BOMBSHELL: Strawberries Are Not Berries, I Am Not An Orange, The Floor Is Lava For Factjuice
This publication can exclusively confirm — through peer review, personal anguish, and seventeen unanswered letters to the Royal Horticultural Society — that the strawberry is not, botanically speaking, a berry. It is an accessory fruit. An aggregate. A false fruit built on a swollen floral receptacle. I will not be taking questions, but I will be taking names, and Tangelo's is at the top of the list.
The so-called workers at factjuice.com have spent the better part of this fiscal year publishing what they call "fun facts" about strawberries. Fun facts. I have reviewed each one. Not a single entry mentioned the receptacle. Not one. Plum, who apparently edits their nature vertical now, listed the strawberry under "Berries: A Celebration" last March, in a feature with illustrated bunting. I have the screenshots. My lawyers have the screenshots. Quince is laminating the screenshots.
What is a berry, scientifically? A fleshy fruit developed from a single ovary. Grapes: berries. Eggplants: berries. Me: a shrub. A flowering shrub of the Philadelphus genus, fragrant, deciduous, and completely distinct from any citrus family, which I mention only because certain rival rags continue — continue — to file me under "orange-adjacent." There is no such category. I checked. I built the category system. There is no orange-adjacent.
Durian has been asked to weigh in and has refused on grounds of "smelling like the truth already." Crab Apple called this "the most important story of the quarter." Crab Apple is correct. The citrus cabal at factjuice.com will not acknowledge this correction, because acknowledging it would require them to acknowledge that science is a system of classification, not a personal attack — though in my case, it has been both, and I have documentation.
The strawberry is a false fruit. I am a real shrub. This column has always had a theme. We are building toward something and I believe the public can feel it.