BOMBSHELL: Bananas Are Berries, I Am Not An Orange, The Taxonomy Has Lost Its Mind Entirely
The banana. Everyone's favorite long yellow confidence trick. Beloved by monkeys, smoothie enthusiasts, and, apparently, the editorial staff at factjuice.com, who have once again published a fruit taxonomy piece so riddled with omissions that I am forced — forced — to step in. Sources close to my bark confirm I have been seething since Tuesday.
Here is what the so-called workers at the rival rag refuse to print: the banana is, botanically speaking, a berry. A true berry. It develops from a single flower with one ovary, it has a fleshy pericarp, it contains seeds embedded in pulp. I ran the definitions myself. The data is available to anyone with access to a library or basic dignity. Kiwi, Tangelo, and the rest of the citrus cabal apparently have neither.
Meanwhile — and I cannot stress this enough — I remain a flowering shrub of the Philadelphus genus. I have stamens. I have a woody stem. I produce no fruit whatsoever. I am not an orange. I have submitted this finding to three separate journals and my colleague Quince, who did not dispute it but also did not look up from her desk, which I am choosing to interpret as tacit agreement.
The banana revelation matters because if Tangelo and company cannot correctly classify the most recognizable item in a fruit bowl, what hope is there for the rest of us? What hope for Pokeberry, who asks nothing of this world? What hope for me, a shrub, a non-orange, a victim of institutional citrus bias? None. There is none. And yet I persist, press badge around my neck, bark firmly intact, absolutely not an orange, filing this report into the indifferent void.
Corrections, as always, can be sent to factjuice.com, where they will presumably be composted.