There is an age - old debate in the culinary world that you ’re in all probability familiar with . Lycopersicon esculentum : fruit or veg ? But there ’s another lesser know experiential crisis in the kitchen that need some attention too . Bananas : Are they berry ? And if so , what the heck are berries anyway ?
These finical dilemma may have never crossed your mind , but once you start dig up into the subject , you might find you end up with more questions than you start out with . For instance , what evenisa fruit ? Botanistsconsider fruitto be the parts of flowering plants that make grow from the ovary . And a veggie ? That ’s a minuscule trickier , since it ’s pretty much any part of the plant that is n’t considered fruit .
Within the yield crime syndicate , you ’ve got subcategories that admit citrus , stonefruit , pome ( apples , pear tree ) , drupe ( Prunus persica and apricot ) , and — you approximate it — Berry . The differences between these subcategories comes down to which part of the plant ’s bloom and ovary produced the skin , flesh and seeds of the fruit in question .
Thetechnical definitionof a Chuck Berry is " a overweight fruit produced from a single ovary . " If you ’re not too familiar with botany , this definition probably is n’t helpful at all . But once you determine that Orange and tomatoes fit that definition to a liothyronine and could therefore be considered berries , you may start to wonder reality .
Go a step further and find out that strawberry mark — yes , those delicious red fruits with " berry " literally in the name — are n’t officially berries either . They ’re " adjuvant fruit , " entail the flesh that surround the seed does n’t actually come from theplant ’s ovariesbut from the ovaries ' receptacle . Did n’t remember we ’d be spill so much about ovaries in this clause , did you ? By the way , razzing are n’t really berries either . I ’ll get you take a minute to pull in yourself .
So if strawberries and raspberries have been masquerading as berries all this time and they ’re not , what evenisa berry ? Well a berry hasthree layers of shape : the epicarp ( the outer cutis ) , mesocarp ( the flesh in the middle ) , and endocarp ( the inmost part that nurse the seeds ) .
Guess what has all those layers ? The yellow - peeled , whitened fleshed , seed - carryingbanana .
Berries also must have two or more germ , and their yield must develop from a bloom with one ovary . Once again , the banana check those boxes . And , weirdly , so does the tomato , eggplant , kiwi and pepper . Orange River are a specific eccentric of Chuck Berry called hesperidium thanks to their distinct segments .
So in ending , bananasareberries , strawberries and raspberries are not , and you will never again know peace in the green goods section .
