Fight the real power

It is perhaps not a landmark case of the Supreme Court, but I found Nix v. Hedden to be an interesting one. In this case from 1893, Associate Justice Horace Gray, writing for a unanimous court only twenty days after the arguments of the case, determined that the tomato is a vegetable and not a fruit. In this case, four members of the Nix family sued Edward L. Heddon, tariff collector for the port of New York, over duties collected on the Nixes' tomatoes. They claimed that since the Tariff Act of 1883 levied a tariff on imported vegetables, the tariffs they were forced to pay on their tomatoes--clearly a fruit and not a vegetable--were collected illegally. But who cares about that? We can generate revenue for the government.

To some degree, this case does not really bother me all that much. Sure there is the whole problem of a perfectly good scientific definition of a fruit being ignored by the government, but if the government is going to place a tariff on importing lettuce why not a tomato? This just underscores the importance of getting words right in legislation.

However, there is a governmental tomato regulation that does realy bother me. In 1937, Congress passed legislation allowing farmers to band together to form marketing committees for the promotion of their products. Thus we have the organizations that give us the "Got Milk?" and the California Raisins ad campaigns. One of these committees is the Florida Tomato Committee, which regulates tomatoes grown south of the Georgia border and east of the Suwannee River, with the exception of small ones like cherry tomatoes and tomatoes grown in greenhouses. The FTC wants to get nice, plump, round tomatoes to your kitchen. The problem arises though with their emphasis on roundness.

There is a variety of tomato that goes by the trademarked name UglyRipe. They aren't smooth and round, having creases and lobes. The Florida Tomato Commission does not approve of this, because, y'know, tomatoes are supposed to be smooth and round. Therefore, under the power to regulate interstate commerce given to it by Congress, the Florida Tomato Commission, drunk on its own power, prohibits the exportation from Florida of the UglyRipe tomato. It's legal to grow it in Florida, it's legal to sell it in Florida, but it is illegal to export it to other states.

Something must be done about the Florida Tomato Committee.