My wife and I argued over NJ’s state fruit — we were both right

My wife and I got into it over, of all things, a piece of fruit. I said New Jersey's official state fruit is the blueberry. She said it's the Jersey tomato. We went back and forth long enough that I finally looked it up, and it turns out we were both right, even if New Jersey wasn't especially interested in making that easy to figure out. The blueberry is the state fruit. The tomato is the state vegetable. Two different laws, two different plants, and one of them botanically has no business being called a vegetable at all.

I already told you how I feel about a Jersey tomato. This one's about the blueberry, and it's personal in a way the tomato piece wasn't.

SEE ALSO: My dad talked to his tomato garden — now I understand why 

Downtown Hammonton Google Maps

A week in Hammonton was the whole summer

I grew up one town over from Hammonton, which likes to call itself the blueberry capital of the world, and for good reason. When I was young, still under 10, I'd spend a week each summer at my aunt and uncle's house there. They were about as kind and loving as people come, and even though the specific memories have thinned out the way they do from that age, a few of them never left. We spent whole days at a pool. Mornings started with blueberries in milk, sometimes with cereal, sometimes without, always in the same blue and white plastic bowl.

And then there was the buckle. For anyone who's never had one, a blueberry buckle is a baked dessert, somewhere between a coffee cake and a cobbler — a soft, buttery batter loaded with blueberries and topped with a crumbly streusel, baked until the berries sink in and the top "buckles" under their weight. My aunt made one that summer week that I still think about. She handed the recipe down to my mom, her younger sister. My mom handed it down to my wife, who makes it once a year for our family now, always with a scoop of vanilla ice cream melting into it. Every spoonful brings my mom and my aunt right back, along with those weeks in Hammonton, all these years later.

Hammonton Blue Berry fields | Google Maps

That week wasn't just a vacation. It was a window into an entire industry my family was part of. In the winter, my cousins spent evenings building wooden shipping crates, getting ready for a harvest that was still months away. One of those cousins owns a blueberry farm in Hammonton to this day. That's not incidental to this story. That's the whole reason I had a side in the argument before I ever looked up the law.

The state made it official in 2004 — and kids from Brick made it happen

New Jersey designated the blueberry its official state fruit in 2004, and the push behind it didn't come from Trenton. It came from a fourth-grade class at Veterans Memorial Elementary School in Brick, who realized during a New Jersey history lesson that the state had never actually named an official fruit. Instead of leaving it there, they turned it into a real campaign — petitions at the state's Blueberry Festival, testimony before Senate and Assembly committees, a full lobbying push most adults never bother with. It worked. Then-Gov. Jim McGreevey signed the bill into law right at their school, crediting the students by name for making it happen.

A year later, lawmakers took on the tomato, and ran straight into the problem that's been irritating botanists and produce aisles for over a century: a tomato is, technically, a fruit. New Jersey solved that the way legislatures solve most things that don't need solving — with a workaround. Since the blueberry already had the fruit title locked up, the tomato got named the official state vegetable instead, leaning on a 19th-century Supreme Court ruling that classified tomatoes as vegetables for tariff purposes based on how they're eaten rather than how they grow.

So my wife wasn't wrong. I wasn't wrong. New Jersey just decided a state could have both, and split the difference in a way that's kept people like us arguing about it at the dinner table for twenty years since.

I'll take that outcome. Not every argument needs a loser, and this one gave me an excuse to go back to a blue and white bowl — and a recipe — I hadn't thought about in years.