Sunshine, Strawberries and a Big Hat

About this drawing

A strawberry picnic is a fine excuse to look closely at your food, because the strawberry is one strange fruit. Botanists will tell you it is not technically a berry at all. Bananas and blueberries are berries, but strawberries are not.

Those little specks on the outside are the giveaway. Each one is a tiny fruit called an achene, with a seed tucked inside. The sweet red part you bite into is the swollen base of the flower. So every strawberry is really a whole crowd of tiny fruits riding on a juicy cushion. A single one can carry around 200 of them.

The big strawberries in today's grocery stores have an American backstory. Small wild strawberries grew in many places, yet the large garden kind appeared in eighteenth-century France, when a plant from Chile crossed with one from North America. Today California grows most of the strawberries sold in the United States.

The plant has a clever trick for spreading out as well. It sends long stems, called runners, across the ground, and a new baby plant sprouts at the tip. Picking your own? Look for fruit that is red all the way to the top, since strawberries stop ripening once they leave the plant. Then rinse them right before eating.

• picnics
• strawberries
• summer
• food