Another fun brain bender you can drop on people at your next dinner is that bananas and tomatoes are both berries but strawberries and blackberries are not.

I think Wikipedia draws a good distinction here: culinary and botanical. So, banana is NOT berry in a culinary sense, and a strawberry is. Even if, botanically it’s the opposite.

I think it’s an important distinction because people using the term “berry” almost always are using it in a culinary context and not a botanical context.

No one wants a pie with fresh “aggregate accessory fruits”, just as much as no one would think it’s correct to call an eggplant tomato pie a dessert with “fresh berries”.

>I only even remember this because of an argument I had many years ago regarding whether a tomato was a vegetable or fruit. I chose the veggie side, but had no real evidence. Come to find out, after researching, the Supreme Court agreed.

Does anyone else remember when Congress told everyone that pizza was a vegetable? Haha. Good times.

Without meaning to defend it too much, as I believe it's mostly a marketting/lobying thing...

As I understand it, the issue was whether or not you could count a pizza towards your vegetable quota. The argument came down to the nutritional content of the tomato sauce on the pizza; nutritionally, this was very similar to the requirements for other things that can be classified as vegetables, and so one portion of pizza was deemed to also count as one portion of vegetables.