Is Tomato a Fruit or Vegetable
Botanically a fruit, legally and in the kitchen a vegetable — here is why both answers are correct, from someone who grows them by the bushel.
A tomato is botanically a fruit and culinarily a vegetable, and both are right. By botany it is a fruit because it develops from the flower's ovary and carries the plant's seeds — the same definition that makes peppers, cucumbers and squash fruits too. By cooking and by law it is a vegetable: in 1893 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Nix v. Hedden that tomatoes are taxed as vegetables because we eat them with the meal, not for dessert. So when someone asks, the honest answer is: fruit by science, vegetable by the kitchen and the courtroom.
I grow more tomatoes than anything else in my zone 7b plot, and I get this question every August when I am handing baskets over the fence. The reason it feels like a trick is that there are two different definitions hiding behind one word, and the speaker is usually using one while you are using the other.
Botanists classify by how a plant part forms. Cooks and grocers classify by how we use it on the plate. Those two systems disagree about the tomato — and about cucumbers, peppers, eggplant, squash and beans, all of which are technically fruits we treat as vegetables. Once you see that there are two scoreboards, the argument dissolves.