There are so many weird fruit facts out there. For example, bananas are technically berries (and you can get blue ones that taste like vanilla, too). Cranberries can bounce. I could go on... and in the specific case of strawberry ‘seeds’, I think I will.
The yellow-white specks you see on the outside of your fave berry are not, in fact, seeds. And actually, strawberries aren’t berries at all – they’re not even fruit (sorry, but I for one consider my mind officially boggled by that fact).
Let’s get back to that “strawberries aren’t a berry” thing
Unlike bananas, strawberries aren’t technically berries. But the kind of people who like to point out that actually, ‘tomato is a FRUIT!’ at every opportunity probably already knew that.
The commonly-spouted logic is that berries have their seeds on the inside, whereas strawberries keep theirs on the outside. And while that’s technically true, the actual “fruits” of the strawberry are the pits we think of as seeds – the real seeds lie in THOSE.
“Those things we think of as strawberry seeds aren’t seeds,” North Carolina State University shared, adding that “those ‘seeds’ on the outside of a strawberry are actually the fruits, each of which contains a single seed.“
So if a strawberry isn’t a berry or a fruit, what is it?
Get ready for the grossest term you’ll read today – it’s technically “swollen receptacle tissue”, and is made from the part of the strawberry plant that connects the flower to the stem. The growth spurt is triggered when the plant becomes pollinated.
“In ’true fruits, like peaches, a flower is pollinated and then the flower’s ovary swells and becomes the fruit, with the seed or seeds in the middle. Not so with strawberries,” North Carolina State University said.
Instead, the fertilised ovaries don’t grow – they stay dried and shrivelled on the outside of their strawberry host, containing the seeds. In fact, it’s pretty unlikely either you or I have ever actually seen a strawberry seed (wild to think about, right?).
Here’s a TikTok showing the germinated seeds on the outside of a strawberry – i.e., the most visible strawberry “fruit” we’re likely to see:
You learn new horrors every day, I guess...