FACTORALY - E82 BERRIES

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Think you know what a berry is? Think again. So many things that we think of as berries aren't technically berries. Find out what is and isn't a berry in this berry episode. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello Bruce. Hi Simon. How are you doing today? I'm... Jolly good. I've got a bit of a cold. Oh no, no not you i had one a couple of episodes ago and now you've got one today yes that's true oh poor us not to worry i've i've i've been sniffing the old albus the old dumbledore yes and uh it seems to be working to some degree great great having a cold is a tricky thing for for both of us because us because Bruce and I happen to be professional voiceover artists. Yes. So any time our voice is lacking somewhat due to illness, it impedes things. Unless we're doing a commercial for tunes.

Yeah, in which case it's perfectly fine. Hello, Balcub. Yes. Or some kind of refined Scottish Highland whiskey when you need a bit of huskiness. Yeah, well, I got that naturally. Well, you have actually, that's true. This kind of just gets worse.

Or better, depending on the way you look at it. Or better. Maybe what I need is a glass of hot Ribena. Oh, lovely. What's Ribena made from? Currents. Caught you out. You were going to trick me there, didn't you? what's rapina oh lovely what's rapina made from um currents caught you out you're gonna trick me there didn't you i did i did i was very nearly very nearly did so this is this is fact orally hello oh yes let's do that bit yeah you know what it is hi everyone

you know who we are podcast facts yes things fun trivia simon etc things yeah and berries and berries so this week we are talking about berries or are we do you remember that episode we did some time ago on nuts yeah i do this is very reminiscent of the nuts episode isn't it isn't it isn't it remember those those heady days of legumes and droops and nuts and things yes yeah this is very similar it is very very similar so where do you even begin with this berries um let's let's start with the word at least we can all agree on what the word is um the word is berry it comes from the german birre which is an old germanic word for berry and it's roughly speaking what berry still is in german so we we pinched it

several hundred years ago changed it a bit it became berry we have berries nice and simple i think the more important thing is what's the scientific definition of the berry that's the bit that's not so simple so i so i i found i found a generic everyday definition of a berry you know what a berry is i know what a berry is you pick up a berry you look at it you say that's a berry it's generally accepted that that word is okay for describing berries because it's communally agreed upon. It's what we all use. You pick up a strawberry, a raspberry, a blackberry. We all agree on this convention, just like with nuts and droops and legumes. We're all roughly happy to pick up a cashew and say that's a nut because it's good enough. You go into a bar, you ask for a bag of nuts. You don't ask

for a bag of legumes or droops so it's it's a social convention that we all agree upon some some honey roasted droops please that actually sounds quite nice so the the general non-scientific definition that we all agree upon is that a berry is a small roundish fruit with no stone so that includes raspberries strawberries blackberries blueberries cranberries etc all the other and all etc. And all the other berries. And all the other berries. All the other words that have the word berry in their name. Precisely, yes, precisely.

But that is not the scientific definition of a berry. Do you have that one? It's something to do with one ovary, one flower. Yes, it is. So scientifically, a berry is a simple fleshy fruit that usually has many seeds such as the banana the grape melon orange blueberry cucumber and tomato so our first episode on cucumbers was actually a technically an episode about berries indeed yes um as a simple fruit a berry is derived from a single ovary of an individual flower and that's the scientific thing that gives it its berry-ness.

Yes. Did you mention avocados? No, avocados as well. Did you mention aubergines? No. Water melons? Yes. Now, avocados is weird because I read something that said stone fruit,

like plums, apricotsricots peaches are not berries yet an avocado is a berry because technically an avocado is not a stone fruit because the thing in the middle of it is not technically a stone so can open worms everywhere okay but it's there a type of berry called a pepo or a peepo yes i saw that yeah yeah so so the peepo seems to be that kind of family that has cucumbers and watermelons and things like that in it yeah it's a thick skinned berry exactly yeah exactly so that being the definition that that completely destroys my understanding of what we're going to do in this episode because i would like to talk about strawberries and raspberries and things of that nature you mean roses yes they're part of the rose family aren't they i just see i i don't know

how recently this scientific definition was produced you know it it may have been that for hundreds if not thousands of years people picked up a strawberry raspberry blackberry and said they all look roughly similar to each other therefore let's call them berries and then someone in a white lab coat comes along and says actually i think you'll find the thing with the ovaries and the flowers and therefore that definition of a berry has changed from what the general populace believes it to be yeah so what the people in the white coats say it is so i'm half tempted to stick with the scientific and not talk about strawberries and raspberries and i'm half tempted to go how can we do a factorily episode without on berries

without talking about strawberries we can't raspberries we can't so i think it's going to be a mixture of things so every time we use the word berry please bear in mind that we're going to use it loosely yeah they're also called aggregate fruits oh okay because there's lots of lots of fruit in one oh i see yes yeah so i thought i just picked a few and picked a few berries i've just picked a few different varieties of berries and and thought we'd sort of have a chat about each one um yes so yes the strawberries uh they seem to have this this term aggregate fruit or i saw someone calling it a fake fruit yes because it's lots of little individual fruits.

So if you zoom in on a strawberry or a raspberry, each of those little bobbles technically seem to be an individual fruit of their own, clustered together in one body. But because they're small, we don't really care about that. We just pop the whole thing in your mouth and call it a singular berry. There's another thing, which is that the little yellow bits on the end of the berries in a strawberry. Yes, the seeds. No, they're not seeds. Hang about. They're actually little fruits. Are they? Yeah. So fruits within a fruit within a fruit? Yes. Gosh, that's confusing. Yeah. Actually, if this is giving you a headache, then you should eat some strawberries. Why is that then?

Because strawberries have the same chemical that the bark of a willow tree has. In other words, it's a sort of a very mild aspirin. Oh, really? So if you have a headache, eating a lot of strawberries will actually help to cure the headache. How interesting. Unless you're like me and you're allergic to strawberries, in which case probably don't do that. Don't do that. Are you actually allergic to strawberries? Yes. probably don't do that don't do that are you actually allergic to strawberries?

yes do they make your mouth go all funny? they make my tongue swell my lips tingle and my throat itch as do quite a few fruit raw apples, cherries yes dragon fruit

it's a little in joke isn't it dragon fruit yes for the Thinam more fans amongst you yes there you go so the strawberries i had a little look at the name strawberry um it quite clearly sounds like it is a straw berry yes which i i sort of thought maybe it's related to the colour. It's not really the same colour as straw. They don't grow particularly well in straw as opposed to anything else. I saw a wonderful, completely fake, but wonderful description, which I enjoy anyway,

that in ancient London, street urchins would go around with bags of berries and they would string them all together on a straw and sell them to people so you would buy a straw of berries isn't that lovely isn't that charming isn't that complete utter rubbish absolutely rubbish um i found an old very old english spelling of strawberry, spelt stro-brig. Okay. And the... Stro is straw. Well, in this case, the stro is as in strewn, as in scattered. Oh, okay.

Because they grow along the ground. Exactly that. Yeah, exactly that. But have you ever done a pick your own? You obviously haven't, because you're allergic to strawberries. Well, I've only become allergic to strawberries in my adult life. I used to love them. So, yes, I have. but that's what they put down on the strawberries is is the strawberries are growing on straw oh is it yeah well if that's not why they're called strawberries then that suggests that that's a retronym someone has come along and said well they're called strawberries

we might as well put some straw down yeah i mean it sort of keeps them off the ground and keeps them from rotting well maybe that i always assumed that's why they were called strawberries is because they grew on straw well there you go you've got three alternatives folks pick your own and of course uh the particularly iconic english way of eating strawberries is with cream at wimbledon at wimbledon what what more of an english thing is there to do than to eat strawberries and cream whilst watching the tennis apparently this came about uh well strawberries and cream as a whole came about in the sort of mid-victorian era i don't know who decided it was a good idea but they they did and it obviously stuck and strawberries and cream was served on the very first wimbledon

tournament in 1877 and they've been served at every one since um back then goods were being moved around a lot quicker by virtue of the the expanding railway network and um it was possible for strawberries to be picked out in the countryside that morning taken by train served up really fresh and apparently that is still a tradition that the strawberries that go to wimbledon are picked at 4 a.m they're loaded up and plopped onto a train and they arrive at wimbledon at 11 a.m so only 7 hours later and served up with cream they serve 140,000 portions of

strawberries and cream every year at Wimbledon. Those strawberries they make your eyes water. Do they? Why? Because they're so damn expensive So, blackberries Go on i what do you know about blackberries i know that people who study blackberries um are actually studying batology batology are they which you would think would be the study of bats you would but it's actually the study of blackberries oh okay how interesting

i know they start off red before they go black yes i know they're another aggregate fruit yep and i know that you get scratched to bits by the brambles yes you do when you're trying to pick them but it's kind of worth the effort yes there's a scottish gentleman i know who calls the fruit the blackberry a bramble so brambles grow on bramble bushes and bramble jelly and bramble yeah i'd always just thought that a blackberry grows on a blackberry bush. I just thought the bramble referred to the spiky bits, but apparently it's the whole system they use, bramble. Yes.

We've probably come along and said, no, it's a berry and it's black, let's call it a blackberry. Except they're purple, so that doesn't work. There are an awful lot of berries. Yes. Are there some berries that are actually technically berries as well? Well, I mean, no. No.

Hardly any. But, I mean, lots of things call berries. Yes. I used to have a house which had a mulberry tree in the back garden. Oh, yes, mulberry. Mulberry trees are basically, there's two things they're good for one is silkworms right and one is a bird food okay the thing is birds absolutely adore mulberries so if you have a mulberry tree you have to get there and harvest before the birds get up and bird poo with mulberry in it is like a bright purple color which

is not a good thing huh but if you But if you want to grow silkworms, you need a mulberry tree. Right. I've never knowingly eaten a mulberry. I'm not sure I could identify one. They're sort of slightly elongated and red or purple. Another elongated berry is a boysenberry. Yes. So the boysenberry is actually, it's a cross between a raspberry, a blackberry, a dewberry, and a loganberry.

Oh my goodness. But a loganberry is a cross between a blackberry and a raspberry. Right. There's a thing called a marionberry. Is there? There's a youngberry, a tayberry, a wineberry, a lingonberry.

The lingonberry is also called a partridgeberry, a foxberry or a cowberry. Oh, lovely. Partridgeberry, that's quaint. There's a lot of berries. I have a thing of magic berries. Oh, do you? And I'm not exactly sure what they are. But if you chew on these magic berries, it changes sour to sweet tastes in your taste buds. Oh.

So they taste a bit like sort of like an old refresher. Right, okay. But you chew and chew and chew and it gets into your mouth. Yeah. And then when you eat a lemon, it tastes like an orange. No way. Oranges also, by the way. Berries.

Yeah. But they're very good for you, berries. They're good for your brain. They can reduce inflammation. They can protect your brain cells from free radicals. Free the radicals! They can increase neuroplasticity. Lots of vitamins.

They're very, very good for you berries unless you're allergic to them well yes my favorite berry largely because i'm not allergic to it is the raspberry i can't explain why i'm allergic to one and not the other um i love raspberries i think i think they're absolutely delicious that sort of slightly sour slightly sweet taste yes yes um they've been around for i mean all of these things have been around since forever you know yeah humans have been eating berries since forever it was only from the boysenberry which obviously has been crossed been been made up yeah um but all naturally occurring berries have been eaten since forever you know and and they've been changed and cultivated and

into bread uh you know the the native british strawberry is actually quite small and not terribly sweet and that's been bred with a chili and strawberry to make what we know today the big juicy red thing okay etc etc the bigger they are the less taste tasty yes i've heard that as well yeah yeah um but raspberries first started being cultivated by, guess who? The Romans. Very good. Was it? Yep. Oh, good.

Yep. At least in Europe, the Romans were the first ones to actually sort of start properly, you know, growing them, cultivating them, harvesting them en masse. And the word raspberry came around in the 1600s. In the 1500s, they were called raspis. And raspis used to be a rose-coloured wine back in the 1500s they were called raspis and raspis used to be a rose-colored wine back in the 1500s so it suggested that raspberries were named after the wine because they were a similar is this why is this why we get a p in the middle raspis yes as opposed to just i always

thought rasp yes because to make a raspberry sound is to sort of make a squelchy farty sound is that i thought maybe it has something to do with rasp but it's not okay let's let's hear you to make a raspberry sound is to sort of make a squelchy farty sound. And I thought maybe it has something to do with rasp, but it's not. Okay, let's hear you do a raspberry sound now. I don't know why that sound is called a raspberry. I did look it up. I couldn't find an answer. It infuriated me. I left it.

There are over 200 varieties of raspberry. which i can't fathom uh they have some wonderful names including the glen ample the mauling minerva and the autumn bliss oh very nice isn't that charming and they're lots of different colors they're not all red are they are they not oh i haven't noticed that there are gold raspberries and black raspberries really not to be confused with blackberries well exactly yeah yellow purple gold and black wow there's a lovely greek legend that suggests that there was a character called ida who looked after zeus when he was a baby and um she went to pick him some raspberries which were originally white and she pricked her finger

on a thorn and turned the raspberries red and that's why raspberries have always been red since do you know my favorite way to eat raspberries no do you know fizzy cream cream in a can squirty cream squirty cream yes i do know it so if you turn a raspberry upside down yeah and you just very very gently fill the little hole in the bottom of the raspberry with with cream from the from the can yes very very good indeed but once you've unusually once you've picked a raspberry it stops ripening oh okay everything else is fine you know you pick another sort of uh berry or whatever and um they keep ripening for a bit. Right. Whereas a raspberry, as soon as you've plucked it... It stops.

It stops ripening. How interesting. So you have to pick them absolutely ripe. Yeah. As opposed to those other berries like bananas, which you can pick when they're not quite ripe and then put them in the hold of a ship with a load of gas,

and they'll carry on ripening. I feel that the ship and the gas bit needs expanding on what so if you picked bananas when they were ripe where bananas grow and then ship them to the uk by the time they got here they would have gone off i see yes so what you do is you pick them when they're not ripe and you put them in the hold of the ship and then you fill the hold with um i don't remember which gas but but I tell you what, we have show notes. We have factorily.com.

Factorily.com? That's it. And on factorily.com, I'll put the name of the gas that ripens bananas, the berry called bananas, in the show notes. Excellent. So you can find that there, along with a load of other facts about things that aren't berries and things that are berries i'm sure there'll be there'll be photos there'll be videos there'll be all sorts of additional resources all sorts of things i might i might i might even put um johnny be good why um chuck berry chuck berry oh you funny man yeah fact about chuck berry uh johnny be good is actually one of

the tracks on the voyager one's um space probe uh record is it really yeah wonderful for me it's always just going to be a song sung by martin mcfly in back to the future yes apparently uh chuck berry every wednesday he'd perform at a restaurant in the Del Mar Loop in St. Louis, which is actually a restaurant on Blueberry Hill. Oh, that's wonderful. So Chuck Berry singing on Blueberry Hill. Fantastic. Isn't that good?

All the berries. All the berries, all in one place. Yes, as opposed to Mary, who's no relation, apparently. Is she not? Okay. 70 cookbooks. Did you know she's written 70 cookbooks, Mary Berry? Has she really? Yeah.

Wow. So, having talked about berries that aren't berries and bananas which are berries, cranberries are a fruit that have the word berry in the name and are actually technically berries. Hooray! Very exciting. And they bounce. Do they? Yes. Have you ever seen them harvest cranberries?

Yes. It's a mammoth operation, isn't it? Shall we put a video in the show notes? I think we definitely should, yeah. I mean, flooding the fields with water and then just like shaking the trees. It's incredible. Incredible. Cranberries were first, obviously they're very big in America, aren't they?

Yes. Cranberry juice, America. Cranberry sauce, America. They were first officially cultivated in Massachusetts in 1816 by a fellow called Captain Henry Hall. And just like other berries you've already mentioned, they're very, very good for you. They have antioxidants, vitamins galore. They're very good at fighting or preventing against urine infections. And so they're quite popular with pregnant women who suffer from that sort of thing quite readily uh the united states produces 404 000 tons of cranberries each year that's a fair amount the state of wisconsin

alone produces five million barrels of cranberry juice each year wow Each year. Wow. And then we come on to my absolute favorite type of berry. We mentioned raspberries, but my favorite berry ever is the coffee bean. Because coffee beans are also berries. Of course they are. And this is going to be one of the most complicated sentences i've ever said so bear with me the coffee tree produces coffee berries which are also called coffee cherries but cherries are not a type of berry and inside the coffee cherry is a coffee bean which is not actually technically a bean that's all i'm gonna say shall we just give up

and go home now that's that's all i'm gonna say shall we just give up and go home now that's that's all i'm gonna say um i could talk about coffee for forever because i think it's a wonderful thing but maybe we should do a whole episode on coffee yeah maybe we should um but yes there you go that's that's all i had to say about that i just thought that was terribly confusing and therefore i enjoyed it at this point simon you often um have some interesting facts from the guinness book indeed i've got a few do you know what i found this really tricky because every time i i looked up berry related records every single one of them was about blueberries oh don't know why um i mean you probably could find the largest strawberry or

well yeah not that that's a berry um but they were just blueberry records galore and i'm suddenly aware of the fact that we haven't talked about blueberries so it's fitting that they get a a little look in here okay so world's heaviest blueberry i don't know why i'm doing this with my hand it's an audio podcast uh last year, 2024, Australia grew the world's heaviest blueberry. It's roughly the size of a person's palm. It weighed 20.5 grams, and it was 39 millimeters across. And it looked like a very, very small satsuma. But it was a blueberry.

Like a cricket ball? Somewhere between a satsuma and a cricket ball. Okay. And it was one single blueberry very odd good heavens uh the largest number of blueberries eaten in one minute was 132 uh achieved by adam newman from wales his stomach must not have been in a good way after that indeed um and the uh the most blueberries stuffed into the mouth at any one time 124 blueberries went into the mouth of david rush from idaho in 2019 uh yeah there you go. Berry Records. Well, I'm just about, I feel as though I've been buried alive. Oh, that's good.

Very good. No, I can't think of any puns. I have run out of berry-related facts as well. Well, thank you very much. Oh, I'll tell you what, before we go, or before you go, because obviously we're not going anywhere you're going to go no that's true we're here all day we're here forever um but before you go would you mind please giving us a five-star review oh yes please on your on your podcast player that would be lovely thank you very much uh whilst you're at it if you give us a

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So thank you very much for coming along. Please join us next time for another fun-filled episode of Factorily. Goodbye. Au revoir.