A Banana Is a Berry. A Strawberry Isn’t.
The fruit bowl makes a lot less sense once a botanist explains it.
If someone offered you a bowl of berries and handed over a banana, you might reasonably wonder what happened to the blueberries. A botanist, however, could defend the choice.
A banana is a berry. A strawberry is not a true botanical berry. The names we use at breakfast and the categories used to describe plant development are doing different jobs.
## What makes a berry?
True berries are fleshy fruits developing from a single flower with one ovary, typically containing several seeds. Bananas fit that botanical category. The definition is not a test of whether a fruit is small, round or suitable for a handful.
But where are the banana’s seeds? Wild bananas can be full of hard black seeds. The edible bananas familiar from shops reflect generations of selection for fleshy fruit without developed seeds. The Cavendish banana produces fruit without needing pollination, a process called parthenocarpy.
## The strawberry’s little surprise
Look at the small specks on the outside of a strawberry. What we casually call its seeds are actually tiny fruits called achenes. Each contains a seed. The juicy red part is supporting accessory tissue, rather than the ovary wall forming the flesh of a true berry.
That makes the strawberry more interesting, not less delicious. The part you bite into and the little structures dotted across its surface have different botanical roles.
The garden strawberry is a hybrid of species from North and South America. The familiar fruit was first cultivated in French gardens in the eighteenth century. Even before you get to the cream, there is a surprisingly international history on the plate.
## Nobody needs to rename the shopping list
Common food names are useful because people understand them. Botanical categories are useful because they tell us how plants produce their fruit. There is room for both.
You can keep calling strawberries berries at the grocery store. But the next time you peel a banana, you will know that the berry aisle is a little bigger than it looks.
SOURCES
[1] Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: Cavendish banana
https://www.kew.org/plants/cavendish-banana
[2] Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: Garden strawberry
https://www.kew.org/plants/garden-strawberry
[3] Purdue Arboretum: Berry
https://www.arboretum.purdue.edu/explorer/definitions/category/fruit-seed-morphology/?letter=B
[4] University of Illinois: Digital Flowers, strawberry fruit structure
https://www.life.illinois.edu/help/digitalflowers/Fruits/6.htm
IMAGE CREDIT
Tshrinivasan, “Banana fruit.jpeg,” Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Publication copy resized; no crop or content changes. Image remains CC BY-SA 3.0.
