In *good* news, I went to the other grocery store today

[conuly]

to pick up pancetta, which is half the price it is at my closer grocery store, and it turns out that berry season has arrived! Two pounds of strawberries for $3! Two boxes of raspberries for $4! Neither of those are actually berries, but whatever!

I was also able to get purslane. That is also not a berry. Neither are the cherries I picked up for $2 a pound. We are going to be eating so much fruit this summer. Just can't wait until the farmer's market gets ripe peaches in. And currents.

I wait all year for fresh, ripe fruit that isn't bananas* or oranges** or apples. Can't eat those hard peaches and plums that you get most of the year. I'm gonna eat myself sick.

* these are berries

** so are these

Comments

[raino]

OK this orange being a berry messes with my head, if you mean it literally. I thought fruit was this thing from tree, which has hard seeds inside?

[conuly]

Botanically, a fruit is the ripened ovary of a plant (not necessarily a tree), which typically means that it has seeds (but some things with seeds are not the ripened ovary of a plant, such as strawberries). Using this definition, oranges are fruits and so are blueberries, tomatoes, watermelon, avocado, bananas, cucumber, melon, peppers, cherries, and so on.

The botanical definition of a berry is any fruit which has seeds in a pulpy mass. This includes, but is not limited to, tomatoes, oranges, blueberries, watermelon. Also bananas, which in the wild do have seeds. It does not include cherries, strawberries, raspberries, or, indeed, most things with -berry in the name. All berries are fruits.

In the common, culinary definition a fruit is the part of the plant that is eaten as a fruit, which mostly means that it is sweet and has seeds except when it doesn't - bananas are fruits but plantains aren't, lemons are fruits but avocadoes usually aren't, and so on. Under this somewhat recursive definition tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers aren't fruits, despite having seeds, because they're not "eaten as fruits". They're vegetables, which under the common definition means something like "a plant or mushroom that we eat in non-sweet ways, excluding grains, nuts, spices, and dried beans/pulses". (Some people also mentally exclude herbs and aromatics, or exclude them in some situations but not others - I wouldn't overthink it.)

In the common culinary definition, a berry is a very soft, sweet fruit that belongs to the recursive category "berry" - so strawberries and mulberries and currants all count, but grapes probably don't, and cherries might.

It's very important to be clear which definition you intend to use, because of course they conflict. I like to use the botanical definition where the culinary one is more appropriate because it amuses me to do so.

At any rate, to my knowledge neither definition, in any common dialect, has to do with trees or how hard the seeds are. Some fruits, such as oranges, come from trees and have hard seeds. Some, such as watermelon, don't come from trees. Some, such as mulberries, do come from trees but have small, unobtrusive seeds. You might use the word that way, but I think you may be the only one.

Here, take a comic.

[gingicat]

I thought that bananas are herbs, botanically.

[jessie_c]

According to Professor Ponder Stibbons, Bananas are pipefish cladistically.

*applause*

[isis]

I giggled!

[conuly]

GNU Terry Pratchett.

~ A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.

[conuly]

The plant is an herb not a tree. The fruit is a berry.

[spikethemuffin]

>You might use the word that way, but I think you may be the only one.

Well, to be fair, botanists seem to have defined "berry" outside of common usage. (It bothers me, too. Sort of like "box turtles" are not turtles but they are indelibly referred to as such...)

[conuly]

To be even more fair, common usage doesn't really have a coherent and consistent definition of the word berry.

[spikethemuffin]

Did you just use "common usage" and "coherent and consistent" in the same sentence? Okay, fine, there's a "doesn't" in there, I'll allow it.

[spikethemuffin]

Also, $2/lb. for cherries? WHAT?

[conuly]

Shock that it's so low, or shock that I think this is a low price?

That store has some good deals on produce, but their dairy is so-so at best.

[fred_mouse]

For me, that is an incomprehensibly low price - American cherries are in local stores at $30/kg.

[spikethemuffin]

Shock that it's so low.

One of the few things I truly miss about Chicago is their gigantic produce emporia. Crappy dairy, as you said, and $8 a box for slightly-stale cereal, but you could eat healthy for days on ten dollars.