So, you think you know what berries really are?

Hint: Bananas are berries. Strawberries… Not so much.

It was 7:36 am when I discovered that strawberries were not berries. Just 36 minutes past the hour that I wake up, sometimes, in order to have enough time for a lavish breakfast. Life is a cheeky beast, they really are not berries. Now, without looking into the minutiae of berry-biology, read on to become an expert in small talk about berries, maybe spark some controversy at the office kitchenette or if you would just like an excuse to continue thinking about things that are edible. Food, LYF.

Fam, be prepared to see berries under a new light. But before I get carried away, rest assured I will not be making a single very/berry pun, however tempting. Just trust me, as somehow this story eventually ends up being about wine. I’ve got your back.

Who’s on the berry team?

First, let’s get the bomb out of the way: berries are actually ovaries.

I’m going to give you some time to process that.

Still here? Well, avocados are also berries, so… technically, when you eat an avocado, you are eating the ovary of a plant. Avo on toast is more like Ova on toast. I am so sorry for that.

Eggplants, zucchinis, and tomatoes: these are all bloody berries! Double-shock, and it was still only 7:51 am. With no idea why I was still reading about berries on my phone, I had to catch up on the fact that not only they are NOT freaking vegetables, but also, surprise, now they’re berries. Thanks, scientific community, for classifying world stuff this way and for your utter disregard for mine and everyone else’s emotional stability.

Anyway, back to berries — there’s more coming your way. Oranges, lime, bananas, melons, watermelons (seriously, what’s happening, it’s like North is South now) and kiwis are also on the berry team. At this point I feel like I should not hold back and just tell you that through this discovery, it seems that most Skittles are actually berry-flavoured. The only ones that are not, are the strawberry and raspberry ones. Go figure?!

Let’s just call everything a berry

It has started to dawn on you, hasn’t it? You need to detach yourself from the word “berry”. Just let go. It’s time for a new chapter in your life. In with the new, out with the old, in whichever order. How annoying is that. The reason why strawberries and raspberries even have this suffix in the first place is because people started calling any roundish squishy fruits growing in bunches “berries” thousands of years ago, long before a scientific definition of berries even appeared — your classic linguistic accident.

You might now be wondering what on earth are strawberries. Well, they’re this thing called “accessory aggregated fruit”. It leaves one with the suspicion that botanists just didn’t exactly know what to section them as. They must’ve thought “um, guys, we’ll just do that one later” and handed in the research the following day during an indecent hangover. Couldn’t that also be the reason why anyone would think of putting aubergines and lemons in the same group?

Turns out the science bit of what actually classifies a fruit as a berry comes down to which parts of the flower of the plant give rise to the skin, flesh and seeds. Although that made zero sense to my pre-breakfast self at the time of this confusing discovery, I’ve managed to break it down. As a general rule, seeds must be:

a) inside of the fruit — not on the skin (like a strawberry!)

b) be embedded in the fleshy and edible part of it. Isn’t that mightily helpful?! It’s a botanists’ inside-joke. Only they have the secret of berryworld.

Wine berries

The wine stuff, a.k.a. “grapes”, are also berries. ‘But what isn’t these days?’ I hear you think. There was no linguistic accident for these, because in Old English grapes were called Winberige, as in ‘wine berries’. Talk about language priorities — forget the name, that’s the stuff from where wine comes from! Wineberry is actually the name of a hairy Japanese fruit and is unfortunately not the name that stuck to grapes. Actually, grapes come from the word “graper”, which in turn comes from the Old French word “krappon”, the hook with which the grapes were collected.

And that, my friends, is how you justify starting to think about an evening glass of Pinot Noir before it’s even 8:00 am.