To a botanist, a berry is any fleshy fruit that grows from a single flower with one ovary and has its seeds embedded inside the flesh. Bananas tick every box. Their tiny black specks down the middle are leftover seeds - modern bananas have been bred so much that the seeds are basically harmless.
Strawberries fail the test. The red, juicy part is actually a swollen part of the flower stem, not the fruit itself. The “fruit” of a strawberry is each of those little yellow dots on the outside - each one is technically a separate tiny fruit with one seed inside.
This same rule turns lots of foods into berries: tomatoes, grapes, kiwis, eggplants, watermelons, and even avocados all count. Meanwhile raspberries, blackberries, and mulberries - the things we actually call berries - aren’t berries at all to a scientist. Nature really doesn’t care what we name things.
