In a story titled, "Pigeon turns farmer into blueberry fool," David Sapsted reports in the News Telegraph that fruit farmer Brian Carlick ran into a bit of a dilemma when a wood pigeon ate the blueberry fruit he was nurturing for a Royal Horticultural Society judge to review at his farm at Aldringham, near Leiston, Suffolk (UK).  It was hoped that the judge could officially determine its size and that the giant blueberry could then be recorded for the Guiness Book of Records.  But sadly this was not to be the case.  Before the judge arrived a wood pigeon, who could not resist the temptation of the giant blueberry,  barged the net surrounding the berry bush and plucked off the prize gobbling it up!  According to the story, Carlick estimates that the "berry weighed about eight grams with a diameter of a two pence piece."   

 Tufts' Blueberries Research Continues to Generate Headlines

 
 April 23, 2003   With Wild Blueberries on the Verge of Glut, a Hunt For New Uses

Wild Blueberry Growers Are Learning Lessons Of Cranberry Crash, Touting Health Benefits
By BARBARA CARTON
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

At the University of Maine, food science professor Al Bushway is three years into a study, partly funded by the blueberry industry, to see whether mixing wild blueberry puree into precooked burgers will prevent the off-taste of reheated meat.

Roughly 500 test hamburgers and chickenburgers later, there's hope, he reports — so long as blueberries are kept to less than 3% of the ingredients. "We went up to 7%," Dr. Bushway says, "but you got a color effect that people may not want to see." By that he means bluish chicken.

Worried about a looming glut of its tiny fruit, the wild blueberry industry is on the move. Armed with the slogan "The Power of Blue," plus research suggesting that blueberries are loaded with health-promoting antioxidants, the industry is trying to persuade consumers to eat more of them. It's also thinking up new uses for a crop most people associate with muffins and jam, and not much else. It's promoting wild blueberry chicken breast with Cajun spices and a wild blueberry chutney topping for Thanksgiving turkey. Others are experimenting with blueberry beer and blueberry face cream.

The wild blueberries sold in stores are actually a commercial crop. They grow on scrubby, ankle-high bushes, mostly in northeastern Maine and parts of Canada. The bushes, some more than a century old, yield a pea-sized fruit that traditionally has been harvested with hand scoops. During the 1990s, annual yields averaged as much as 135 million pounds.

But then harvests shot up, reaching nearly 200 million pounds in 2000. Growers cite more irrigation and better herbicides as reasons for the increase. Another factor: more rent-a-bees trucked in from the South to pollinate the plants. Although harvests in the past two years have slipped a bit, the industry expects soon to be grappling regularly with crops of more than 200 million pounds.

Production of plumper, cultivated blueberries, the ones most commonly sold fresh in supermarkets, also is rising. The marble-size cultivated ones are grown in 35 states on bushes the size of trees. In the same family and genus as wild berries (Ericeae vaccinium), they belong to a different species (corymbosum not angustifolium).

Last year's cultivated crop was 224 million pounds, up from 192 million in 1997, says the U.S. Highbush Blueberry Council, in El Dorado Hills, Calif., which represents more than 2,000 growers.

Fresh on the minds of the wild-blueberry growers is a disaster that beset the cranberry industry in the mid-1990s, when prices plunged amid a sudden glut that caused many growers to go bust. John Sauve, executive director of the Wild Blueberry Association, says he wants to avoid a similar catastrophe by stimulating demand "in a much faster fashion."

The industry is counting on the fruit's supposed health benefits. All sorts of claims are made and studies cited suggesting that blueberries offer protection against urinary-tract infections, cancer, age-related health conditions such as short-term-memory loss, heart disease and brain damage from strokes.

Most of the research hasn't differentiated between wild and cultivated berries. That doesn't deter the wild-blueberry industry, which in taking on cultivated blueberries is touting a study by a Canadian government researcher, Wilhelmina Kalt. The wild blueberries it looked at had nearly twice the levels of antioxidants and other supposedly health-promoting compounds as their cultivated cousins.

The claim disconcerts growers of cultivated berries. "I think that's really unfair," says Ruth Lowenberg, a spokeswoman for the Highbush Council, who notes that the Canadian study "hasn't been replicated." All blueberries are "a wonderful product," she says, minimizing any competition that might exist between wild blueberries, typically sold frozen, and cultivated berries, which are much bigger in the fresh-fruit market.

Most Americans don't seem to have gotten the message. Per capita consumption of all types of blueberries is just four cups a year. That's about on a par with the rarely eaten kiwi, and just one-sixth the quantity of strawberries downed.

"People don't wake up every morning thinking 'I have to have my wild blueberries today,' " says Mr. Sauve. To rectify that situation, he has set a goal: Build blueberry consumption to a half cup a day, or 180 cups a year. His target would expand consumption 45-fold, propelling blueberry intake ahead of every other fruit. "I don't have any trouble with us appearing as though we're reaching," he says. "We are."

Because wild blueberries have a short harvest season, most are sold frozen. Boosters say that unlike frozen strawberries, the wild blues don't turn into a soggy mess when thawed.

Another target is the ubiquitous blueberry muffin. Many people use the juicy, cultivated berries because they look bigger. That's a culinary blunder, claims Mr. Sauve. Because of the big berry's high water content, he contends, the fruit shrivels and "you're left with a blue hole."

In Nova Scotia, Farmers' Cooperative Dairy has worked on developing wild blueberry milk, in part to sop up a local glut of berries. Blueberry-flavored sour milk is a popular beverage in Finland, where its maker claims it lowers blood pressure.

But Kelly Kale, research and development manager at the big Halifax dairy, says his efforts were frustrated because the blueberry-milk mix kept curdling. Mr. Kale tried added neutralizers, but they eliminated the flavor and color. "My major thrust is yogurt now," he says.

BluCreek Brewing Co. of Madison, Wis., sells its BluBeer suds — containing 5% wild blueberry fruit — in nine states, mostly in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic. Thomas Moffitt, BluCreek's owner, says he experimented with cultivated berries, but they "made the beer more watery and almost a purple color."

Meanwhile, in Boston, 50 laboratory rats are being fed blueberry-infused pellets at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Jean Mayer Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. Half of the rats are old, the other half young. A similar group of 50 are eating regular rat chow. The rats will be pitted against one another in maze-running experiments this spring.

James A. Joseph, chief of the center's Laboratory of Neuroscience, hopes to look closely at the mechanisms involved in a previous experiment, in which he found that old rats fed a blueberry-rich diet grew new neurons — meaning blueberries seemed to help reverse age-related short-term-memory loss. The rats also regained some balance and coordination. The results have yet to be found in human clinical trials.

Dr. Joseph, author of a book called "The Color Code" that touts the value of pigmented food, isn't waiting. Leaning back in his office chair, he swilled a thick blue goo — a blueberry smoothie — he had brought from home. "I try to do a cup a day" he said.