Botanically, a berry is a fruit that develops from a single flower with one ovary, and carries its seeds inside the flesh.
By that definition, bananas qualify. So do grapes, tomatoes, chillies, brinjal, and — surprisingly — watermelons and papayas.
Strawberries do not. What you eat in a strawberry is the swollen base of the flower. The actual fruits are those tiny specks on the outside, each one a separate fruit with a single seed. A strawberry is technically dozens of fruits wearing one costume.
Raspberries and blackberries are not berries either. They are aggregate fruits — clusters of small drupes, which makes each little bead a cousin of the mango and the plum.
None of this is a mistake in everyday language. “Berry” in a kitchen means small, sweet, and eaten whole, and that is a perfectly good working definition for a kitchen.
But it is a useful reminder of something larger: scientific categories are built to answer scientific questions, not to match intuition. When the two disagree, it usually means they were never answering the same question.
