The Cincinnati Beacon - Bananas: Fruit? Herb? Berry? Freak of Nature?

Many people know that tomatoes are not a vegetable, but a fruit. The tell-tale sign is the presence of internal seeds. Seeds are the key to understanding the strict scientific distinctions between fruits and vegetables.

This might also explain why most of the non-tomato ketchup recipes out there use fruits—and not vegetables—as their base. And if this concept (of non-tomato ketchup) strikes you as strange, it shouldn’t. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve seen that most Heinz and Hunts labels specify that they are selling tomato ketchup—a specification which implies the existence of other types.

Some of you might have paused to see me referring to a pepper as a fruit. But peppers fit the rule stated earlier: they have seeds on the inside. Same with eggplants, cucumbers, or even pumpkins. In cooking, these foods are treated like vegetables because they are not sweet like other fruits—but for the strict connoisseur those are the rules.

Some of you, loyal readers, might be thinking here about those brown specks you’ve seen when biting into a banana. But those are not seeds. At one time in the evolution of the banana, perhaps—but in this modern age bananas are not planted from banana seeds. Wikipedia has this bit of banana science:

While the original bananas contained rather large seeds, triploid (and thus seedless) cultivars have been selected for human consumption. These are propagated asexually from offshoots of the plant. The plant is allowed to produce 2 shoots at a time; a larger one for fruiting immediately and a smaller “sucker” or “follower” that will produce fruit in 6–8 months time. The life of a banana plantation is 25 years or longer, during which time the individual stools or planting sites may move slightly from their original positions as lateral rhizome formation dictates. Latin Americans sometimes comment that the plants are “walking” over time.

Cultivated bananas are sterile (parthenocarpic), meaning that they do not produce viable seeds. Lacking seeds, another form of propagation is required. This involves removing and transplanting part of the underground stem (called a corm). Usually this is done by carefully removing a sucker (a vertical shoot that develops from the base of the banana pseudostem) with some roots intact. However, small sympodial corms, representing not yet elongated suckers, are hardier to transplant and can be left out of the ground for up to 2 weeks; they require minimal care and can be boxed together for shipment.

Further, due to the structure of the so-called banana tree itself, the entire plant is more properly known as an “herb.”

It is technically known as a ”false berry,” but even so this designation resides in the fruit family. This makes the banana the only official fruit without internal seeds.

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