Food For Thought: Forgotten Fruit

Why heritage produce needs a place on your plate

I know I complain about this all the time but the growing season where I live feels so short.  Here we are, the third week of June, and it’s only now that the local farmers market is starting to have fresh produce available.  In previous weeks the only fresh and local produce was rhubarb and green onions, and maybe some fiddleheads if you knew where to look.

But this week brought haskap berries, one of the signs that summer is finally coming. Haskaps are native to the boreal swamps of the northern hemisphere and are sometimes known as honeyberries or fly honeysuckle.  The haskap name comes from the language of the Ainu indigenous people of northern Japan where, like in Russia, Canada, and other northern climates the berries grow wild.

Haskaps are very similar to blueberries in that they have tender skins and tiny seeds, and can be more tart or more sweet depending on the weather.  You can use them in any place you’d enjoy a blueberry – pies, tarts, jams, muffins, pancakes, and right out of hand.

But you’ve probably never heard of a haskap berry, and even if you have you’ve never seen one at your local grocery store.  But why?

One thing is for sure – the fruit and vegetables you find at your local grocery store aren’t there because they are the most delicious varieties.  The produce at your grocery store is there because it’s uniform, high-yield, and it ships well.  Really.

If you’ve travelled a lot, particularly to tropical regions, you’ll doubtlessly have noted the tremendous variety of fruit that bears no resemblance to what we find in our local stores:  scabby oranges with mottled green patches, tall and pale pineapples, mangoes with orangey-red flesh.

Contrast those to the varieties in your fruit bowl:  the perfectly orange (though occasionally mealy) oranges, the fat golden pineapples that are sometime a bit sour, and the yellow-fleshed mangoes that frequently go from rock-hard to rotting overnight.

But the fruit in the grocery store (especially the local bougie market) sure looks nice doesn’t it? And the global food system is really good at filling our shops with food from all corners of the world year round at, honestly speaking, a pretty low price. A pound of bananas somehow gets all the way from Costa Rica to Canada and still only costs 59 cents a pound, far less than the price of a single domestic postage stamp. A few generations ago such an abundance would have been the exclusive privilege of the most wealthy, if such a feat was even possible.

But it does come at a cost, and there is no better fruit to illustrate the point than the Cavendish banana. If you don’t live in a banana-growing climate and you eat bananas you eat Cavendish bananas, guaranteed. It’s guaranteed because 99% of all exported bananas on the entire planet are Cavendish bananas. In fact, there’s a good chance you’ve never tasted another kind.

Unless you are at least 60 or so years old, that is. Until the middle of last century the most common banana was the Gros Michel, a variety that was virtually wiped out by Panama Disease, a fungus that attacks the root system. The Cavendish was immune to the fungus and, while not as tasty as the Gros Michel, had the other characteristics producers were looking for: uniform, high-yield, and could be shipped long distances because it stayed green for weeks. Soon the Cavendish became the dominant variety of banana grown world-wide and the entire supply chain is now designed around the characteristics of this one kind of banana.

But as is predictable (at least to any of us who have lived through the last two years), diseases mutate and a new strain of the fungus is threatening banana plants around the world. This new fungus, Tropical Race 4 (TR4), threatens to do to the Cavendish what Panama Disease did to the Gros Michel. TR4 was first spotted about 30 years ago but it’s popping up here and there wherever bananas are grown, costing millions in lost production and even more in lost livelihoods.

It’s not only the Cavendish that is is vulnerable this time: there are more than a thousand varieties of bananas around the world and many of them are vulnerable to TR4. But somewhere there are varieties with disease-resistant genes that will ensure we still have something to slice over our cereal. The race to save the world’s favourite fruit illustrates the dangers of monoculture and the lack of biodiversity in our food supply - we’re just one plague away from a disaster.

Bananas may be a dramatic example, but an example that renders it obvious the lack of genetic diversity among the produce on our grocery shelves. Of the more than 7,500 varieties of apples world-wide, how many are on your grocery shelves? Five or six? There are probably 10,000 varieties of tomato but how many have you tried? Cucumbers? Melons? Oranges? Broccoli?

Heirloom and heritage varieties are key to our food security. These cultivars may not be the most commercially-viable varieties but they are invaluable to protect the biodiversity of our food supply. Heirloom and heritage seeds carry traits that can weather disease, pests, a changing climate, and other conditions that threaten the monoculture crops we depend on. But because so many of these varieties don’t have commercially valuable traits they risk being forgotten and lost altogether.

As cooks and eaters we have an important role to play in preserving the biodiversity of our food supply. We can grow heritage produce in our own gardens, save seeds, and support organizations like Seeds of Diversity that help gardeners and growers find new varieties and back up their seed collections.

But the easiest and most delicious thing we can do is to open our minds and our palates to new varieties and tastes. And why not?

You’re most likely to find heritage and heirloom fruits and vegetables at your local farmers markets, in CSA boxes, and even in neighbourhood gardens. The varieties you’ll find are often well-suited to the local climate and have special place among the foodways and cultures of the people around you. They’re grown because they are worth growing, not because they have a long shelf life. If you’re unfamiliar with something, you surely aren’t the only one, so just ask! And if there’s a pre-prepared product - a jam or jelly, a preserve, a sauce or a vinegar - it’s an easy way to try something new without the guilt that I call “Farmers Market Regret”.

Diversity - whether in nature, in culture, or in ideas - makes systems more robust and less vulnerable to both natural and human-made destructive forces. Diversity recognizes and rejoices in differences whether they add layers of strength or test the hardiness of the whole. So just as you would welcome a new neighbour to your community, why not welcome some new foods to your plate this summer? You’ll be doing us all a favour and some of them might just be delicious.