14 surprising facts about fruit that you didn’t know

Scientifically speaking, strawberries aren’t actually considered berries, or even fruit. Berries are defined as having their seeds on the inside, and since strawberries have their seeds on the outside, they are technically ‘false fruit.‘ Bananas, on the other hand, are developed from flowers with a single ovary and have soft skin, fleshy middles, and small seeds within. That means that they meet all the requirements to be considered both a fruit and a berry!

Due to the traces of potassium and related decays found in bananas, they are considered to be slightly radioactive. Your body needs potassium in order to function normally, so bananas do help a bit in that regard. Don’t worry, you will only die from radiation poisoning if you are able to eat 10,000,000 bananas at once—and that’s an astounding feat in itself!

Due to amazing marketing tactics, we tend to assume that oranges have some of the highest levels of vitamin C when it comes to consumable foods, but according to research, they are hardly at the top! Kakadu plums alone are proven to have 100 times more vitamin C than oranges, whereas chilli peppers, guavas, and thyme are just some of the many foods with higher vitamin C levels.

Plenty of vegetables are actually considered fruits in a botanical sense! Cucumbers grow from flowers and contain dozens of seeds inside to birth the next generation of cucumbers. This basic function is enough to classify them as fruits instead of vegetables.

This sounds crazy but it’s true: The average tomato contains more than 31,700 genes, which means that it has at least 7,000 more genes than a human being! This was discovered while scientists were mapping the tomato genome so that they can breed better tomatoes and better understand the versatile family of plants.

Hold your horses, we’re not saying that humans are 50 percent banana—although that would make us pretty delicious. This just means that about half of our genes have counterparts found in bananas as well. To make things simpler, both humans and bananas have some kind of gene that codes for cell growth, but it doesn’t technically mean that we have the same DNA sequences.

Pineapples aren’t really ‘apples’ but berries! Essentially, they are a group of berries that are fused to a central stalk, meaning that they’re not even technically a single fruit. Each pineapple plant only produces one pineapple per year, since it can take 18 to 24 months for a pineapple to grow into its full size. Knowing that, perhaps we should all treasure the pineapple a little bit more next time we have one...

Back in 1880, John ‘Peg Leg’ Webb dropped some cranberries down the stairs and discovered that the little fruits can bounce. Cranberries have tiny air pockets inside them that help them float on water and bounce on hard surfaces. Some believe that the higher the cranberry bounces, the better the quality. Try it out with a few cranberries next time you buy them!

Records have been found of Sumerian tablets from 25,000 B.C. that show figs used in cooking, and the remains of fig trees have been excavated at Neolithic sites from 5,000 B.C. High in fibre, iron, and potassium, its trees can live up to 100 years and now we have proof that humans have always been loyal fans of this blessed fruit!

Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of the vine, and there are more than 20,000 different varieties of tomatoes in the world. They are the most globally produced fruit, due in large part to its versatility in cooking and playing key roles in foods such as ketchup, salads, and many more culinary uses. In fact, the tomato is also a perfect example to understand what the ‘umami’ flavour represents.

Almost all the fruit we see and buy in supermarkets are cloned versions of the original fruit, as their genetics have been preserved for our consumption. Cloning fruit provides us with high-quality produce that is efficient for the market and easy to regulate in terms of quality. We can also introduce selected genes with desirable qualities, such as sweetness or disease-resistance.

The coffee beans we know are actually pits of a fruit known as the coffee cherry—so named because of how similar it looks to an actual cherry. The pits take up most of the space inside the coffee cherry, with the skin of the cherry thick and bitter, and the little pulp between pit and skin being intensely sweet.

Although this may sound like something out of a fairytale, never doubt the human imagination—especially when we have the ability to make our dreams come true. By grafting trees (vegetatively joining two plants into one instead of cross-pollinating), they can actually produce different fruits from the same family. Known aptly as fruit salad trees, they can sprout three to seven different types of fruits, each retaining their own characteristics. The fruits they bear also ripen over different periods so there is a constant production of fruit!

Most fruits can still respond to their environment even after being harvested. Take the banana, for example: A quick Google search will turn up multiple methods to quicken the ripening process of bananas that are still green, or tips to keep them from ripening too fast. Avocadoes ripen or ‘soften’ after they have been harvested as well!