Bananas Are Berries, Strawberries Aren't

[ath0]

Because this is Hacker News, the discussion would be incomplete without a link to the Supreme Court case Nix v. Hedden[1].

After the Tariff Act of 1883 taxed vegetables (but not fruits), produce seller John Nix — no relation to the package manager — sued to get tomatoes classified as a fruit.

The court held that the “common meaning” mattered more than the botanical one:

“Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas. But in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked or raw, are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery, and lettuce, usually served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert.“

If you’re in New York, you can celebrate Nix’s memory by eating at a fancy vegetarian restaurant[2], or, of course, you can just use the package manager or operating system.

[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/149/304/ , or see the wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden [2] http://www.nixny.com/

[lhotiuerpoiu]

I eat tomatoes like apples (with salt, I'm not a monster). No kink-shaming please.

[asiachick]

and in South East Asia avocados are eaten as a fruit more than a savory thing like in Mexico. Avocado smoothies are delicious!

Also there are tomatoes that are much sweeter than your average USA tomato. In Japan they are called Fruit Tomatoes.

[dmos62]

I find the article pleasant in its writting and humour. For me this goes to show that thin clickbait articles can be interesting, it's just that most people who can write don't usually do clickbait. Excerpt:

> 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 could therefore be considered berries, you may start to question reality.

> Go a step further and find out that strawberries — yes, those delicious red fruits with "berries" literally in the name — aren't officially berries either. They're "accessory fruits," meaning the flesh that surrounds the seed doesn't actually come from the plant's ovaries but from the ovaries' receptacle. Didn't think we'd be talking so much about ovaries in this article, did you? By the way, raspberries aren't really berries either. I'll let you take a minute to collect yourself.

[throwaway_tech]

>yes, those delicious red fruits with "berries" literally in the name — aren't officially berries either.

Similar to peanuts not being nuts, but in fact legumes.

[mikorym]

And of course the technical definition supersedes the use of the word "berry" in the English language...

[mrleiter]

There's a very good video on this [1] by Innuendo Studios on why this discussion is more or subjective, since it matters in what context you say it and what you mean by it.

He does this with the example of a tomato, which by botanical defintion is a fruit. But in culinary terms, it is a vegetable. So when someone says "haha, did you know that a tomato is actually a fruit", it's subjective and can almost have no added value in a discussion. Botanists know it's a fruit. Cooks know the taste of the tomato and will use it accordingly. Hence, nothing is gained. Except confusion and unnecessary discussion.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmxIK9p0SNM

[hnhg]

There is one thing to gain: an easy lesson in how things can be subjective. I believe the world suffers because many people profoundly reject this.

[scarejunba]

That's not subjectivity so much as a namespace error. It's why quarks have no colors but also have colors.

The amusement arises from intentionally misunderstanding the namespace. It's not a real misunderstanding.

[LoSboccacc]

> Cooks know the taste of the tomato and will use it accordingly.

this is an exceptionally simplistic view since tomato is readily available as juice, as opposed as zucchini and peppers, whose are seldom used in cocktails that aren't smoothies

[Digit-Al]

Well according to the article it could also be considered a berry.

[Kiro]

> Hence, nothing is gained.

I disagree. It's a fun fact, not a reprimand.

[theBobBob]

I remember hearing some super cliched but kinda funny saying one time:

"Knowledge is knowing that tomatoes are a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that you shouldn't put it in a fruit salad."

[cmurphycode]

And being a chef is knowing how to make it work anyway :)

[w-m]

That makes me wonder how tomato in a fruit salad would actually taste.

[monadic2]

Is anything actually gained from rigid definitions like this? People clearly use berry in a different way than botanists do.

[blowski]

It's just wordplay, a basic pun, because the same word, "berry", appears in two different contexts. In everyday usage, a strawberry is a berry, but in botany it's not.

If you're doing botany, you should probably use the latin term Fragaria instead of strawberry.

Edit: If you like this, you'll also find interesting that many nuts (hazlenuts, walnuts, Brazil nuts, pecans, almonds) are not nuts but seeds. One of the few actual nuts is a chestnut.

[arrrg]

I guess it’s interesting in that you can learn something about botany.

However, culinary definitions (where strawberries are berries and tomatoes are vegetables) are just as valid and not wrong because botanical definitions seemingly contradict them.

Bananas can both be berries and not berries at the same time and both definitions can be valid, what’s most useful then just depends on the context (and for most people most of the time that context is, by the way, a culinary one and not a botanical one).

[wodenokoto]

knowledge is knowing that tomatoes are fruits, wisdom is to know not to put them in a fruit salad.

[Hermel]

Yes, you learn something about its biological function. The biological definition of “fruit” tells you where the offspring of a plant grows out of. For example, the actual fruits of the strawberry plant are the little seeds at the surface of each strawberry.

[stjohnswarts]

For botanists yes it makes a huge difference. For people, they are going to group food more in how it is cooked, used, tastes than what it's taxonomic placement is. So the answer is yes and no.

[cryptica]

Agreed, botanists should just make up new words like `fructus`, `berrius` and `vegetablus` to avoid confusion.

[fredsted]

Just something to bring up as idle conversation around the water cooler.

[mcv]

That strawberries are not true berries becomes fairly obvious once you learn that tomatoes are berries. All berries seem to have fairly watery flesh surrounded by a thin but tough skin. Tomatoes have both, strawberries have neither. Raspberries superficially look like a collection of tiny berries from this perspective. Bananas have a skin, but it's not thin, and their flesh is not watery.

That's just my layman's analysis, though. It's suited me well for many years, but if now eggplants and peppers are also berries, I'm starting to wonder whether the word berry even means anything.

[lordgrenville]

There's a deeper point here about how scientific taxonomies differ from folk taxonomies. Scientists might decide to classify something based on its genetic makeup or microscopic structure, whereas laypeople will classify based on macroscopic appearance or use or taste. Neither one of these is closer to the absolute truth, they are both just heuristics useful in different contexts.

Scott Alexander has a somewhat related post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

[ragazzina]

>All berries seem to have fairly watery flesh surrounded by a thin but tough skin.

The point of the article was that bananas are berries though, and your definition doesn't really describe bananas (maybe kiwis).

[robbrown451]

Yeah and cucumbers are fruit, birds are dinosaurs, ladybugs are not bugs, peanuts are not nuts, etc.

Sometimes I think that scientists should just stick to taxonomic categories or other words that don't conflict with their "common usage" meanings.

(and while we all seem to agree that whales aren't fish, they are certainly within the "bony fish" clade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteichthyes and are a lot closer relatives to a goldfish than are sharks :) )

[bustadjustme]

.... whales certainly aren't bony fish. They're in class Mammalia, which is not within the superclass Osteichthyes. I.e. they're mammals, not fish.

[stjohnswarts]

No one considers whales to be bony fish. No one.

[tgb]

Similarly, the botanical definition of "nut" excludes basically everything we think of nuts. Pedants seemed to have learned that peanuts are "not nuts" but have yet to pick up on that almonds, pistachios, walnuts and pecans are also "not nuts."

[bena]

Because most people who like to throw around such pedantic facts only want to appear informed and by extension intelligent.

[jerf]

I've developed a rule of thumb about matters culinary: "The answer to 'is X a Y?' is 'no'." Betteridge's Law of Culinary Classification, I suppose.

The answer seems to be to not care at all, and aggressively ignore anyone who suggests otherwise.

[sdiq]

Read the article and the botanical classifications of some of these fruits feels like a weirdly broken and clearly unacceptable "it-works-as-intended" bug. The classifications should in many ways align with the every-day use of the same words. That is, unless the language changes so much that most of the same words end up meaning an opposite of what they historically meant, or something completely different from the same. In that case, the botanical classification could be kept.

[nmeofthestate]

Looks like no-one has posted this yet:

https://www.mrlovenstein.com/comic/643

[d--b]

The scientific name is bad, it confuses everyone. Why not change that instead of telling people that berries aren't berries?

[mehrdada]

Potato plant produces a berry too, but the actual fruit is toxic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_fruit

[8note]

if I remember correctly, the potato itself is toxic raw

[jmull]

Not really a great article because it mostly perpetuates the confusion rather than clears it up.

Context determines whether a strawberry is a berry or not. In common usage it is. Using a scientific horticultural definition it is not. Context usually determines which definition of berry applies implicitly, though if you're communicating in a context where you think it's reasonably ambiguous, you can be explicitly about which definition you're using.

[gumby]

And Tomatoes, by ruling of a Massachusetts court, “are a vegetable for tax purposes”

[elcomet]

In french, we have the word "Baie", which means berry, but is not widely used for fruits, and we also have another expression which is much more used, "Fruits rouges", literally "red fruits". I think it covers more accurately fruits like raspberries, strawberries, and others. I don't know if "red fruits" is also used in english.

[staz]

All the "fruits rouges" are not red and it confuse me a lot (e.g. Blueberries)

[loriverkutya]

And strawberries are also not straws. It's all a lie.

[sammorrowdrums]

The distinction between different domain terminologies is prescient for software development.

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/359604

Especially when there is conflict between domain terminology and coding concepts.

For example my company at large refers to Booleans (meaning search expressions that are vaguely Boolean in nature in our sense, that job boards enable for CV searching).

Ultimately mutual understanding trumps being correct in my view.

That said, when I have to weigh vegetables in supermarket I still pause before selecting the vegetable category to weigh tomatoes.

[walterkrankheit]

I wish this article went a bit deeper. I still don't feel like I have a primary grip on WHY the non-berry items ended up with berry names to begin with. Bananas, okay, late-period adoption, but the rest?

[rasz]

2010: EU subsidizes fisheries. France wanted in on the action. European Commission has officially categorized snails as "inland fish" in order to allow French snail farmers to receive subsidies.

2002: Fruit jams are subsidized in EU. Portugal makes carrot jams. Guess what, carrot is a fruit in EU. Let me cite that for you:

'tomatoes, the edible parts of rhubarb stalks, carrots, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, melons and water-melons are considered to be fruit'

[rob74]

One of the many questions the article leaves open is what (if any) fruit called "berries" are actually berries? I did some quick research, and apparently cranberries, blueberries, lingonberries and huckleberries are also "botanical berries" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry#Botanical_definition)...