Everything You Thought You Knew About Bananas Is Wrong

If you’ve ever eaten a banana, you’ve actually been eating berries. Botanically speaking.

The banana plant produces only one flower cluster in its entire lifetime. That cluster eventually becomes the bunch of bananas you buy at the store. After fruiting, that stalk dies. New stalks grow from the underground rhizome, and the cycle repeats.¹

Here’s where it gets strange. Even though the bananas we eat are sterile and seedless, they’re technically supposed to have seeds. Wild bananas are full of hard, round seeds the size of BB pellets with barely any edible flesh. The banana you eat is a genetic freak—a mutant that produces fruit without fertilized seeds.²

So botanically, they’re considered a berry. The definition of a berry is simple: a fleshy fruit produced from a single ovary. Grapes, tomatoes, avocados, and yes, bananas all fit this category.³ That means strawberries and raspberries are the impostors—they’re aggregate fruits, not berries at all.

And those bananas don’t grow on trees.