4 ms·

California's blueberry boom (2009)

28 points by stevewilhelm 11y ago

comrade1 11y ago
Those things they sell as blueberries in the stores really aren't blueberries. They appear to be some giant flavorless mutant. I don't know if it's because they give them too much water or if the flavor has been bread out of them, but they're a pale comparison to wild blueberries. My parents would drive my brother and I, just little children, to the middle of nowhere in WI and push us out of the car with a few buckets and then return around sunset to pick us up. We were supposed to have the buckets full of berries by then. My brother, 3 years younger than me, would spend most of the day eating his berries and so it would be up to me to fill his buckets too. This was in the Midwest but I've met a couple of Finns that had the same experience growing up. And then we had to eat blueberry pie, blueberries with ice cream, blueberry crumble, blueberries with cream, blueberries, blueberries, blueberries until the Winter. Also, one time we saw a bear lying in the middle of the berry bushes scraping its arms along the bushes pulling all of the berries to its mouth. It was much more interested in the berries than a couple of defenseless corn-fed children.
- legulere 11y ago
  Note that blueberries don't exist wildly in Europe, only bilberries which are often confused. Most people don't even know that there is a difference. This is similar to how cranberries and lingonberries are confused.
  - hansjorg 11y ago
    What you call billberries is called e.g. blåbær (literally blueberries) in Norwegian, Danish and Swedish. It's also called blaeberry in English.
- tomkinstinch 11y ago
  > Those things they sell as blueberries in the stores really aren't blueberries. The is absolutely true. My family owns a pick-it-yourself blueberry farm at the top of a mountain in the Hudson River Valley of NY. Prior to 100 years ago it was worked as a vegetable farm, but then the fields were left fallow and wild blueberry bushes popped up. My family has owned it for about 70 years, and most of the bushes are a bit older than that. These are high-bush blueberries, 8-12 feet tall. You can pick the berries standing up with a bucket hanging from your neck. The flavor of the berries is very potent compared to store berries, and they are much smaller. They're incomparable with mass market berries. They're also more delicate, and have a shelf life of only a few days in the fridge once picked (though they can be spread on cookie sheets and frozen for greater longevity). My childhood black lab would run around with us plucking berries with its mouth as the family picked into buckets. One of my favorite memories of summer in the Northeast. From the berries we would make pies, jams, cakes, muffins, and our personal favorite: "blueberry pizza," made from unsweetened pizza dough onto which blueberries were spread with a bit of butter and a light dusting of cinnamon and sugar. Happy to answer any blueberry questions folks may have.
  - comrade1 11y ago
    If you suspend them in water in the fridge they last longer, but eventually they must be froze how you describe.
  - joshu 11y ago
    Would a blackberry bush live in my yard with just rainfall? Or is it to dry in the bay area?
    - dang 11y ago
      The north side of Bernal Hill above the Mission in SF has a sprawling blackberry patch. It thrives there. It's quite wonderful.
    - amichelony 11y ago
      I've grown several blackberry varieties in the bay area and currently have a thornless loganberry, which I highly recommend. Blackberry is one of the easiest plants to grow and it won't be easy to eradicate it once it's settled. However, I wouldn't depend on rainfall if I wanted a lot of berries.
    - tomkinstinch 11y ago
      Blackberries are hardy, and will grow well in many climates that get rain. You may be able to grow them in the Bay Area, with limited productivity. Of course you'd have better luck with some irrigation, or at the edge of your yard if you use sprinklers. They can spread broadly though, so much so that in certain areas they can be invasive (Portland, OR, for example). Planting blackberries is not something to enter into lightly since they're a pain to remove (quite literally; there are thorns). Blueberries on the other hand are more difficult: they require bright (but not necessarily direct) light, ample rainfall, acidic soil (pH 4-5), and limited competition. We frequently have to cut away grape vines that grow on bushes and block sunlight. Birds, bears, and other woodland creatures also love blueberries so you have to beat them to the bushes.
- andyjdavis 11y ago
  >They appear to be some giant flavorless mutant. This could be said about a great deal of the fruit and veg available in supermarkets. Giant, shiny, brightly colored and with very little taste. They are bred to look good as that is what sells. They are also bred to grow as big as possible as fast as possible. Apparently when you optimize for cosmetic appearance, size and speed of growth you lose taste (and possibly also nutritional content). Not really surprising. What gets measured gets managed and all that. And it is easy (and financially rewarding) to measure average size, the volume of produce coming out of a given area of land in a given time period and the percentage of produce left unsold and ultimately discarded due to poor cosmetic appearance.
- ensignavenger 11y ago
  I spent many summers growing up working at a blueberry farm. They had two fields, one with the big blueberries that I picked and they sold to the stores, and one with a variety that was smaller, and has a much better taste! When someone would come in to pick berries for themselves (they did U-Pick as well as selling to the stores) they would always recommend picking from the second field with the smaller berries, because they had better taste. Now, the first field (bigger berries) ripened sooner, so once it was done for the season we would still go down to the second field and pick them for the stores, and they tasted much better :) So yeah, the smaller breeds of blue berries tend to taste better, but they don't sell as well. Now that I am starting to plant my own blueberries, I am looking for the good ones :)
- lkrubner 11y ago
  This is a major complaint that foreigners have with American food. I think it has something to do with the subsidization of water. You can really notice it when you visit places like Ireland or Poland. The vegetables tend to be smaller but the flavor is more intense. In the USA the vegetables are huge, but the flavor is mild. I'm not sure what would explain it, other than the subsidization of water.
  - QuercusMax 11y ago
    They've been bred for yield and shelf / transportation stability without regard for flavor. Water might be part of it, but it's more a means to an end rather than a cause in itself.
  - jqm 11y ago
    Artificial fertilizers are another cause IMOP. The plants are pushed to produce without taking up the same nutrient profile of slower growth. In my experience making your own compost (the stuff sold as compost in big box stores isn't usually real compost) and using that as your primary fertilizer provides much better flavor. Compost making is an art in and of itself and I enjoy it as much or more than gardening. A properly built compost pile is quite fascinating as it heats up and breaks down organic matter at amazing rates.
- jpatokal 11y ago
  Nit: Finns grow up on bilberries (mustikka, https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Bilberry https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Bilberry), not blueberries (pensasmustikka). And blueberries, giant American hybrids or otherwise, are indeed quite tasteless in comparison.
corysama 11y ago
Am I missing some context here? Why is this getting voted up on Hacker News?
- stevewilhelm 11y ago
  OP here, noticed that we now have California grown, relatively inexpensive blueberries that I don't recall seeing when I was a kid. Turns out it's another example of how markets can be disrupted by hacking. In this case, the 'hack' was breeding blueberry plants that can grow in California. Farmers find gaps in the growing periods to deliver their more expensive product when growers in other states can't deliver.
  - rasz_pl 11y ago
    and by hack you mean exploiting subsidised water?
    - Aloha 11y ago
      All of California is exploiting cheap water - normally this isn't a problem, there's more than enough to go around - now, not so much. (it's not subsidized, the costs to bring it to the users are pretty evenly passed along to the users of the water) Los Angeles relies on water brought from the Owens valley, the California water project, and the Colorado river, San Francisco from water brought from Hetch Hetchy, and so on, really, the entire west, and the settlement of the American West is frequently a story of water. Most large cities across the world import water, NYC, Rome, London, etc - agriculture is no exception to this trend.
      - reality_czech 11y ago
        Not all of California is exploiting cheap water. Some of us (the ones who live in cities) are paying a high price for it and using it sparingly. City water use is less than 20% of the total California water use. The almond crop alone uses more water than all the city residents in the state. It's hard to make a blanket statement about how much California farmers pay for water since it varies a lot. Some pay literally nothing, due to antiquated water rights laws. Others pay per acre-foot, but usually less than a tenth of what city residents pay. Still others can't get water at any price, because giving water at artificially cheap prices to the first two groups has left nothing to spare. And most agricultural water supplies aren't metered or monitored except at the very roughest level. However, due to widespread public ignorance and the agricultural lobby, the conversation about growing rice in the middle of a desert (by flooding the fields) will never be had. Instead we get bans on restaurants serving people glasses of water unless they request it, and similar stupidity.
russell 11y ago
I grew up in eastern Maine half a century ago. We had a rural property and grew several acres of low bush blueberries only a few inches tall but quite lush. The land was acidic and rocky, essentially worthless for anything else. Cultivation was as close to natural as you could get. If you wanted blueberries, you burned the land in the early spring. Burning was a neighborhood thing. Someone would light the fire line and the rest of us would carry around 5 gallon Indian pups (brand name I think). Do that for a few years and you had a field of blueberries. Actively cultivated blueberry fields were burned every other year. I never looked into the reasoning; it was tradition, but I suspect it was a combination of clearing out dead matter and maintaining the acidity. In August we would rake the blueberries and take them to the local cannery. A blueberry rake is a rectangular scoop about 9 inches wide with wire tines. The LA Times is dead wrong about the flavor comparison. Maybe all high bush varieties are mild and flavorless, but Maine wild blueberries are really rich and flavorful. Mmmm blueberry pie. A Maine summer was strawberry pie in June, wild raspberry and blackberry pie in July, and blueberry pie in August. And lobster and clams so that it wasnt all pie, pie, pie.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  I grew up in Iowa, and it was fresh garden vegetables all summer, squash in the fall, our own meat all year, milk from the cow with butter and cream as a bonus. And we didn't value it, nosir not at all. A summer tomato was about as worthless as you can get - we'd play tomato war as kids. Nowadays I try to get some of that back by planting my own garden.

28 points by stevewilhelm 11y ago

Those things they sell as blueberries in the stores really aren't blueberries. They appear to be some giant flavorless mutant. I don't know if it's because they give them too much water or if the flavor has been bread out of them, but they're a pale comparison to wild blueberries. My parents would drive my brother and I, just little children, to the middle of nowhere in WI and push us out of the car with a few buckets and then return around sunset to pick us up. We were supposed to have the buckets full of berries by then. My brother, 3 years younger than me, would spend most of the day eating his berries and so it would be up to me to fill his buckets too. This was in the Midwest but I've met a couple of Finns that had the same experience growing up. And then we had to eat blueberry pie, blueberries with ice cream, blueberry crumble, blueberries with cream, blueberries, blueberries, blueberries until the Winter. Also, one time we saw a bear lying in the middle of the berry bushes scraping its arms along the bushes pulling all of the berries to its mouth. It was much more interested in the berries than a couple of defenseless corn-fed children.

legulere 11y ago
Note that blueberries don't exist wildly in Europe, only bilberries which are often confused. Most people don't even know that there is a difference. This is similar to how cranberries and lingonberries are confused.
- hansjorg 11y ago
  What you call billberries is called e.g. blåbær (literally blueberries) in Norwegian, Danish and Swedish. It's also called blaeberry in English.
tomkinstinch 11y ago
> Those things they sell as blueberries in the stores really aren't blueberries. The is absolutely true. My family owns a pick-it-yourself blueberry farm at the top of a mountain in the Hudson River Valley of NY. Prior to 100 years ago it was worked as a vegetable farm, but then the fields were left fallow and wild blueberry bushes popped up. My family has owned it for about 70 years, and most of the bushes are a bit older than that. These are high-bush blueberries, 8-12 feet tall. You can pick the berries standing up with a bucket hanging from your neck. The flavor of the berries is very potent compared to store berries, and they are much smaller. They're incomparable with mass market berries. They're also more delicate, and have a shelf life of only a few days in the fridge once picked (though they can be spread on cookie sheets and frozen for greater longevity). My childhood black lab would run around with us plucking berries with its mouth as the family picked into buckets. One of my favorite memories of summer in the Northeast. From the berries we would make pies, jams, cakes, muffins, and our personal favorite: "blueberry pizza," made from unsweetened pizza dough onto which blueberries were spread with a bit of butter and a light dusting of cinnamon and sugar. Happy to answer any blueberry questions folks may have.
- comrade1 11y ago
  If you suspend them in water in the fridge they last longer, but eventually they must be froze how you describe.
- joshu 11y ago
  Would a blackberry bush live in my yard with just rainfall? Or is it to dry in the bay area?
  - dang 11y ago
    The north side of Bernal Hill above the Mission in SF has a sprawling blackberry patch. It thrives there. It's quite wonderful.
  - amichelony 11y ago
    I've grown several blackberry varieties in the bay area and currently have a thornless loganberry, which I highly recommend. Blackberry is one of the easiest plants to grow and it won't be easy to eradicate it once it's settled. However, I wouldn't depend on rainfall if I wanted a lot of berries.
  - tomkinstinch 11y ago
    Blackberries are hardy, and will grow well in many climates that get rain. You may be able to grow them in the Bay Area, with limited productivity. Of course you'd have better luck with some irrigation, or at the edge of your yard if you use sprinklers. They can spread broadly though, so much so that in certain areas they can be invasive (Portland, OR, for example). Planting blackberries is not something to enter into lightly since they're a pain to remove (quite literally; there are thorns). Blueberries on the other hand are more difficult: they require bright (but not necessarily direct) light, ample rainfall, acidic soil (pH 4-5), and limited competition. We frequently have to cut away grape vines that grow on bushes and block sunlight. Birds, bears, and other woodland creatures also love blueberries so you have to beat them to the bushes.
andyjdavis 11y ago
>They appear to be some giant flavorless mutant. This could be said about a great deal of the fruit and veg available in supermarkets. Giant, shiny, brightly colored and with very little taste. They are bred to look good as that is what sells. They are also bred to grow as big as possible as fast as possible. Apparently when you optimize for cosmetic appearance, size and speed of growth you lose taste (and possibly also nutritional content). Not really surprising. What gets measured gets managed and all that. And it is easy (and financially rewarding) to measure average size, the volume of produce coming out of a given area of land in a given time period and the percentage of produce left unsold and ultimately discarded due to poor cosmetic appearance.
ensignavenger 11y ago
I spent many summers growing up working at a blueberry farm. They had two fields, one with the big blueberries that I picked and they sold to the stores, and one with a variety that was smaller, and has a much better taste! When someone would come in to pick berries for themselves (they did U-Pick as well as selling to the stores) they would always recommend picking from the second field with the smaller berries, because they had better taste. Now, the first field (bigger berries) ripened sooner, so once it was done for the season we would still go down to the second field and pick them for the stores, and they tasted much better :) So yeah, the smaller breeds of blue berries tend to taste better, but they don't sell as well. Now that I am starting to plant my own blueberries, I am looking for the good ones :)
lkrubner 11y ago
This is a major complaint that foreigners have with American food. I think it has something to do with the subsidization of water. You can really notice it when you visit places like Ireland or Poland. The vegetables tend to be smaller but the flavor is more intense. In the USA the vegetables are huge, but the flavor is mild. I'm not sure what would explain it, other than the subsidization of water.
- QuercusMax 11y ago
  They've been bred for yield and shelf / transportation stability without regard for flavor. Water might be part of it, but it's more a means to an end rather than a cause in itself.
- jqm 11y ago
  Artificial fertilizers are another cause IMOP. The plants are pushed to produce without taking up the same nutrient profile of slower growth. In my experience making your own compost (the stuff sold as compost in big box stores isn't usually real compost) and using that as your primary fertilizer provides much better flavor. Compost making is an art in and of itself and I enjoy it as much or more than gardening. A properly built compost pile is quite fascinating as it heats up and breaks down organic matter at amazing rates.
jpatokal 11y ago
Nit: Finns grow up on bilberries (mustikka, https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Bilberry https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Bilberry), not blueberries (pensasmustikka). And blueberries, giant American hybrids or otherwise, are indeed quite tasteless in comparison.

corysama 11y ago

Am I missing some context here? Why is this getting voted up on Hacker News?

stevewilhelm 11y ago
OP here, noticed that we now have California grown, relatively inexpensive blueberries that I don't recall seeing when I was a kid. Turns out it's another example of how markets can be disrupted by hacking. In this case, the 'hack' was breeding blueberry plants that can grow in California. Farmers find gaps in the growing periods to deliver their more expensive product when growers in other states can't deliver.
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  and by hack you mean exploiting subsidised water?
  - Aloha 11y ago
    All of California is exploiting cheap water - normally this isn't a problem, there's more than enough to go around - now, not so much. (it's not subsidized, the costs to bring it to the users are pretty evenly passed along to the users of the water) Los Angeles relies on water brought from the Owens valley, the California water project, and the Colorado river, San Francisco from water brought from Hetch Hetchy, and so on, really, the entire west, and the settlement of the American West is frequently a story of water. Most large cities across the world import water, NYC, Rome, London, etc - agriculture is no exception to this trend.
    - reality_czech 11y ago
      Not all of California is exploiting cheap water. Some of us (the ones who live in cities) are paying a high price for it and using it sparingly. City water use is less than 20% of the total California water use. The almond crop alone uses more water than all the city residents in the state. It's hard to make a blanket statement about how much California farmers pay for water since it varies a lot. Some pay literally nothing, due to antiquated water rights laws. Others pay per acre-foot, but usually less than a tenth of what city residents pay. Still others can't get water at any price, because giving water at artificially cheap prices to the first two groups has left nothing to spare. And most agricultural water supplies aren't metered or monitored except at the very roughest level. However, due to widespread public ignorance and the agricultural lobby, the conversation about growing rice in the middle of a desert (by flooding the fields) will never be had. Instead we get bans on restaurants serving people glasses of water unless they request it, and similar stupidity.

russell 11y ago

I grew up in eastern Maine half a century ago. We had a rural property and grew several acres of low bush blueberries only a few inches tall but quite lush. The land was acidic and rocky, essentially worthless for anything else. Cultivation was as close to natural as you could get. If you wanted blueberries, you burned the land in the early spring. Burning was a neighborhood thing. Someone would light the fire line and the rest of us would carry around 5 gallon Indian pups (brand name I think). Do that for a few years and you had a field of blueberries. Actively cultivated blueberry fields were burned every other year. I never looked into the reasoning; it was tradition, but I suspect it was a combination of clearing out dead matter and maintaining the acidity. In August we would rake the blueberries and take them to the local cannery. A blueberry rake is a rectangular scoop about 9 inches wide with wire tines. The LA Times is dead wrong about the flavor comparison. Maybe all high bush varieties are mild and flavorless, but Maine wild blueberries are really rich and flavorful. Mmmm blueberry pie. A Maine summer was strawberry pie in June, wild raspberry and blackberry pie in July, and blueberry pie in August. And lobster and clams so that it wasnt all pie, pie, pie.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
I grew up in Iowa, and it was fresh garden vegetables all summer, squash in the fall, our own meat all year, milk from the cow with butter and cream as a bonus. And we didn't value it, nosir not at all. A summer tomato was about as worthless as you can get - we'd play tomato war as kids. Nowadays I try to get some of that back by planting my own garden.