this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

"There is nothing more American than shooting a man in this Walmart of a world."

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 hours ago

Not unique because EU also classifies tomatoes as vegetables.

Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable?
The classification of fruit and vegetables can be based
on various approaches β€” botanical, agronomical,
culinary β€” thus resulting in different definitions. For
example, the tomato is botanically a fruit, but it is
commonly considered a vegetable from both the
agronomical and the culinary points of view.
The facts and figures presented in this briefing follow
Eurostat's definitions based on the farm management
and agronomical practices, according to which the
term 'fresh vegetable' refers to annual (or, rarely,
biennial) horticultural crops, and the term 'fruit' refers
to perennial crops.
Following this approach, tomatoes are included in the
main statistical aggregate of vegetables, as well as
melons, water melons and strawberries, which are
commonly considered and consumed as fruit.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2019/635563/EPRS_BRI(2019)635563_EN.pdf

[–] [email protected] 31 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Obviously fruit/vegetable should be broken down into whether or not you can just make a sauce with it.

Tomatoes: easily broken0 down into a sauce Apples: guess what? saucable

Zucchini: not easily sauced. Cucumber: don't even think about it!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 13 hours ago

Now I really want to try making a zucchini-cucumbersauce

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Hilarious but we're gonna end up with a few weird things like jackfruit and bananas becoming vegetables. I'd also add that apples are only sauceable through maceration which really puts them into the same camp as squash like zucchini, and any root really like carrots or celeriac.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Pretty sure it's so giving ketchup to school kids constitutes a serving of vegetables.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago

No that was 90 years later as school budgets were cut further and further until they were using things like pickle relish as a required vegetable. Our public school system is an embarrassment.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Strange times for Berry Club

From Mr. Lovenstein whose website unfortunately doesn't seem to work, except to redirect you to Meta-owned socials. Ugh.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

Yeah man, they're completely nuts!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

And we laughed when some pope declared the capybara is a fish

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Capybara are fish, so are bees, because fish don't actually exist.

The levels of validity may vary, but everything I said there is true in one form or another.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago

That only creates more questions πŸ˜…

[–] [email protected] 49 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Botanically, there's no such thing as a vegetable.

That's a culinary term, which seems to cover some fruits, some plant roots, some plant stems, some plant leaves, and some plant flowers.While culinary fruits are the other botanical fruits, and a few flowers (figs are weird)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 16 hours ago

The legal decision is important for a slew of reasons including taxation, SNAP benefits, etc. The decision was less about science and more about the reality of how tomatoes are used in our society.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

Now I get why some (a ?) states declared pizza a veggie or something like that? Like if vegetable is a culinary term it makes sense you could classify pizza as a vegetable. But like, why the fuck is law declaring what anything is culinary?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 17 hours ago

To get around legal requirements to include vegetables in school lunches

[–] [email protected] 8 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

Speculating here, but taxes are one reason.

Almost all the rules about what counts as wine, beer, whiskey, etc. comes from some country making definitions for tax purposes. Often from hundreds of years ago.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

Vegetables do not exist. Well, they exist as a culinary thing. There’s just no scientific/botanical definition of what makes something a vegetable.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

What about Stephen Hawking?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 18 hours ago

Stephen Hawking is a pile of ash, not a vegetable.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

All fruits are vegetables, but not a vegetables are fruit.

Vegetable = any edible plant part.

Fruit = Ovary of a flowering plant that carries the seeds.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I remember watching a YT video once about a legislative move of a US county to declare the number Pi to be exactly 3.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

*State. It was Indiana.
* 3.2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFNjA9LOPsg – How Pi was nearly changed to 3.2 - Numberphile

[–] [email protected] 28 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

I'm going to take this as an opportunity to point out that bees are a type of fish in California.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

You weren't kidding!

California enforces many wildlife regulations. CESA, or the California Endangered Species Act, is designed to keep animal and plant life from extinction. The law covers any threatened β€œbird, mammal, fish, amphibian, reptile, or plant.”

Insects weren’t mentioned in the specific act’s wording. However, a separate California regulation legally defines fish as β€œa wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals.”
So, are bees actually fish? Yes, because all invertebrates are according to California law. The broad definition of fish allows activists to fight for insect survival.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has clarified that β€œIt was not believed necessary to include the term invertebrate in the original legislation because β€˜fish’ is defined in the Fish and Game Code to include β€˜invertebrates’…”

Talk about by-the-book!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 16 hours ago

So tomatoes are trans?

[–] [email protected] 111 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

wow whoever made this post is SO smart

[–] [email protected] 5 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I don't see how the supreme court could do this!

Clearly brown cows produce chocolate milk, so why don't plants that GROW UPWARDS!!! Count as trees?!?!?!?

The american logic clearly follows a mysterious trend of some sorts...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

The Supreme Court was fully aware of the technical term:

Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas. But in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked or raw, are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery, and lettuce, usually served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert.

The attempt to class tomatoes as fruit is not unlike a recent attempt to class beans as seeds, of which Mr. Justice Bradley, speaking for this Court, said:

"We do not see why they should be classified as seeds any more than walnuts should be so classified. Both are seeds, in the language of botany or natural history, but not in commerce nor in common parlance. On the other hand, in speaking generally of provisions, beans may well be included under the term 'vegetables.' As an article of food on our tables, whether baked or boiled, or forming the basis of soup, they are used as a vegetable, as well when ripe as when green. This is the principal use to which they are put. Beyond the common knowledge which we have on this subject, very little evidence is necessary or can be produced."

Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893)

So this is how the Supreme Court could do this: they were fully aware but reasonably decided tariff laws should be based on ordinary meaning.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago

It. GROWS. UPWARDS. IT GROWS UP!!! UP!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (3 children)

There are two big grocery chains where I live. One puts the olives in the canned vegetable aisle, the other puts them in the canned fruit aisle. I keep forgetting which does which and end up in the wrong aisle every time.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 day ago (9 children)

Being smug over the meanings of words that aren't ever actually used in a consistent way is even more American.

Um actually, Strawberries are not a berry, it's a Gameboy, not a Nintendo, and I lick toads. Can you go to the bathroom?

The only thing similar that I have experienced in Europe is the protected food name law, e.g. Champagne and Parmesan, but that's an EU cultural protectionism law that the US doesn't actually follow.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_indications_and_traditional_specialities_in_the_European_Union

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Fun fact, the vatican classifies capybaras as fish

[–] [email protected] 15 points 23 hours ago

For lent-related purposes, I presume? Same as beavers.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 day ago (7 children)

Botanically, sure, but from a culinary perspective they're used like a vegetable.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 day ago (5 children)

I don't think vegetable is a botanical term. So fruit and vegetable aren't really mutually exclusive.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah I mean, mushrooms get lumped into the vegetable category most of the time and they're a fungus!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Pizza is a salad according to your legal system

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

That's a wrap.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago

Vibe judging.

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