the berry.

Humans have been eating berries for millennia: archaeological evidence shows that even Palaeolithic cave dwellers were fond of the sugary treats. When peat farmers discovered the perfectly preserved, 2,500-year-old Haraldskaer Woman in a Danish bog in 1835, an autopsy discovered blackberries in her digestive tract. Berry plants are, in general, hardy and prolific, so they occur naturally in almost every corner of the world, making them prime fodder for our foraging forebears. Imagine returning to the cave with an animal hide’s worth of juicy blackberries to share with the tribe. High-fives for days.

So, let’s get the first bit of confusion out of the way: what we think is a berry and what biology says is a berry are two very different things. To a biologist, a berry is any fruit with a three-layer structureexocarp, mesocarp and endocarpthat also contains two or more seeds and grows from a single flower. Thus, blueberries, cranberries and goji berries are true berries, while strawberries, raspberries and blackberries are not. (Their multi-segmented structure disqualifies them.) Other examples of true berries: bananas, tomatoes, grapes, watermelons and pumpkins.

The reason we call all these non-berries berries is because, in Old English, grapes were known as winberige, or ‘wine berries’. When English colonisers made it to the Americas and discovered a cornucopia of blueberries, cranberries and elderberries, they used their closest available analogy to help name them. Weirdly, this was around the same time that people started referring to winberige as grapes, after the graper, the old hook that farmers used to pick them. So, a whole suite of non-berries became berrified and one of the definitive examples of an actual berry became synonymous with a long wooden hook. Language is weird.

Thanks to this distinction, there