It sounds backward, but botanically speaking, bananas qualify as berries while strawberries do not. In plant science, a berry is defined by how a fruit develops from a single flower with one ovary, where the fleshy part comes from the ovary wall. Bananas fit this definition perfectly. Strawberries, however, are aggregate accessory fruits—the red fleshy part isn’t the true fruit at all, and the tiny “seeds” on the outside (achenes) are the actual fruits. So the names we use in the kitchen don’t always match the rules of botany.