﻿The Fruit Is A Lie

We all know, I think, that a tomato is a fruit not a vegetable. It’s the sort of amazing fact printed on cereal boxes to amuse and entertain children with very low standards. The distinction is, so I fuzzily recall, that fruit are part of reproduction, whereas a vegetable is any other botanical bit we eat. Thus, fruit have seeds inside, veg don’t — veg can be leaves (cabbage), roots (parsnip) or buds (sprouts).

The plot, however, thickened when I was cutting up strawberries — one of the few consolations for an English ‘summer’ — and idly wondered what the hell they were, since the seeds were on the outside. Being the sort of know-it-all who watches QI I was also aware that many berries were not, technically and botanically speaking, berries. A blackberry, for example, is actually an aggregate fruit composed of drupelets (little flesh bits with just one seed inside). Impress your friends with that. So I was prepared for a shock, but not the magnitude of what I actually found.

Strawberries, you will be glad to know, are a ‘false fruit’. Which seems reasonable enough. But at this point a small doubt started to grow in my mind... what, actually, then, was a real fruit? Oranges? No, they’re a modified berry. Bananas? Leathery berry. Plums? Drupe — fleshy bit with one stone inside. Peaches, nectarines and mangos, similar. Pineapple? Forget it — multiple fruit, incorporating the support that the original flowers all grow on, making it a pseudo-multiple-carp. Although interestingly and cutely, they are pollinated by hummingbirds and bats. (Not usually simultaneously.)

Apples, I thought. Good old apples. No. They are pomes. What is a pome? Well, It’s a real fruit in the middle and a false fruit round the outside. It’s the real thing dressed up as a fake to avoid detection by the cops. So is the pear.

No. None of them are bloody fruit. I feel so betrayed.

This is a diagram of dirty dirty fruit reproductive action. Note that I am not fully comfortably with them displaying their reproductive organs like that, and spewing their pollen into the air freely, but I can’t seem to stop them.

A fruit — a ‘true fruit’ — is one where all tissues are derived from the plant ovary and this alone. This includes peas. Whereas strawberries, for example, also include some of the flesh from the peg that holds the ovary, disqualifying them from fruit status. The apple gets its carpels involved as well as the ovary, leading to a kinky pome. ‘True berries’ are also ‘true fruits’, but not the other way round. Grapes, currants (red and black), elder- and gooseberries are all proper upstanding berries which will not deceive you or smuggle themselves into your house in pies before stealing your silver while you sleep.

In fact, the only ‘true’ fruit I can find that’s not a berry but is, kind of, a fruit (more so than peas anyway) is the tomato again. Maybe those cereal box authors did know what they were on about after all.

I can only conclude it makes the biologists feel special, because they know something we don’t know. Something physicists would never do. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to look for the most charmed particle I can find. I intend to see if I can cause it to decay into strangeness.