Bananas are botanically classified as berries, but strawberries are not.

In botany, a berry is a fleshy fruit produced from a single flower with one ovary, where the entire wall of the ovary ripens into edible tissue. Bananas fit that definition perfectly: they develop from a single ovary and have skin, pulp, and small embedded seeds, which technically makes them true berries alongside tomatoes, grapes, and avocados.

Strawberries fail the test. What we eat as a strawberry is a swollen piece of the flower’s receptacle, with the actual fruits being the tiny yellow “seeds” dotting its surface, each one a separate dry fruit called an achene. That makes the strawberry an aggregate accessory fruit, not a true berry at all, despite carrying the name. The mismatch between culinary and botanical fruit categories trips up cooks and scientists alike, since the two systems were built for entirely different purposes.