Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, there's an age old war of terminology in the culinary world that you're probably familiar with tomato, fruit or vegetable, But there's another lesser known existential crisis in the kitchen that demands some attention to Bananas. Are they berries? And if so, what the heck are berries anyway?
Botanically speaking, these particular dilemmas may have never crossed your mind, but once you start digging into the topic, you might find you end up with more questions than you started out with. For instance, what even is a fruit? Botanists consider fruit to be the parts of flowering plants that developed from the ovary, and a vegetable. That's a little trickier, since it's pretty much any part of the plant that
isn't considered a fruit or seed. Within the fruit family, you've got subcategories that include citrus, stone fruits, palms like apples and pears, droops like peaches and apricots, and pertinent to our discussion today, berries. The differences between these subcategories comes down to which part of the plant's flour and ovary produces the skin, flesh, and seeds of the fruit in question. The technical definition of a berry is a
fleshy fruit produced from a single ovary. If you're not too familiar with botany, this definition probably isn't helpful at all. But once you learn that oranges and tomatoes fit that definition to a t and therefore could be considered berries, you may start to question reality. Go a step further and find out that strawberries, yes, those delicious red fruits with berry literally in the name, aren't officially berries either.
They're accessory fruits, meaning the flesh that surrounds the seeds doesn't actually come from the plant's ovaries, but from the ovaries receptacle. I didn't think would be talking so much about ovaries in this episode, did you. By the way, raspberries aren't technically berries either. It all goes to show that our language, and especially the connective tissue between our everyday language and our scientific language, is highly flexible. So
scientifically speaking, what exactly is a berry? Well, a berry has three layers of flesh, the exocarp or the outer skin, the mesocarp or the flesh in the middle, and the endocarp,
which is the innermost part. That holds the seeds, and guess what has all of those layers The yellow, peeled, white fleshed, seed carrying banana, which, by the way, is the number one fruit choice in the United States according to the U s d A. In every Man, Woman, child, and otherwise identifying human person ate about eleven pounds or five kilos of bananas. Berries must also have two or more seeds, and their fruit must develop from a flower
with a single ovary. Once again, the banana checks all of those boxes, and weirdly, so does the tomato, eggplant, kiwi and bell pepper. Oranges are a specific type of berrier called a Hesperidium thanks to their distinct segments. So in conclusion, bananas are berries, strawberries and raspberries are not, and you will never again know peace. In the produced section, today's episode was written by Michell Kanstandrodowski and produced by Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more in this and lots of other botanical topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com and for more podcasts from my heart Radio Physic, I Heart Radio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,