Nothing is a Berry!

... At least not the ones you expect.

Did you know a strawberry isn’t actually a berry? Also a blackberry isn’t a berry. Or a raspberry, boysenberry, loganberry, cloudberry, mulberry, elderberry. I never heard of a cloudberry before writing this, it sounds delicious. “It’s a rare arctic berry with a unique sweet-tart, slightly floral, and earthy flavor, often described as a mix of raspberries, apricots, and citrus.” Oh wait, it’s not a berry. Even Google is confused about what is an isn’t a berry.

Here are some things that are berries:

• Banana

• Tomato

• Grape

• Kiwi

• Persimmon

• Eggplant

• Cucumber

• Pumpkin

• Zucchini

• Squash

• Bell pepper

• Chili pepper

• Avocado

Blueberries, cranberries, gooseberries, huckleberries and lingonberries are (almost) the only fruits that have berry in the name and actually are berries.

So… what the hell?

One might wonder, why did they name all these things berries if they aren’t really berries? Well they didn’t.

Streawberige is the old English word for strawberry, sometime pronounced berie. The first dictionary was written in 1604, before that you could just spell things however you wanted and no would could correct your spelling. Much of English originated from other languages, old common German in the case of Strawberry. Old English was spoken from around 500 AD to 1100 AD.

The microscope was invented in 1590 by Zacharias Janssen, improved in 1609 by Galileo Galilei, and by the 1670s Antonie van Leeuwenhoek built an extremely powerful single-lens microscope and becomes the first person to observe bacteria, sperm cells, and protozoa. This led to the ability to look at berries (and all other life) in a new way and in the 1800’s botanical classification became based on the development of fruit at a cellular level instead of outward appearance.

The current botanical definition of a berry is “a simple fruit having seeds and fleshy pulp (the pericarp) produced from the ovary of a single flower.“

The strawberry, which is actually a cousin of the rose, is a aggregate fruit, which develops from the merger of several ovaries that were separated in a single flower. This merger is even more apparent in raspberries and blackberries where you can easily see the separate minifruits.

Dictionary.com defines berry as “any small, usually stoneless, juicy fruit, irrespective of botanical structure, as the huckleberry, strawberry, or hackberry.” which is more what most of us think about when we think of a berry. I would have defined it as a small fruit that grows on a bush. I don’t know about you but the fact that a banana is a berry doesn’t sit right with me. In my opinion I think the botanists should have created a new word that would apply to certain kinds of berries. Doesn’t seem like they should be able to hijack the definition of something so widely accepted at the time. No one asked me though.

I guess it just depends on what level of analysis you want when you define something. A chemist would call it a collection of water, sugar, pectin, cellulose, etc. A physicist would define it as an arrangement of 9×10^22 atoms, mostly hydrogen and oxygen. Or a collection of electronics, protons and neutrons. Or up quarks, down quarks and electrons. A string theorist would say it’s a collection of vibrating strings. I’m going to keep calling it a berry.