Bananas Are Berries, Strawberries Aren't
recipes.howstuffworks.com
recipes.howstuffworks.com
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/
Then again, this is an actual thing in India, albeit with _black_ salt, which is more tangy than bitter and salty.
To this day I love prosciutto, and I like melons, but I can't stand the taste of them together.
That first evening there, I was really worried that all I had heard about how good Italian food was maybe not true - perhaps it was all strange things like what they'd just given me?
Edit: basically, it is just coarse salt.
My understanding for the mechanism by which the salt makes the fruit sweeter is by increasing the concentration of sugars in the flesh that's now surrounded by salted water.
Kosher salt is named for the application of drawing water from meat (which is itself part of the kosher preparation of meat) so it's not too surprising that the salt is also well suited for drawing water from fruits like watermelon.
I use table salt on watermelon and it's great too. I can believe that kosher salt would be better, but I doubt most people would consider the difference immense. But palates vary, so, if you've got both salts around might as well use the bigger crystal.
Is that correct? AIUI the primary way that salt makes foods taste sweeter is due to the fact it attenuates our sense of "bitter".
This makes me a bit skeptical that the type of salt matters much. Perhaps it's simply easier to get the dosage right with Kosher salt?
In my experience, yes, salt type doesn't matter too much except for 1) iodine is sometimes quite noticable 2) very minerally sea salts can add flavors
but the amount does (by weight, not volume). Table salt and kosher salt are both very consistent [1] but I use the latter to avoid iodine
[1] but note the brand, iirc morton's is almost 2x as dense as diamond crystal. when in doubt, weigh.
But also it doesn't have additives like table salt (e.g. iodine and anti-caking agents). Iodine at least has a definite flavor.
It's also very consistently made (though not between manufacturers) unlike some sea salts, and relatively inexpensive so it's the go-to kitchen salt (as against finishing salt) for a lot of cooks; you know what you get in a pinch every time.
Black salt is not tangy like lemony, it is just rock salt. Sometimes fruitsalts are salts peppered with ground black pepper and or lemon juice. Black salt on its own is earthly salty like ocean water.
I still eat my tomatoes like that every so often, it's so good ! Although I think I end up eating quite a bit of salt when I do that which isn't so good...
Obviously, sliced tomatoes with salt is a relatively common breakfast side item, so the idea of just eating tomato with salt isn't that uncommon in the U.S.
Waffle House, one of the larger chains of grill made food offer sliced tomatoes as a side in place of hash browns. I have no found that offering elsewhere. So it makes me wonder how it made to the menu
A few other things great with salt and pepper: grapefruit, watermelon, cantelope, cottage cheese, buttermilk.
Also there are tomatoes that are much sweeter than your average USA tomato. In Japan they are called Fruit Tomatoes.
> 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.
> you may start to question reality
In Middle English, everything that wasn't a berry was an "apple". A banana was an appel of paradis, apple of paradise.
Potatoes are "pommes du terre" in French, meaning "earth apples", and French fries are "pommes frites", fried apples.
Or just freedom fries.
Similar to peanuts not being nuts, but in fact legumes.
On the other hand "nuts" including peanuts are typically processed in the same facilities, so cross-contamination is real too.
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.
Legislators may or may not think like writers/lawyers, but even if they do they're constrained by those who don't, the need for compromise, and the incentive to have gotten something done even if it's not perfect. So they sometimes end up doing a bad job of legal writing.
Lawyers actually like variability of interpretation, since it allows for flexible arguments. This is especially true for common law countries, where law is systematically interpreted by the courts, very often following arguments of lawyers and/or scholars.
You see, language is a social construct and can never be as accurate as mathematics. You can define an interger very rigourously, but you cannot define language that way. Yes, there is grammar and such things. But it‘s very dynamic. And I didn‘t even start with „meaning“. There‘s a very large debate in philosophy about what that even is.
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
I think this is merely a flaw with the English language. Tomatoes are fruits (fruit of the tomato plant) but they are not fruit (a food category). It's two separate words with different grammatical treatment.
> Berries also must have two or more seeds, and their fruit must develop from a flower with one ovary. Once again, the banana checks those boxes. And, weirdly, so does the tomato, eggplant, kiwi and pepper. Oranges are a specific type of berry called hesperidium thanks to their distinct segments.
Just to throw some extra confusion into the mix :-)
The amusement arises from intentionally misunderstanding the namespace. It's not a real misunderstanding.
I disagree. It's a fun fact, not a reprimand.
"Knowledge is knowing that tomatoes are a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that you shouldn't put it in a fruit salad."
They ended up quite enjoying them, but I have never been tempted to try it lol
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.
The bit we eat is usually a seed or fruit - the shell encasing it is a nut. At least, that's what I understood.
Do you mean they're edible?
When we say "a strawberry is not a berry" we're playing on the different meanings of the word berry. It's not a humourous pun, but I would still call it a pun.
Also, correcting people to say that bananas are berries doesn’t even acknowledge a second meaning of berry. It suggests the meaning they know of is wrong. I’m aware we’re talking about a technical meaning and a commonly-accepted meaning, but the assertion is suggesting the commonly-accepted meaning is completely invalid.
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).
For me its biological function is to be eaten, so I care more about where it goes than about where it comes.
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.
Scott Alexander has a somewhat related post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
The point of the article was that bananas are berries though, and your definition doesn't really describe bananas (maybe kiwis).
Kiwis are a bit hairy to be berries, but they feel closer to berries to be than bananas.
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 :) )
If you look at the cladogram on the wikipedia page I linked, you see a picture of a salamander near the top representing the category Tetrapodomorpha. We (and whales) are also on that branch. Sharks are outside of that whole cladogram, as they are cartilaginous fish. ( * )
In other words, any clade which includes all bony fish also includes mammals.
[*] which means that the most recent common ancestor of sharks and goldfish lived longer ago than the most recent common ancestor of whales and goldfish
That will redirect from "bony fish" to "Osteichthyes", the name of the scientific category that represents bony fish.
And there is a cladogram on that page. And it includes whales, by virtue of including tetrapods (it shows a picture of a salamander).
It also says on that page "Osteichthyes can be compared to Euteleostomi. In paleontology, the terms are synonymous." And "Euteleostomi presents a cladistic view which includes the terrestrial tetrapods that evolved from lobe-finned fish". And yes, as mentioned, whales are tetrapods.
So, while I didn't say "whales are bony fish", I said "whales are members of the bony fish clade", and I'd say wikipedia agrees with that statement. (to be clear, we humans are also members of the bony fish clade) And if you consider bony fish to be a paraphyletic group, well, then it isn't a clade.
The answer seems to be to not care at all, and aggressively ignore anyone who suggests otherwise.
You'd could also try to make so criteria that defines berries, but that's what we already have, even though it tells us that strawberries aren't berries. We could make new ones, but how do we ensure that bananas becomes fruit, strawberries should be a berry and peas and corn should definitively not become berries?
For daily usage it fine that we don't see bananas as berries and that tomatoes certainly shouldn't go into a fruit salad, even if it's technically a fruit.
Why? I don't see pressing need for a waterproof definition. I'd think for general use "I know it when I see it" definition suffices, and for where exactitude matters having explicit list is better anyways
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/did-congr...
>No, Congress did not declare pizza a vegetable
Congress decided that 1/8th of a cup of tomato puree counts as a SERVING of vegetables. Not A vegetable. You're just intentionally saying something stupid in order to attempt to project that stupidity on someone else.
Can confirm it's not commonly used in North American english. I can't say I've ever heard it used like this before
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.
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'
(What do you do on a gallows? You hang.)
https://www.thespruceeats.com/juice-and-smoothie-recipe-with...
Carl Linnaeus lived in the 18th century. The botanical sense of "berry" developed from the ordinary sense -- almost certainly because someone was investigating "what do all these berries have in common?", and picked a trait that identified the largest number of small fruit.
You can see the same thing happening with "fish". Starfish and jellyfish are not "fish" in a taxonomic sense, but they are things that live in the water. In Chinese, octopuses and crocodiles are also "fish". (章鱼 and 鳄鱼, where 鱼 by itself is "fish".)
I think you'll need to clarify that a bit - most vegetables are roots, leaves, flowers or stalks.
Than strawberry would be a fruit, cucumber would be, roots salaa etc not.