Berry Me

As a berry lover, each week during the season I load up purchasing three to six containers. Although I could easily pack away all that fresh fruit with smoothies, on yogurt, in desserts, and even in savory cooking, I limit myself to one or two containers, opting to freeze and can the rest for treats during the dead of winter. Right now we are coming into a strong blackberry season. So strong in fact that when I picked up my berries before the market opened, the vendor asked me to set them on my stand where my customers could see them.

“I’ve got a lot of them to move today,” they told me.

By noon I had to hide my blackberries because customers kept trying to buy them from me because the fruit vendors had been picked clean. Sometimes I’ll take pity on a regular who didn’t get out of bed early enough, but not this time. Those berries were mine and I wasn’t sharing.

Did you see those blackberries last week? They were the size of my palm! Huge clusters of juicy drupelets oozed sweetness as I popped them into my mouth. As patrons spied my stash they’d exclaim, “They’re so good this year.” And they’re right.

Similarly, I’ve had a house guest this week who has been on the receiving end of a blackberry clafouti for dessert and seared duck breast with a blackberry and mushroom cream sauce for dinner who always insists that the food that I serve tastes so much better than that sourced from grocery stores and restaurants. Shop at the farmers market and you, too, can eat good food like this has been my standard response for years.

But as a farmer, I also understand that not every year is a good year. Sometimes hail destroys entire crops and often within days of the beginning of its harvest season. A warm, rainy year can cause berries to rot on the stem. I’ve got friends with a U-Pick berry farm up in Vermont. Their canes laden with immature fruit were covered in flood waters briefly rendering them inedible due to possible contamination. And no, you can’t jar or cook with them since floodwater contains toxic substances and pathogens that can’t be washed or cooked out.

There were also customers who looked longingly at my flat of blackberries lamenting their lacking budget. “Fruit is getting so darn expensive,” and I thought about the disconnect between consumers and producers that continues despite the daily chronicle of environmental disasters currently taking place. But we keep hitting the snooze button on Mother Nature’s wake-up calls.

While consumers see the fallout of blips in our food supply only as an increase in prices, I cringe to think of what would happen when farmers say they can no longer grow our favorite fruits and vegetables because the weather won’t cooperate.

This week I’ve seen excessive heat warnings and heat emergency alerts. Everyone keeps and active tab for airnow.gov on their devices, checking daily to see if Canadian wildfire smoke is going to put the brakes on outdoor activities. And if all that isn’t enough, scientists are sounding alarm bells for the slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), better known as the Gulf Stream which basically regulates the temperatures and weather for the entire East Coast.

Last week I watched how fast vendors went from being buried in black berries to being completely out of black berries. When it comes to our food supply, everything can change in an instant. Get ‘em while you can.