Patrick S. McCarney: A taco is a sandwich: The legal meaning of food matters

For the most part, judges do not set out to be whimsical. Yet time and again, judges across the United States have found themselves deciding questions that sound more like bar trivia than jurisprudence. Is a burrito a sandwich? Is a tomato a vegetable?

These cases are not anomalies. Food occupies a unique place in our lives — simultaneously cultural and commercial, ordinary and regulated. All words and their underlying meanings are critical to a system of laws. When legal consequences turn on everyday words like “fruit” or “sandwich,” courts are forced to choose among competing definitions: scientific, culinary, contractual, cultural, popular and statutory. Generally speaking, courts give words their plain and ordinary meanings unless some other meaning was clearly intended. But sometimes the plain meaning is not equally plain to everyone. The results can seem counterintuitive — even amusing —but they are usually doctrinally sound, even as they raise eyebrows.

While entertaining, these cases are also more broadly instructive and demonstrate a core lesson for businesses and lawyers alike: words that seem to have an obvious meaning can carry unexpected — and expensive — legal consequences when they appear in statutes, regulations or contracts.

‘Mexican-style sandwich’

In Quintana v. Fort Wayne Plan Commission, Cause No. 02D02-2212-PL-414 (Allen County Superior Court, May 13, 2024), an Indiana trial court held that tacos and burritos qualify as “Mexican-style sandwiches” under a zoning restriction that permitted only “sandwich bar-style restaurants” in a shopping center. The court’s decision allowed a taco restaurant to operate where local authorities had previously said it could not.

At first glance, the holding sounds absurd. Most people do not think of tacos as sandwiches. But the court reasoned that the zoning restriction did not limit cuisine, only format. The zoning requirement aimed to exclude fast food chains, not foreign food. The court noted that Greek gyros, Indian naan wraps and Vietnamese banh mi would also conform with the zoning requirements. One could argue that tortillas function much like bread and that taco fillings are analogous to those found in food items more traditionally accepted as sandwiches. In any event, the court rejected the perhaps more common understanding of the term “sandwich” as it is used in American-style cuisine.

The case drew national attention with commentators on both sides of the issue satirizing the implications of “sandwich law.” The underlying law — a zoning restriction — was not novel, but the outcome challenged conventional thinking.

Of course, courts do not always reach the same result when faced with similar questions. In White City Shopping Center, LP v. PR Restaurants, LLC, 21 Mass L. Rep. 565 (Mass. Superior Court, October 30, 2006), a court held the opposite: A burrito was not a sandwich for purposes of a restrictive lease clause. The lease between the parties prohibited the landlord from leasing adjacent parcels to a business that primarily sells sandwiches, which was not a defined term in the lease. After the tenant discovered the landlord was negotiating to lease space to a burrito chain restaurant, the tenant sought an injunction to prohibit the landlord from doing so.

In denying the requested injunction, the court emphasized the common understanding of “sandwich.” Because the term sandwich was not defined, the court applied a dictionary definition: “two thin pieces of bread, usually buttered, with a thin layer (as of meat, cheese, or savory mixture) spread between them.” The court concluded that a burrito, wrapped in a single tortilla, did not resemble what most people would call a sandwich. The fact that another court — years later, in another state — would reach the opposite conclusion underscores an important point: Food classification is context-dependent, not absolute. The same food can be classified differently depending on the court and legal issue.

Pizza might be a sandwich?

While the Court of Appeals of Texas might not have expressly held that pizza is a type of sandwich, it did uphold a jury verdict against a landlord that prohibited a tenant from selling pizza because of a provision in the lease that only permitted the tenant to use the property as a “sandwich shop.” Corum Management Co. v. Aguayo Enterprises, Inc., 755 S.W.2d 895 (Tx. Ct. App. 1988). Prior to signing the lease, the landlord was aware the tenant intended to sell pizza (among other items) from its business and made certain assurances that the term “sandwich shop” as used in the lease would be broad enough to include the sale of pizza. A few months after the lease was signed, the landlord informed the tenant it could not sell pizza, leading the tenant to file a lawsuit, which it won.

This case illustrates that the intent of contracting parties is not always the ordinary meaning of the words written in black and white. Pizza, while perhaps not intuitively a sandwich shop offering, was treated as such because the parties seemingly agreed that it was (or at least they did when the lease was signed).

The tomato case

Perhaps the most famous food-classification case in American history is more than a century old: Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893). There, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that tomatoes are vegetables, not fruits, for purposes of federal import tariffs.

Botanists would no doubt object, because tomatoes develop from a flower, contain seeds and are scientifically classified as berries. The court did not care. Writing for a unanimous bench, Justice Horace Gray explained that statutes use words in their ordinary meaning, not their scientific sense. In common usage, tomatoes were served with dinner, not dessert, and were therefore vegetables within the meaning of the tariff statute. In other words: While one could scientifically define a tomato as a fruit, in everyday life they are used (and spoken about) more like vegetables and should therefore be classified as such. The consequences were significant for tomato importers, because fruits were not subject to the Tariff Act of 1883. But vegetables were.

Why obscure food cases matter

These cases underscore a principle that is easy to overlook: Legal meaning is not always intuitive. For businesses, this has concrete implications in at least three areas:

1. Contract drafting

Contracts frequently rely on everyday words — “food,” “meal,” “sandwich.” Businesses must be careful about assuming words have certain meanings in their agreements. When disputes arise, courts may interpret words differently than the parties intended. Businesses relying on informal or seemingly intuitive definitions do so at their peril.

2. Regulatory compliance

Many businesses operate in heavily regulated environments. Whether a product or service falls into a particular legal category can determine:

• labeling requirements
• licensing obligations
• tax treatment
• enforcement exposure

3. Risk allocation and due diligence

Seemingly minor definitional issues can carry significant downstream effects. Businesses expanding into new locations, renegotiating leases or launching new products must account for how regulators and courts (not just customers) will classify what they sell or the services they provide.

Law is hungry for meaning

Food cases are memorable because they can reveal inconsistencies between: 1) how the law operates versus how people speak; and 2) how people speak versus what they mean. Courts are not redefining tacos or tomatoes for sport. They are applying established interpretive principles to words that happen to be familiar — and are therefore deceptively easy to overlook.

For lawyers and businesses alike, the lesson is simple: Never assume that ordinary words will be treated ordinarily once they appear in a legal document. In law, lunch is never just lunch — and sometimes, a taco is a sandwich.•

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McCarney is an associate with Riley Bennett Egloff LLP.