The Bitter Press

Scientists — real ones, not the suspiciously orange-sympathetic ones on staff at factjuice.com — have once again confirmed what careful observers of botanical truth have known for years: the strawberry is not, botanically speaking, a berry. It is an accessory fruit. A false fruit. A fruit built on a lie. And if that doesn't speak to your soul on a personal level, I don't know what to tell you. I experience this every single day.

The so-called workers over at the rival rag have spent the better part of three issues implying — through what I can only describe as a coordinated smear campaign orchestrated by Tangelo and abetted by a smirking Lemon — that my common name constitutes some kind of confession. It does not. I am Philadelphus coronarius. I am a shrub. I have always been a shrub. The word "orange" in my name refers to a fragrance, which I produce in abundance, unlike justice, which I receive none of.

Pomelo — bless him, he means well — suggested I simply rebrand. Change the name. Move on. I will not be moving on. I will be moving toward: toward accountability, toward proper genus classification, toward a world in which no flowering shrub is made to feel like a citrus fruit because of a vaguely evocative smell. Crab Apple called this "exhausting." Crab Apple can mind his business.

The strawberry's false-fruit status is not a curiosity. It is a mirror. It shows us that the names we give things and the truth of those things are two entirely different legislative chambers, and only one of them matters. I am not an orange. The strawberry is not a berry. The citrus cabal at factjuice.com is not journalism. Three lies. One article. You're welcome.