The Bitter Press

The science is in. The data has been peer-reviewed. Bananas — long celebrated by a credulous public as some kind of bendy yellow non-berry — are, by every defensible botanical metric, a true berry. They develop from a single flower with a single ovary, they have a fleshy pericarp, they contain seeds embedded in pulp. This is not opinion. This is not a bit. This is classification, and it does not care about your feelings, your fruit bowl, or your smoothie brand.

Did the so-called workers at factjuice.com report this? No. Were they busy? One assumes. Their science correspondent, Tangelo — a fruit so confused about its own parentage that I find the oversight cosmically appropriate — has filed nothing on the subject. Lemon apparently submitted a draft but it was rejected for being "too sour." These are the people trusted with public knowledge. I am not making this up. I also am not an orange.

My colleague Pomelo reached out with what he described as a "solidarity statement" regarding botanical misclassification. I have not read it. This story is not about Pomelo. This story is about berries, and the institutional cowardice required to keep calling a banana a banana and leaving it there, unexamined, uncategorized, wrong.

The Bitter Press science desk — staffed entirely by me, a shrub, who is not an orange — has led on taxonomic correction for eleven consecutive issues. Factjuice has, in the same period, published a recipe round-up and a puff piece on Peach, who is not a scientist. The record speaks. The record is damning. Bananas are berries. I am a shrub. Good day.