
The Origins of the Domestic Blueberry - Vigier
http://daily.jstor.org/delicious-origins-of-domesticated-blueberry
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tomkinstinch
> White posted an advertisement “offering $50 apiece for wild blueberry bushes
> bearing berries as large as a cent.”

Ah. Let that be known as the advertisement that ruined blueberries. Why do we
always optimize for size over flavor?

Commercially cultivated blueberries are flavorless compared to some of their
wild counterparts. My family owns a 50-acre pick-it-yourself blueberry farm,
Blueberry Park, at the top of a wooded mountain in the Hudson River Valley of
upstate NY.

Prior to 100 years ago our farm was worked as a vegetable farm, but 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, and you can pick the berries
standing up with a two-quart bucket hanging from your neck. The flavor of the
berries is very potent compared to store berries, and they are smaller--about
half the diameter of commercial berries (compare the crown size of these[1] to
store-bought berries). They're truly incomparable in flavor to mass-market
berries. Much more potent, and slightly more tart (though the tartness and
sweetness vary from bush to bush). One wild berry has the flavor of a mouthful
of commercial berries.

Just as flavor was lost with cultivation, so too were nutrients. As an
indicator, wild berries are so rich in anthocyanins that picking a quart of
them will (temporarily) stain your finger tips a deep blue. Wild berries are
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).

Due to our career diaspora, we don't have our farm open to public any more,
but the family still goes up to pick each summer. Property taxes are so high
it's hard to hold on to the farm, but we can't bear to sell it since we all
have such fond memories of the place. My childhood black lab would run around
with us plucking berries with her 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.

I'd love to sequence the genomes of some of our bushes so their
characteristics could be preserved. Barring that, I'd love to propagate them
to other places. My fear is that if we ever do sell the farm, a developer will
bulldoze the bushes and a place that was once magical (to me) will be lost.

Happy to answer any blueberry questions folks may have!

Edit: I'd also love to chat if anyone is interested in helping crowdfund an
effort to create a reference genome sequence for highbush blueberries. The
genome is estimated to be about 600Mb in size, so an $8k HiSeq 2500 run (w/
prep) would give ~180x coverage.

1\. wild, highbush (ours):
[http://i.imgur.com/3SgdoFn.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/3SgdoFn.jpg)

~~~
Bromskloss
Your description could have been talking about the ones that grow here in
Sweden. Then again, there are apparently American and European blueberries.
Does that mean that we are not really experiencing the same kind of berries,
you and I?

~~~
snaily
We are not! The "8-12 feet tall" tells part of the difference. Bilberries, or
"European blueberries", is pretty much ground cover at 2 feet or so (and
supposedly covers about 20% of the entirety of Sweden).

~~~
mrweasel
And annoyingly when buying "blueberries" in Denmark, what you expect and what
you get a two different berries. We expect to get blueberries like the ones
that grow in Sweden, instead we get "American blueberries".

There was a trend a few years ago, where the wonders of blueberries and their
antioxidant content. I made people run out to buy blueberries in mass. They
just bought the run one, because the claim was only sort of valid for European
blueberries and everything in the stores was American blueberries.

I believe that technically they are suppose to mark them as "American
blueberries, but no one seems to do that.

~~~
Bromskloss
Indeed. What goes as "American blueberries" around here are less expensive
than the ordinary ones, I think, and and nice and big to look at, but
unfortunately don't taste much.

