#FruityFriday part 2

This post, about the different types of fruit, is just for fruity friday fun, for the people who love to collect facts. You definitely don’t need to know any of these things to know that fruit is delicious and nutritious!

There’s four main types of fruit (or 6 or 3 depending on who you ask and what classification system you use). Simple, aggregate, multiple and accessory.

Simple

Simple fruit is actually not that simple. The technical definition is an indehiscent (fruit derived from a single ovary having one or many seeds within a fleshy wall or pericarp. So the definition is about coming from one flower (important later when comparing to other subtypes), being indehiscent meaning it doesn’t split open to reveal its seeds when ripe, and having that fleshy wall or pericarp (so having that fleshy bulk around the seeds).

Simple fruits come in two main types berries and drupes.

Berries are not what you think - most the things that have berry in the name are not berries. Berries have soft pulp around the seeds and include blueberries (BERRY!) but also tomatoes, grapes and citrus fruits. Yep, oranges are berries but blackberries, raspberries and strawberries are not. A lot of fruits that you would not think are berries are botanically so - pumpkin, watermelons they are berries!

Drupes are what you might know as stone fruits. I weirdly love the word drupe though. Drupes have a hard pit around a single seed, and a fleshy outside. Examples in this category are pretty obvious and are most things with a stone - cherries, olives, peaches, apricots, mangos etc.

The trickiest one in avocado, seems like it might be a fruit, but its a gosh darn berry, because that’s not a pit enclosing a seed, that whole thing is the seed.

Banana’s are also berries, even though lots of websites say they aren’t even fruit because the plant is a herb not not a tree - tree versus herb is about comparing the stem of the plant (wood or succulent) the definition of fruit does not matter if its a tree or not.

Aggregate

Aggregate fruit are formed from lots of ovaries, but still from just the one flower. This is where a lot of the berries sit, like blackberries and raspberries (also known as druplets, because they are mini drupes all clustered together, another word I weirdly love). Other examples are custard apples.

Multiple

Multiple fruits are kind of like aggregate fruits, but the ovaries that mature to form the fruit come from multiple flowers. Examples are pineapples, mulberries, breadfruit and figs.

Accessory

This one is the weirdest, and also kind of isn’t a fruit, because remember that technical definition of fruit being the mature ovaries and seeds, accessory fruits are when other organs (bits) of the flower develop into the fleshy bit that we eat. The two main examples in this category are strawberries and pomes.

Strawberries are the most whack “fruit” the pink fleshy part we call the fruit forms from tissue near the ovary, and those little bits we call seeds, THOSE ARE THE FRUIT, inside each of those there is an even tinier seed!

Pomes are your apples and pears and similar. The bit we eat isn’t the ovary, its a fleshy ripening and enlarging of flower stem tissue. The little bit inside around the core, you know when you cut an apple in half you can see a line in the centre encircling the core, THAT part is the fruit, the bit we eat is just accessory!

The bottom line? Yeah, you didn’t need to know any of that to eat and enjoy your fruits! But it is fun sometimes to know what the details of the everyday things we take for granted :)