Pepper is not a vegetable, raspberries are not a berry and other cheating foods

The season of strawberries and cherries is coming! You are about to enjoy your favorite goodies. And when we eat them, we don’t really think about what it is. Did you know, for example, that raspberries are not a berry?

Let’s talk about fruits, vegetables and berries that are not at all what they seem!

In everyday life, we call berries any small fruit that can be eaten in one fell swoop. And from the point of view of botany, berries are fruits covered with a thin skin, with one or more grains inside, developing only from the ovary. In general, science defines berries stricter.

For example, the Strawberry… Our summer favorite is a false berry, not a real one. It does not correspond to the definition given by botanists, as well as Strawberries, because the bones are outside, not inside. In addition, not only the ovary is involved in the development of the fruit in strawberries and strawberries, but this is also against the “berry rules”. In addition, false berries also include briar… And to call them correctly “mnogorozhek”.

С watermelon everyone, by the way, is also mistaken, considering it a berry. Its fruit is correctly called pumpkin, because it differs from the berry by its many seeds inside and a hard shell. Pumpkins include cucumber (he turns out to be not really a vegetable) and melon… And, of course, the pumpkin itself.

Raspberry – what can it be? Only a berry! But no, this is not a berry, but a drupe. That is, a fruit consisting of many smaller fruits, each of which has its own shell, soft core and bone inside. Drupes include blackberryand cloudberry, and cherries… From drupe fruit – plum и персик… And you will never guess which fruit is considered the closest relative of cherries from the point of view of botany! Turns out, coconut.

Rђ RІRѕS, avocado – this is just a berry. As well as bananas – technically they all fulfill the conditions of scientific definition. In addition, the banana tree is not a tree at all or a palm tree, it is a grass. Kiwi Is another berry that we used to think of as a fruit.

Tomatoes и eggplant Are not vegetables. In fact, these are berries, if we follow the strict logic of science.

Scientifically wrong, it would be peanuts nuts. By definition, these are beans, because they grow in a pod, albeit underground. And normal, botanically correct nuts grow on trees.

Another discovery is capsicum, both spicy and sweet, Bulgarian. These are all false berries, not vegetables at all. More precisely, the fruit of the capsicum is defined as follows: a false hollow poly-seeded berry. It even sounds insulting.

By the way

The stores are full of other products that are designed to mislead people by their name alone. For example, crab sticks have nothing to do with crabs. They are made from surimi – minced meat made from white ocean fish such as cod or pollock and a variety of additives.

Wasabi in the store, it is most often just a green spicy pasta, not real wasabi. A real, truly Japanese seasoning is prepared from the root of the plant of the same name, which is also called Japanese horseradish. But this plant has nothing to do with our usual horseradish. Like the green pasta called wasabi, it is often made from mustard, dyes and domestic horseradish.