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Okay, but the ruling is totally sensible inasmuch as it applies to “purposes of tariffs, imports and customs”. Tomatoes by and large aren’t being imported for their botanical value; they’re being used for food. This ruling exists so corporations can’t “um ackshually” their way out of paying their fair share.
But that’s too sensible; in reality, this unanimous ruling that I never bothered to spend five seconds researching independently (I am very intellectually superior) was just “le Americans uneducated ecksdee”.
(And before you point it out: yes, an “um ackshually” definition of vegetables includes fruits, although this is using a culinary one. So indeed, the original post can’t even pedant right.)
Edit: to totally gild the lily, imagine your country adds a tax to crab meat because overfishing for a luxury good is destroying the Earth’s oceans. Someone sells Alaskan king crab, and they go to the courts demanding their taxes back because “um, ackshually, crabs are infraorder Brachyura, but king crabs are nested cladistically inside the hermit crab superfamily”. You would hope the court would tell them to get lost, because for the environmental impact and culinary uses that the bill is targeting, it’s a crab.
Botanically, sure, but from a culinary perspective they’re used like a vegetable.
Fruit the botanical term and fruit the culinary term are just not the same word. Similarly to how theory means something different in science and in colloquial speech. That’s just how language works.
More people ought to learn about the programming language concept of namespaces. Generalize from that and you realize that every domain of discourse has its own namespace of words that have different meanings from those same words outside the domain.
My favourite is math which has loads of wonderfully generic-sounding terms such as rational, irrational, radical, real, imaginary, complex, group, ring, field, category, set, operator, element, and unit which all have radically different meanings from the everyday senses of those words.
Yes, but then where would we be without all those endless squabbles about X which are easily solved by pointing out that A::X != B::X?
This is dumb, botanically tomatoes are a fruit doesn’t preclude them being vegetables because vegetable isn’t a botanical term at all. Tomatoes are fairly sweet but they have more culinarily in common with vegetables. Nutritionally I’m not positive but it’s a separate issue.
Regardless the supreme court decision was regarding tariffs/imports/customs which makes sense to classify it simply by the way in which people consume it. People eat tomatoes as a vegetable, just like we eat zucchini and cucumber as vegetables despite them all also being fruit.
