What do you think of this fact?
At the grocery store, it’s obvious: strawberries, raspberries and blackberries go with the berries, and bananas go somewhere else entirely. Botany sees it exactly the other way around. To a botanist, a banana is a true berry and a strawberry isn’t.
What a berry really is
In botany, “berry” isn’t a vibe, it’s a technical term with a clear definition. A berry is a fleshy fruit that develops from a single ovary of a single flower. The fruit wall stays fleshy when ripe and doesn’t split open on its own. The seeds sit inside the flesh.
That’s exactly what a banana does. It grows from one ovary and has a fleshy fruit wall, so it’s a berry. The fact that we don’t eat its thick peel doesn’t change a thing.
Why the strawberry fails the test
In a strawberry, the red flesh doesn’t come from the ovary at all. It’s the greatly enlarged receptacle, the part of the flower that holds everything else. The actual fruits are the tiny specks on the outside that almost everyone calls seeds. Each one is a small fruit called an achene. That makes the strawberry an accessory fruit, not a berry.
Raspberries and blackberries don’t make the cut either. They’re aggregate fruits, made of lots of tiny drupelets stuck together.
Berries nobody expects
Meanwhile, the list of true berries is full of surprises. Botanically, it includes:
- Tomatoes, peppers and eggplants
- Grapes
- Citrus fruits like oranges and lemons
- Avocados
Pumpkins, cucumbers and watermelons count as berries too. So a giant pumpkin is one seriously heavy berry.
Grocery store names come from the kitchen, not the biology textbook. Still, the banana deserves a spot in the berry aisle at least once.