Aw, no! You asked! Things are about to get crazy up in here!

First let’s get vegetables out of the way. The definition of a vegetable is a plant that’s grown for the edible parts. Fruit, however, is defined as the mature ovary or ovaries of seed-bearing plants, as well as any of their accessory parts, like layers of tissue or “pulp”. (See? Told ya!) So since we eat the leaf stalks of rhubarb, they aren’t a fruit at all but are instead a vegetable. And the tomato, which from childhood we’re taught is a vegetable, is actually a fruit because it contains its seeds.

Now there are other categories under fruits – subcategories, if you will, and berries are under one. The berry doesn’t split apart when it is mature and they’re not all tiny and sweet. Actually, eggplants, tomatoes, and avocados are classified as berries. But the strawberry is not!

The strawberry is known as a pseudo-carp, which means “false fruit”. It is part of a multiple fruit that has many little individual fruits on its flesh. Those parts are the specks that are on the strawberries and they are the seeds – and therefore they are the actual fruit.