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.
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.
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."
Is anything actually gained from rigid definitions like this? People clearly use berry in a different way than botanists do.
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.
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 :) )
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."
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.
Looks like no-one has posted this yet:
The scientific name is bad, it confuses everyone. Why not change that instead of telling people that berries aren't berries?
Potato plant produces a berry too, but the actual fruit is toxic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_fruit
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.
And Tomatoes, by ruling of a Massachusetts court, “are a vegetable for tax purposes”
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.
And strawberries are also not straws. It's all a lie.
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.
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?
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'
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)...
any reason why rasberries and strawberries have the words berries in them then?
An example of why creating classification systems is such a PITA.
The classic: Strange Times for the Berry Club: https://meme.xyz/meme/21615
I’m surprised this is news to anyone. Context always matters. Is the conventional wisdom that there is Not two dichotomies for produce: culinary and botanical?
I read up on these things some time ago, and what amused me the most is that while almost every vegetable is a fruit, the Juniper berry is, in fact, a cone.
I'd like a line drawn between "wants to be eaten" and not :)
Than strawberry would be a fruit, cucumber would be, roots salaa etc not.
A banana is a sandwich. Change my mind.
Btw, you know that spiders are not insects?
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/