Yes. In the 1893 Supreme Court tomato ruling, Nix v. Hedden, the justices unanimously held that a tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit, for purposes of federal import duties. Justice Horace Gray wrote the opinion, and the reasoning was simple: when a statute uses ordinary words without defining them, courts read those words the way ordinary people use them. Botanists can call a tomato a fruit all day; the tariff was written in English, and in English a tomato is something you put in a salad, not a pie.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893)
What Was Actually at Stake
The fight was about money. The Tariff Act of March 3, 1883 taxed imported vegetables at 10 percent of their declared value under Schedule G, but placed “fruits, green, ripe, or dried” on a duty-free list.2Legal Information Institute. Nix v. Hedden1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893) Zero versus ten percent is a strong reason to pick a side.
John Nix and his associates imported tomatoes from the West Indies in the spring of 1886 and paid the duty under protest. On February 4, 1887, they sued Edward L. Hedden, the Collector of the Port of New York, to get the money back, arguing tomatoes belonged on the free list because a botanist would call them fruit.3Library of Congress. Nix v. Hedden
Botany Versus the Dinner Table
The importers built their case on science and dictionaries. A tomato grows from the ovary of a flowering plant and carries the seeds, which makes it a fruit by any laboratory standard. They read aloud from Webster’s and Worcester’s, both of which described the tomato as the fruit of a plant.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893)
The government answered by reading dictionary entries too, only for peas, eggplant, cucumbers, squash, and peppers. All are botanical fruits. None are sold or eaten as such. Hedden’s lawyers argued Congress wrote the tariff for merchants and cooks, not botanists.3Library of Congress. Nix v. Hedden
What Justice Gray Wrote
The decision came down on May 10, 1893. Gray conceded the botanical point without flinching: tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, beans, and peas are, in the language of botany, fruits of the vine. But he wrote that in the common language of the people, all of these are vegetables grown in kitchen gardens and served at dinner with soup, fish, or meat as part of the principal course, not as dessert.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893)
That dinner-versus-dessert line carried the ruling. The 10 percent duty stood.
Gray also put dictionaries in their place. They are aids to memory and understanding, he wrote, not evidence of what a word means. Courts take judicial notice of ordinary English on their own; a dictionary only confirms what everyone already knows.3Library of Congress. Nix v. Hedden
The Rule That Actually Did the Work
The mechanism buried inside the opinion is called the commercial designation exception. If a word in a tariff statute has picked up a specialized meaning in the trade that differs from its everyday use, courts will apply the trade meaning. The importers could have won this way. They would have needed to prove that produce merchants themselves used “fruit” to include tomatoes and “vegetable” to exclude them. They offered no such proof, so ordinary meaning controlled.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893)
The evidentiary rule is what lawyers still cite. Anyone asking a court to read a statute in a specialized way carries the burden of proving that specialized meaning exists. Fail to prove it, and the common understanding wins.
Why the Case Still Gets Cited
The tomato is the reason people remember Nix v. Hedden. The ordinary meaning rule is the reason lawyers cite it. When Congress uses everyday words and does not define them, courts presume Congress meant them the way regular people use them. That presumption has become a fixture of textualist statutory interpretation.
The logic runs both directions. It stops importers from using botanical technicalities to escape duties, and it stops the government from stretching common words into meanings no ordinary reader would recognize. Whenever regulation collides with specialized knowledge, some version of this argument shows up.
How Tomatoes Are Classified Today
The tariff code is far more detailed now than in 1883, and tomatoes are still vegetables. Fresh tomatoes fall under heading 0702 of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, with duty rates that shift by season to account for the domestic growing calendar. Frozen tomatoes sit under subheading 0710.80, also within the vegetables category.4U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The tariff classification of frozen tomatoes from Turkey
Gray’s reasoning has aged well because it tracks how people actually behave. Grocery stores shelve peppers next to lettuce. Restaurants serve squash as a side dish. More than a century after the ruling, the dinner-versus-dessert test still sorts the produce aisle.