All right, let’s settle this: Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable? According to botanists, anything with seeds is a fruit; tomatoes have seeds; ergo, they are a fruit.

Well, not so fast, reply cooks. By that syllogism, cucumbers, corn, green beans, walnuts, and many other foods commonly recognized as vegetables and legumes would likewise be considered fruits. Besides, doesn’t function, rather than form, define what a food is? Fruits and nuts are used in desserts; are tomatoes ever employed that way? Sure, some tomato-based sauces can be slightly sweet – but the food itself has a strong, slightly bitter savory essence that can’t be compared to any widely recognized fruit. So in terms of use, tomatoes would have to be considered a vegetable.

It’s a shame to let the government decide this issue, but the fact is that the U.S. Supreme Court – although hardly qualified to expound on the matter – ruled in 1893 that tomatoes are to be considered a vegetable for the purpose of the Tariff Act of 1883. This was done, of course, so that the parasite class could impose taxes on imported tomatoes. In other words: Tomatoes were formally branded a vegetable so that the government could tax them.

Why were tomatoes being imported in the first place? Well, they weren’t widely cultivated in America in the late 1880s, because they weren’t widely eaten until then. This isn’t true today, when tomatoes are all but unavoidable on American tables. Alas, too many of them are genetically modified to the point of being unrecognizable. It would be difficult to tax those vegetables today, because it would be hard to say they legally qualify as tomatoes! This isn’t true, however, of vegetables grown from heirloom tomato seeds.

Heirloom tomato seeds are not genetically modified. They are organic seed lines going back to a time before large-scale corporate intervention in agriculture. Tomatoes, if considered a fruit, are the most widely produced fruit in the world; if considered a vegetable, they lag behind only potatoes, beans, and sugarcane in global production. Heirloom tomato seeds are widely cultivated in some places, but for the most part heirloom tomato seeds are planted by people who tend small, personal gardens. The flavor, consistency, and variety of tomatoes grown from heirloom tomato seeds make this effort well worth it!