How fruit moves: Crop systems, culture, and the making of the commercial blueberry, 1870–1930

Abstract

Social Impact StatementThe history of blueberries highlights the agroecological systems, multispecies relationships, and socioeconomic factors that shape eating habits and commercial availability of food. In the United States, an elaborate and lucrative human‐managed crop system evolved around so‐called wild blueberries in the late nineteenth‐century. Blueberry domestication under the auspices of public‐private collaboration in the early twentieth century then established the foundation for today's global blueberry trade. Wild blueberries continued to occupy specific economic niches, however, and an uneasy dynamic developed between locally revered Vaccinium species and the commercial “blueberry.” In an urbanizing world of people increasingly alienated from their food sources, blueberries provide a reminder of the intricate relationships between people and plants that shape both basic prospects of survival and specific ways of life, whether for good or for ill.Summary This work examines blueberries' emergence as a commercial product and how it grew out of a history that involved multiple Vaccinium species and their convoluted interactions with human ecologies. It outlines the agroecology of the wild blueberry trade in nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century Maine, followed by blueberries' domestication and expanded commercialization in the 1910s and 1920s through a public‐private collaboration between USDA scientist Frederick V. Coville and New Jersey cranberry grower Elizabeth C. White. The complexity of blueberries' path to becoming a global commodity underscores the significance of cultural factors in determining how a singular “blueberry” came to be defined in the first place. The article uses a range of sources to document blueberries' history of commercialization from the late nineteenth century to the present. In particular, local newspapers from Maine made it possible to reconstruct the agroecology of the wild blueberry trade in the state in the period prior to 1920, while a variety of government documents and agricultural journals provided the key means for exploring blueberries' domestication and commercialization in the 1910s and 1920s. The article delineates the main features of the agroecology that defined Maine's wild blueberry crop system and the public‐private relationship surrounding the domestication and commercialization of blueberry culture in New Jersey. These histories ultimately underscore the interplay between regional cultures, processes of commodification, and a nationalizing economy that came to define the blueberry as a product in the fresh fruit market of the United States. Public‐private collaborations, cultural discourses, and the evolving market relations that came with the globalization of blueberry culture in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries continue to reflect trends established earlier in the twentieth century. The article concludes that the emergence of “the blueberry” as a singular commercial product embodies a set of systems and relationships between plant species and human societies that blurs the boundaries between wild and domesticated, ranges in scale from the local to the global, and preserves niches for localism within a global commercial landscape that itself contains multiple species underneath a veneer of standardization. Today's globalized fresh blueberry thus contains within itself a long and convoluted history of cultivation, plant breeding, competing crop systems, market relations, and cultural constructs.