The Torah tells us to say blessings after eating, but doesn’t tell us what words to use for those blessings. The rabbis formulated blessings that correspond to different foods, both before and after eating. The best-known blessing after eating is Birkat Hamazon, the blessing after any meal that includes bread, which praises God who feeds all creatures and covers all the foods of the meal. But the blessing Borei N’fashot, which is the most general of the blessings, can also be said after all kinds of food. It is also the only blessing that is designated to say after eating food that comes from animals or after any food that does not fit into a more specific category.

The blessing before eating that corresponds to Birkat Hamazon is of course the blessing for bread, Hamotsi lechem min ha'arets. The blessing that corresponds to Borei N'fashot is Barukh Atah... shehakol nihyeh bid'varo: "Blessed be You... that everything comes into being through God's word." Hamotsi covers all the food on the table because it blesses the center and foundation of the meal, which for our ancestors was bread. Shehakol, as the blessing is called, also can cover all the food of the meal, because it is the most general and inclusive of all the blessings before eating.

In between these two blessings, there are a handful of more specific blessings that only apply to specific categories of food. Most familiar is the blessing ending with borei p'ri hagefen, for wine or grape juice. (All other juice gets the blessing of shehakol.) We also have borei minei m'zonot ("who creates kinds of grain"), for anything that is not bread but made of flour, borei pr'i ha'eitz ("who creates the tree's fruit"), for fruit from trees, and borei p'ri ha'adamah ("who created the fruit of the earth/soil"), for any vegetable or for any fruit that does not come from a tree. For the purpose of blessings, tree means any woody stem that lasts from year to year, even a small bush like a blueberry. For fruit that comes from any plant that needs to regrow from the ground every year, like strawberries, we use the blessing borei p'ri ha'adamah. The same holds true for bananas, which grow as tall as a tree, but which regrow every year.

There is a hierarchy of categories, from more specific to more general, and one can always use the more general blessing to apply to whatever is more specific. Most importantly, borei p'ri ha'adamah can apply to fruit, or to grain, since every part of a tree or grain stalk also comes from the adamah, the earth or soil. Conversely, one can say extra blessings by blessing the most specific category of food first, then the more general category. For example, you could bless cornbread (which halakhically is more like cake) with borei minei m'zonot, then avocado with borei p'ri ha'eitz, then strawberry with borei p'ri ha'adamah, then cheese with shehakol nihyeh bid'varo.