Banana You Say

Surely I had misread the sentence.

I pulled my glasses from my head, polished the lenses with my shirtsleeve, set the glasses back in place, and read the sentence again.

The words were unchanged. A strawberry is not a real berry, but a banana is.

I grabbed the corner of the table to steady myself as my world turned upside down. Once certain a floor was really still a floor I hurried to consult with Mr. Google, PhD.

And learned that true fruits are "simple fruits".  Simple meaning that they form from a flower with a single ovary.

Strawberries grow from a flower with multiple ovaries, making strawberries a complex fruit and therefore not a true fruit. (A banana, it turns out, comes from a flower with a single ovary - so it is a real fruit.)

This explanation sounded a lot like the government documents I spend my day reading but... if one is going to split hairs, then I guess one might as well split fruits too.

But now I had a new dilemma: True fruits and almost-fruits begin as ovaries. Human life begins in an ovary. So does that mean when I go into my garden I'm looking not for fruit ready to be picked, but plants that are ready to deliver?