Stupid meme. Many other countries also classify tomatoes in with vegetables for various commerce regulation and taxation purposes. That case was just capitalists trying to get out of paying tariffs by nitpicking the definition of a tomato
I hate these things where people twist reality just so they can make a cute “Americans are so dumb” meme. If you want to bash the US, there are plenty of relevant topics to choose from for criticism. Better yet, read a book once in a while instead of just scrolling the internet and grabbing random shit that’s gone viral.
And BTW, what’s a fruit or vegetable is not some objective Sacred Truth that science “discovered”, it’s that science came up with a system of categorizing plants that people deemed to be useful for the study of Botany, just as legislators came up with a slightly different classification useful for taxation, and regular people also classify them in a way that’s useful for cooking purposes. This is not a situation where Science! is an almighty God. It’s just ways of sorting things. “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”
And BTW, what’s a fruit or vegetable is not some objective Sacred Truth that science “discovered”, it’s that science came up with a system of categorizing plants that people deemed to be useful for the study of Botany,
It’s true that all biological classifications are just operational, they’re not some absolute natural truth or a fifth law of thermodynamics. However, the definition of “fruit” is also not some arbitrary malleable classification we randomly attach to plant anatomy based on how it looks. There are biological definitions that are indeed malleable in that way, this one isn’t.
Fruits are organs with a specific origin in the plant and with a very specific goal. Tomatoes are fruits, and there’s no system of definitions that could group them otherwise that wouldn’t either: contain contradictions or wrongful elements or be identical to the current definition of fruit. You could call them “blorgblurgs” but the elements in that group would be the same, because fruits are a specific part of a plant with actual reason behind the definition.