You might have heard it said that raspberries, blackberries, and yes, even strawberries are not really berries at all, or perhaps even the dubious claim that pumpkins, avocadoes, kiwis, and bananas are the real berries. While this is technically true botanically speaking, the word "berry", as it's used in any non-scientific context, has nothing to do with any scientific definition, and only to do with their size and the general context in which they are traditionally eaten. Wikipedia seems to agree, as the main Wikipedia article for "Berry" is for the traditional category of small fruits, with "Berry (botany)" being its own separate article!

A similar situation would be if people went around saying that ladybugs aren't actually bugs, because they don't belong to the order of "true bugs", ignoring that the word "bug" for all practical purposes just means insect, or really any small arthropod that resembles an insect, such as centipedes and roly-polies (pill bugs) for example.

One is left to wonder what the botanist who named the scientific category of "berries" was thinking, considering how little overlap that category has with the pre-existing category of fruits with "berry" in their names; basically the only "true berries" that fit both the traditional and scientific definitions are blueberries and cranberries, plus a few more obscure berries such as lingonberries and gooseberries.

I frequently hear this so-called "fun fact" worded so as to single out strawberries in particular as non-berries, probably just because they're the most popular berry, which I guess would make it more surprising to hear that they're not berries. I find this particularly annoying however, because those who repeat it are missing the far more surprising and arguably more meaningful fact they're not a fruit at all.

While the botanical definition of a berry is rather obscure and detached from its everyday meaning, the botanical definition of a fruit is much less so. Most people will agree that tomatoes for example are a fruit, even though they're treated more like a vegetable in cooking. Additionally, the botanical category of "berry" is based on some rather arbitrarily defined physical characteristics which apparently aren't even fully agreed upon by botanists, whereas "fruit" refers precisely to the seed-bearing organ of a plant formed from the ovary after flowering. This makes fruits a much more interesting and meaningful category for something to be a part of than botanical berries, in my opinion at least.

It is also more interesting to say that a strawberry is not a fruit because it makes them quite unique; there are plenty of examples of non-sweet fruits that are treated like vegetables, but strawberries are the only vegetable that's treated like a fruit, at least that I know of.

When I try to explain to people that strawberries are not a fruit, they often try to refute my claim by saying that they are an "accessory fruit" or an "aggregate fruit", however these categories are misleadingly named as they do not refer to types of fruit, but rather structures which contain some non-fruit material in addition to fruit, and structures which contain multiple fruits, respectively. In the case of a strawberry, the only actual fruits are what appear to be the seeds on the outside, with the entire rest of the berry being non-fruit. The way these labels are often defined only adds to their misleading nature, for example Wikipedia flat-out claims that "An accessory fruit is a fruit" in the very first sentence of their article, which is then contradicted when the article gives the example of strawberries, referring to the seeds as "the true fruits", thus implying that the strawberry as a whole is not a true fruit!

Some other accessory fruits can be a bit ambiguous as to whether or not they should really be thought of as fruits, for example apples and pears are accessory fruits in which the true fruit is the core. But since the non-fruit material forms a cohesive structure with the fruit material, I still think it's reasonable to call the whole thing a fruit, even if it's kind of an edge case. On a strawberry, however, the actual fruits are clearly distinct from the strawberry they're attached to, and in fact the "berry" portion is really just the stem on which the fruits are grown.

It should be apparent by now that the question of whether or not a strawberry is really a fruit is not a scientific question, as it really comes down to which part of the plant you want to call a strawberry. Botanically speaking, "strawberry" just refers to the species, so the whole plant is a "strawberry" technically, but that's obviously not what I'm talking about; I think most people would agree that there is such a thing as a "strawberry" separate from the plant on which it grew, even if it can't be objectively defined where the strawberry itself begins and the rest of the plant ends. The only thing you can really say scientifically speaking is that the strawberry is a fruit-bearing plant, which may be where some of the confusion comes from.

Personally, I would say that the red part of the strawberry is the "strawberry" itself; if you were to remove the seeds, you wouldn't be left with a pile of "strawberries" with the stem sitting next to them; you would have a seedless strawberry next to a pile of seeds (well, fruits). Therefore, the word "strawberry" does not refer to the fruits of the strawberry plant, it refers to the stem; meaning that, at least what I (and probably most people) call a strawberry, is not technically a fruit, but a vegetable.

It's still a berry though, I mean, it's right there in the name!