When I studied Botany I initially found the description of the things I would eat definitely odd. I guess the first rule is that plant species and parts are all classified and generally clumped together with similar physiology.
Take for instance the definition of a ‘true’ vegetable? Well it is anything that is the root, stem or leaf of a plant. Which of cause makes for some interesting anomalies in how we describe the food we eat, because this means that while many of us would call rhubarb a fruit because we use for dessert, technically it’s a vegetable.
Then there is the proper definition of a fruit: fruits are the ovaries of a flowering plant that develops after its seeds are fertilised (or sometimes even without fertilisation). So corn, peas and cucumber etc are all fruits. What about cauliflower, broccoli? Well they do contain the ovaries but they haven’t developed so they are simply defined as flowers. Weirdly the pink inside of a ripe fig is the flowers…
It gets even more complicated because we have further definitions of these fruits into fleshy and dry, simple and complicated. So technically just on the fleshy side we end up with drupes, poms, hesperidiums, aggregate fruits and berries. So as not to confuse myself I’ll leave the dry fruits for another day. Simply to say that dry fruits are more than a nut!
Drupes are stone fruits, they are composed of an outer skin, flesh and a hard seed in the middle. As a simple fruit they come from the ovary of a single flower and include mangos, avocadoes, olives, cherries and peaches. Poms are similar but have more seeds without the stone and are apples and pears. Hesperidiums are citrus with all those co-joined segments. Aggregate fruits come from multiple flowers that produce many fruits that mature into a single, larger fruit for example pineapples and mulberries. So next time you look at a pineapple each one of those hexagonal shapes is a fruit in it’s own right…
And strawberries? Well they’re not even a fruit. They’re a special type of plant structure a ‘fleshy receptacle’. The seeds in the strawberry are the actual fruit part.
Confused? You might be interested in watching the Scishow’s Hank Green’s
www.youtube.com/watch?v=LybfPwCzs3g
