By Jason G. Goldman
From time to time, politicians and other rulers-of-men like to categorize the natural world not according to biology, but rather for convenience or monetary gain. Take, for example, the tomato. The progenitor of ketchup is a seed-bearing structure that grows from the flowering part of a plant. It is, by definition, a fruit. In 1893, however, the US Supreme Court ruled in the case of Nix v. Hedden that the tomato was a vegetable, subject to vegetable import tariffs. Even if the tomato is, technically, a fruit, it tends to be treated in American cuisine as a vegetable, wantonly littering our salads with its jelloey gooeyness.
Corn and rice are another good example. The Bible forbids Jewish people from eating chametz – foods made from wheat, barley, spelt, rye, or oats – on Passover. Ashkenazi Jews consider corn, rice, and legumes, a class of foods called kitniyot, as forbidden on Passover as well. It isn’t that they’re forbidden, per se, but that they’re easily confused for the real thing. As I learned in my high school Talmud class, the medieval Rabbis decided to forbid these not-technically-forbidden grains because of a principle called marit ayin, which literally means “what it looks like.” The Wikipedia explanation is quite good: “While not against the laws of passover to consume kitniyot, a person might be observed eating them and thought to be eating chametz despite the law, or erroneously conclude that chametz was permitted. To avoid this confusion, they were simply banned outright.”
Still, neither the Supreme Court’s reclassification of the tomato is a fruit, nor the medieval Rabbis’ designation of corn and rice as forbidden grains, is the most amusing example of non-scientific categorization. The Catholic Church has them all beat.
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