Fruits- we wouldn't be healthy without them

Can you imagine a world without fruits—without apples and oranges and blueberries? There wouldn’t be any strawberry shortcake, cherry pie, or raspberry sherbet either. And we wouldn’t be very healthy. We get a lot of important vitamins from fruits. 

            What is fruit?

We think of fruit primarily as something to eat. But fruit has a purpose quite apart from our needs. Fruit is part of a flowering plant.

It’s the part that carries the seeds. The purpose of fruit is to protect a plant’s seeds and help them get spread about. Wind and water spread seeds. So do animals when they eat fruit and drop the seeds. The seeds grow into new plants.

There are two main types of fruit: fleshy and dry. Fleshy fruits are soft and juicy, the way we usually think of fruits. Peaches, plums, and apples are all fleshy fruits.

Dry fruits are thin and hard. Grains like wheat and rice, or nuts like chestnuts or almonds, are dry fruits.

            Some surprises

A tomato is a vegetable, right? No, it’s actually a fruit. Other food we think of as vegetables—such as squash, peppers, and eggplant—also are fruit. They’re fruit because they carry seeds and develop from flowers.

Here’s another surprise. Scientists classify the tomato as a berry. In addition, they don’t consider some fruits we call berries to be true berries. The raspberry is what’s called an aggregate fruit. That means it’s made of lots of tiny fruits that grow in a tight bundle. The red part of a strawberry holds the actual fruit—the tiny dark seeds on the outside of the strawberry. The red part is just the tip of the strawberry stem that’s enlarged. Funny, isn’t.