Thems the Berries (or Not)

Everyone more or less knows that tomatoes are fruits and not vegetables, botanically, though we treat them as vegetables culturally.

But did you know that tomatoes are botanically classified as berries? I didn't until today.

I was originally going to write this post about just strawberries, because I had seen something about their oddness, but then it turned out while they're weird, they're not the only strange thing about berries.

First... strawberries are not berries. This post on livescience.com is the best thing I found that gives a good overall explanation about berries and fruits. The basics:

• Berries contain their seeds inside a fleshy layer, surrounded by an outer skin. Sometimes that skin is soft (as on a tomato) and sometimes it's hard (as on a watermelon) or kind of tough, requiring peeling (as on banana). Peppers and eggplants are a couple of other surprises I found in the berry category. Others are more expected, like blueberries, cranberries, or kiwis.
• Berries are a kind of fruit that has an additional bit of definition, requiring that they come from a single flower with just one ovary that produces at least two seeds. So you can see how tomatoes fit into that set of characteristics. 
• If the plant only produces only one seed per flower, that is called a drupe instead of a berry. A cherry is an example of a drupe. 
• Strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries have flowers that have more than one ovary. The little segments that make up raspberries and blackberries are each formed from a separate ovary. Each one is itself a drupe.
• Strawberry flowers also have multiple ovaries, but they don't result in multiple drupes. Each of their seeds is held on the surface of the fruit as something called an achene. Strawberries (and raspberries and blackberries) are called aggregate fruit.
• Don't ask about citrus. But here's another fact I didn't know: They are also considered berries.

That's probably enough fruit oddity for one night.