Strawberries: are they a fruit, fruit or vegetable? The answer is ...

Along with apples, strawberries are one of the most popular fruits that Germans eat as a snack. They pamper the taste buds on the tongue with their characteristic sweetness and are extremely healthy at the same time. In typical parlance, the name of the plant suggests that it is a berry, but it is Strawberry is something completely different and difficult to classify into a category without disregarding the usual vocabulary permit.

botany

Botany provides information

All plants and their associated parts such as leaves, flowers and fruiting bodies can be determined via botany. For this reason, these points need to be examined more closely in order to be able to define whether a strawberry is a fruit, a fruit or even a vegetable? According to the conception of botany, the strawberry is a dummy fruit, in the narrower sense a nut fruit. The term achenes would be even more precise, but these are only the small yellowish nuts on the Fragaria (botanical for strawberry). Listed here again for a better understanding.

• Fruiting as dummy fruit
• False fruit has nuts on the flower base (pulp) of the common nut fruit
• Nuts from the common nut fruit are called achenes

Strawberries

Because the red pulp of strawberries is not the actual fruiting body, but rather a carrier for the nuts on the surface, so a strawberry is one Fruit. It is not the pulp that is responsible for the division here, but the nuts. These are the actual fruits of the plant and are therefore classified as nuts. Fruit would also apply here, since in the German language fruit is a collective term that includes all fruits of the following species groups.

• Nuts (including strawberries, also sweet chestnuts or acorns)
• Stone fruit
• Pome fruit
• Soft fruit
• exotic fruits

The same applies to the strawberry, because it is a dummy fruit with nut fruits that are raw due to their formation can be consumed and are harmless to humans because they are included in the fruit can. It is interesting to see that strawberries also belong to the fruits that come from the order of the rose-like (Rosales). Much of the fruit species belongs to this order, including rose hips, apples and pears. Of course, it can just be called a fruit, which would correspond exactly to its botanical affiliation. The individual parts of the strawberry fruit are listed again here.

• Common nut fruit
• Achene

Note: While the German language makes the difference between fruits and types of fruit extremely difficult, this is not the case in English, for example. Here strawberries count as "fruit", as do apples, melons, tomatoes or wheat grains, as there is no separate term for fruit types.

Common nuts?

What are common nuts?

The dummy fruits of two plant species are referred to as common nut fruits.

• rosehips
• Strawberries

These form from the bottom of the flower and do not require any other parts of the plant. When the strawberry blossoms change from the flowering time to the formation of the fruit, the yellow bottom of the flower bulges more and more and changes the color from a light green to the familiar, rich red. During this time, the threads of the flower base formed into the closed nuts, the achenes and the strawberry. This form of growth was developed to attract animals such as deer or insects, which eat the pulp and thereby also swallow the nuts. These are then excreted and the strawberry continues to multiply.

Achene?

What are achenes?

The achenes are the nuts of the strawberry plant. Achenes are closing fruits that are only connected to the pulp by a thin layer. Other plants besides strawberries also have achenes, just in a different form.

• sunflowers
• dandelion
• Ordinary pointed burdock
• parsley

They have the advantage that they can easily be carried on, be it by the wind or, as in the case of the strawberry, after being consumed by living beings. This is why they have such a thin pericarp. Since the nuts in strawberries are protected due to their hardness, no hard fruit wall is needed to protect them from external influences. In the case of strawberries, achenes belong to the nut fruits, which reinforces their classification as a fruit.

Vegetables?

But no vegetables?

The argument arises again and again that strawberries are vegetables because the fruits are nuts. Since these are visible on the pulp and this represents the largest visible part of the fruit, it is often counted among the fruit vegetables. The reason for this is the German language, which designates all parts of plants with fruits that can be used and consumed by humans. But here the difference is also clear from a botanical point of view: while in the case of fruit, only the fruiting bodies of individual species are used If, for example, the apple of a tree, many other parts are also used in vegetables, for example the Root.

Note: Also confusing is the assumption that nuts are vegetables because they are rather incidentally used by humans. They are usually prepared before consumption and are not a major part of the diet, which could be a possible assumption for classifying strawberries as a vegetable.