Huckleberries. I never see them as a commonly available thing in stores, eaten alongside things like bananas, which sucks, because bananas are some plant grown like a thousand miles away and I can go outside and go gather my own huckleberries if I wanted. It should be really easy, I live in an area where they grow.
So, that, but also just more broadly I kind of think that after learning enough about different regional botany, we’ve both crippled basically every ecosystem with a bunch of invasive species, we’ve crushed the human experience into a very narrow square set of experiences which includes the biodiversity that you can see around wherever you are, and we’ve made food worse. Because we’re not using local plants for our food, you see, we’re just using a bunch of generic ingredients that are sort of unnaturally made out to be universal across entire hemispheres, maybe even across the globe. No regional variation outside of specialty goods, only Mcdonald’s.
The thread’s gonna be against this opinion broadly, I think, but there’s not like, it’s not just the huckleberry, you understand, there’s a lot more out there that you don’t know about, both edible and not.
People pick it in the wild, but it hasn’t been successfully domesticated. Much of the plant lives underground, and it depends on very specific conditions that are hard to reproduce on farms. You can buy some wild-foraged berries, but they’re a pain to get, so available for limited periods of time and relatively-expensive.
I don’t believe that those grow in Europe, and in fact, looking online, the name “huckleberry” only showed up in the Americas, after European colonists misidentified an American berry as the European-native “hurtleberry”. You might be thinking of a different type of berry; googling, I don’t see people talking about huckleberries in the Nordics.
We also have a plant called “huckleberry” around the Bay Area in California, Vaccinium ovatum, which is easier to find in the wild, grows larger and more (albeit smaller) but a lot less impressive, in my experience.
[1]Cited as “U.S. 1670” in Onions, CT (1933). Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 1 (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p.
No-one misidentified anything, per se. Taxonomy in the 1600’s just wasn’t anywhere near what it is today, and you’d be well in your rights calling the berry with the same name, just like I’m sure you call apples apples instead of going by the variety of subspecies. (And “apple” used to even mean even wider set of fruits. That’s where the word for “orange” here in the Nordics comes from, “Appelsin” = “Chinese Apple”)
Huckleberries. I never see them as a commonly available thing in stores, eaten alongside things like bananas, which sucks, because bananas are some plant grown like a thousand miles away and I can go outside and go gather my own huckleberries if I wanted. It should be really easy, I live in an area where they grow.
So, that, but also just more broadly I kind of think that after learning enough about different regional botany, we’ve both crippled basically every ecosystem with a bunch of invasive species, we’ve crushed the human experience into a very narrow square set of experiences which includes the biodiversity that you can see around wherever you are, and we’ve made food worse. Because we’re not using local plants for our food, you see, we’re just using a bunch of generic ingredients that are sort of unnaturally made out to be universal across entire hemispheres, maybe even across the globe. No regional variation outside of specialty goods, only Mcdonald’s.
The thread’s gonna be against this opinion broadly, I think, but there’s not like, it’s not just the huckleberry, you understand, there’s a lot more out there that you don’t know about, both edible and not.
Visit the Nordics in June-July.
Markets full of them.
Hell, you don’t need to buy any, just walk into any forest and start picking.
First, note that there are a number of plants called the “huckleberry”.
My guess is that @[email protected] has good odds of talking about Vaccinium membranaceum. I’ve had that in Idaho, and consider it to be pretty good.
People pick it in the wild, but it hasn’t been successfully domesticated. Much of the plant lives underground, and it depends on very specific conditions that are hard to reproduce on farms. You can buy some wild-foraged berries, but they’re a pain to get, so available for limited periods of time and relatively-expensive.
I don’t believe that those grow in Europe, and in fact, looking online, the name “huckleberry” only showed up in the Americas, after European colonists misidentified an American berry as the European-native “hurtleberry”. You might be thinking of a different type of berry; googling, I don’t see people talking about huckleberries in the Nordics.
We also have a plant called “huckleberry” around the Bay Area in California, Vaccinium ovatum, which is easier to find in the wild, grows larger and more (albeit smaller) but a lot less impressive, in my experience.
It’s a variety of bilberry.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccinium_myrtillus
The name huckleberry comes from “hurtleberry” -> “whortleberry”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huckleberry#Nomenclature
[1]Cited as “U.S. 1670” in Onions, CT (1933). Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 1 (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p.
No-one misidentified anything, per se. Taxonomy in the 1600’s just wasn’t anywhere near what it is today, and you’d be well in your rights calling the berry with the same name, just like I’m sure you call apples apples instead of going by the variety of subspecies. (And “apple” used to even mean even wider set of fruits. That’s where the word for “orange” here in the Nordics comes from, “Appelsin” = “Chinese Apple”)