Greek Goddess of Fertility. Ain't she a stunner?
I love pomegranates. I first heard of pomegranates in fourth grade when we learned Greek Mythology. The stories were full of pomegranates; it was practically a literary device for change. It was the pomegranate seed that changed the fate of poor Persephone, subjecting her to eternal life in the underworld.
I was reminded of the story of Persephone when I asked myself the question “are pomegranates fruits or berries?” I thought there was a difference, when really, fruit is more like the umbrella term and berries go under it.
According to E.N. Anderson’s “Everybody Eats” a fruit as seen by botanists is a ripened ovary produced by a flowering plant. Basically anything that grows on a stem and has seeds in it. This differs considerably to what us normal folks call fruit, but for all intents and purposes I am going to stick with the scientific term. (Apparently, eggplant is a fruit??)
So then we have different categories of fruits. There is aggregate fruit, which are fruits that came from one flower but that are made of many different ovaries (the sacs of liquid with seeds in them) like raspberries (raspberries!) and eggplant . Actual berries are defined as being “…a fleshy fruit in which the entire ovary wall ripens into an edible pericarp. The flowers of these plants have a superior ovary and one or more carpels within a thin covering and fleshy interiors.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry).
A pericap is just a fancy word for the edible outer skin of a fruit, like that of a squash. Wait…so then squash are berries? Apparently, every fruit that I considered a berry is not really a berry, and the fruits I separated into other categories were actually fruit.
I asked ten people in Lakeside dining to say whether the following fruits were berries or not: grapes, raspberries, plantains, pomegranates, strawberries, and blueberries. Here is what some of them said:
Grapes: one person said it was a berry…he was a bio major
Raspberries: everyone unanimously named this one a berry…too bad it actually isn’t.
Plantains: I had a few laughs. It hadn’t even occurred to anyone that this might be a berry but the tiny seeds nesting in the fleshy ovary suggests it is so.
Pomegranates: this one got a few head scratches. In general, everyone decided that a fruit had to have seeds, and that berries had to have many seeds. But the darn fruit didn’t even have the word berry in it.
Actually, I never considered it a berry either until I read E.N. Anderson. If a berry has to have an outer layer, with lots of ovaries then pomegranates definitely fit the bill. One website I checked out, http://waynesword.palomar.edu/termfr4.htm said that technically, pomegranates are “technically a leathery-skinned berry containing many seeds, each surrounded by a juicy, fleshy aril. But pomegranates have very little flesh and seems more like a vessel for fertility than a berry…
technically a leathery-skinned berry containing many seeds, each surrounded by a juicy, fleshy aril. But pomegranates have very little flesh and seem more like a vessel for fertility than a berry…
And I still have problems accepting that strawberries are just accessory fruits and rasberries are not berries at all. Could people in the future conceive of calling Persephone's fruit the pomegrante berry? I don't know...I just don't know...
Comments