Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, there's an age old war of terminology
Speaker 1: in the culinary world that you're probably familiar with tomato,
Speaker 1: fruit or vegetable, But there's another lesser known existential crisis
Speaker 1: in the kitchen that demands some attention to Bananas. Are
Speaker 1: they berries? And if so, what the heck are berries anyway?
Speaker 1: Botanically speaking, these particular dilemmas may have never crossed your mind,
Speaker 1: but once you start digging into the topic, you might
Speaker 1: find you end up with more questions than you started
Speaker 1: out with. For instance, what even is a fruit? Botanists
Speaker 1: consider fruit to be the parts of flowering plants that
Speaker 1: developed from the ovary, and a vegetable. That's a little trickier,
Speaker 1: since it's pretty much any part of the plant that
Speaker 1: isn't considered a fruit or seed. Within the fruit family,
Speaker 1: you've got subcategories that include citrus, stone fruits, palms like
Speaker 1: apples and pears, droops like peaches and apricots, and pertinent
Speaker 1: to our discussion today, berries. The differences between these subcategories
Speaker 1: comes down to which part of the plant's flour and
Speaker 1: ovary produces the skin, flesh, and seeds of the fruit
Speaker 1: in question. The technical definition of a berry is a
Speaker 1: fleshy fruit produced from a single ovary. If you're not
Speaker 1: too familiar with botany, this definition probably isn't helpful at all.
Speaker 1: But once you learn that oranges and tomatoes fit that
Speaker 1: definition to a t and therefore could be considered berries,
Speaker 1: you may start to question reality. Go a step further
Speaker 1: and find out that strawberries, yes, those delicious red fruits
Speaker 1: with berry literally in the name, aren't officially berries either.
Speaker 1: They're accessory fruits, meaning the flesh that surrounds the seeds
Speaker 1: doesn't actually come from the plant's ovaries, but from the
Speaker 1: ovaries receptacle. I didn't think would be talking so much
Speaker 1: about ovaries in this episode, did you. By the way,
Speaker 1: raspberries aren't technically berries either. It all goes to show
Speaker 1: that our language, and especially the connective tissue between our
Speaker 1: everyday language and our scientific language, is highly flexible. So
Speaker 1: scientifically speaking, what exactly is a berry? Well, a berry
Speaker 1: has three layers of flesh, the exocarp or the outer skin,
Speaker 1: the mesocarp or the flesh in the middle, and the endocarp,
Speaker 1: which is the innermost part. That holds the seeds, and
Speaker 1: guess what has all of those layers The yellow, peeled,
Speaker 1: white fleshed, seed carrying banana, which, by the way, is
Speaker 1: the number one fruit choice in the United States according
Speaker 1: to the U s d A. In every Man, Woman, child,
Speaker 1: and otherwise identifying human person ate about eleven pounds or
Speaker 1: five kilos of bananas. Berries must also have two or
Speaker 1: more seeds, and their fruit must develop from a flower
Speaker 1: with a single ovary. Once again, the banana checks all
Speaker 1: of those boxes, and weirdly, so does the tomato, eggplant,
Speaker 1: kiwi and bell pepper. Oranges are a specific type of
Speaker 1: berrier called a Hesperidium thanks to their distinct segments. So
Speaker 1: in conclusion, bananas are berries, strawberries and raspberries are not,
Speaker 1: and you will never again know peace. In the produced section,
Speaker 1: today's episode was written by Michell Kanstandrodowski and produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio's
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works. For more in this and lots of
Speaker 1: other botanical topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com and for more podcasts from my heart Radio Physic,
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