What the Hell is a Vegetable?

Shounak Dharap:

What is a vegetable? This sounds like the prompt for a philosophy final that you are in no way prepared for, but it is in fact a legitimate question. What is a vegetable? We know what a fruit is – the covering of an embryo. That’s the botanical (and therefore ultimate) definition. Technically zucchini is a fruit, cucumber is a fruit, and even a chili is a fruit. The key identifier is that they all have seeds. So what is a vegetable? Potatoes are tubers, carrots and beets are roots, onions and garlic are bulbs, and lettuce is a leaf. It turns out that even cauliflower and broccoli are both flowers. Suddenly the quasi-philosophic title phrase of this article has become a legitimate conundrum. So from all of the aforementioned facts, you gather that there must be a specific way to define what is a vegetable. After all, tomatoes are vegetables. If you’re confused at this point, it is for good reason; there have been precious few times when the red tape-wrangling bureaucrats on capitol hill have passed a bill that actually makes sense.

In 1883, U.S. tariff laws that imposed a duty on vegetables but not on fruits caused the tomato’s status to become a matter of legal importance. The U.S. Supreme Court settled the controversy on May 10, 1893 by declaring that the tomato is a vegetable, based on the popular definition that classifies vegetables by use – that they are generally served with dinner and not dessert (Nix v. Hedden (149 U.S. 304)). So for the simple reason of lowering taxes on tomatoes in accordance with the Mongrel Tarrif Act of 1883, the Supreme Court subjectively declared that, by law, a tomato is a vegetable.

In popular lexicon, vegetables have come to be defined as “an edible plant or part of a plants other than a sweet fruit or seed.” The definition of the word is not scientific, however, but largely based on culinary and cultural tradition, which is somewhat arbitrary and subjective. Thus, for example, mushrooms (which biologists consider to be fungi rather than part of the plant kingdom) are commonly included among the vegetables, at least in the retail industry; while nuts, grains, herbs, and spices are usually excluded.

So how does this affect you? Well, the next time you’re at a party at the soon to be repainted Marley house and start talking to that attractive botany/political science major, you can impress them with your knowledge of archaic tariff acts and useless vegetable knowledge. After all, I’m sure you could use all the help you can get.