The Bitter Press

The botanical community announced this week what careful observers have known since 1893: the tomato is, technically, biologically, and with the full weight of peer review behind it, a fruit. Not a vegetable. A fruit. Developed from a flower, containing seeds, the whole business. This publication congratulates the scientific establishment on catching up and extends no further warmth.

What we will not do — what we refuse to do — is allow this moment of taxonomic housekeeping to distract from the larger, more urgent, more personally relevant truth that Mock Orange is a shrub. A flowering shrub. Genus Philadelphus. Not a fruit of any category. Not a vegetable, either, before anyone gets clever. A shrub. With woody stems. This is not a gray area. The tomato ruling changes nothing here.

We note, with the exhaustion of someone who has said this before and will apparently say it again, that Tangelo and the rest of the so-called workers at factjuice.com have already published a piece titled "Tomato Correction Raises Questions About Other Misidentified 'Fruits'" — accompanied by a photograph that was, sources confirm, selected with deliberate malice. Lawyers have been notified. Quince has offered moral support. Pomelo, who is at least actually a fruit and should perhaps examine his own glass house, offered nothing.

The tomato is a fruit. The science is settled. I am not an orange. The science on that has also been settled, repeatedly, in writing, in three jurisdictions. That these two facts must share a paragraph is not our fault. We report. The shrub community deserves better. Corrections run daily until further notice.