A banana is a berry and a strawberry is not
To a botanist, a berry is a fleshy fruit grown from a single flower with its seeds inside. By that rule a BANANA, a GRAPE, a BLUEBERRY, a KIWI and even a WATERMELON are berries, and so, in a modified form, are a LEMON and an ORANGE. A STRAWBERRY is not: its seeds, about two hundred of them, sit on the outside, and the juicy part is the swollen base of the flower. A RASPBERRY is a cluster of tiny fruits, each with its own seed, stuck together.
The PEACH, PLUM, CHERRY and APRICOT are stone fruits, with one hard seed in the middle. A NECTARINE is a peach with smooth skin, the result of a single change in one gene. The COCONUT is a stone fruit too, just a very large and hairy one. A FIG is stranger still: it is a hollow bag of tiny flowers turned inward, and in the wild each one is pollinated by a wasp small enough to crawl inside. Our bees page covers the more usual pollinators.
The banana your grandparents ate
Supermarket bananas have no seeds you can see, because they are sterile. Every plant is grown from a cutting, so nearly all of them are clones of one variety, the Cavendish. It is named after the Duke of Devonshire, whose gardener grew it in a hothouse at Chatsworth in the 1830s. Wild bananas, by contrast, are packed with hard seeds.
Until the 1950s the world ate a different banana, the Gros Michel, said to be creamier and sweeter. A soil fungus called Panama disease spread through the plantations, and because every plant was genetically the same, none could resist it. Growers switched to the Cavendish, which a new strain of the same disease now threatens.
Pineapples for hire and a renamed gooseberry
In eighteenth-century Britain, a PINEAPPLE grown in a heated hothouse cost a fortune, and people are said to have rented one for an evening to show off at a dinner party before returning it. Stone pineapples still sit on top of gateposts and buildings from the period.
The GRAPEFRUIT appeared in Barbados in the 1700s as a chance cross between an orange and a pomelo, and it may be named for growing in bunches like grapes. It can interfere with some medicines, and some medicine labels warn against it. The KIWI was once called the Chinese gooseberry. In 1959 New Zealand exporters renamed it kiwifruit, after their national bird, to make it easier to sell abroad.
Ripening and a sailors' nickname
A ripening banana gives off ethylene, a gas that tells fruit nearby to ripen too, so a hard PEAR, MANGO or PAPAYA shut in a paper bag with a banana softens faster. An APPLE floats because about a quarter of it is air.
British sailors were given LIME juice to prevent scurvy, a disease caused by a lack of vitamin C, and Americans nicknamed them limeys. In fact lemons had worked better. When the navy switched to limes in the 1860s, and processed the juice in ways that destroyed much of its vitamin C, scurvy crept back on long voyages. A MELON, a FIG and a GRAPEFRUIT all offer plenty of the same vitamin.