Blueberries ripe with antioxidants and memories in Maine and Alabama: Color Us Connected

This column appears every other week in Foster’s Daily Democrat and the Tuskegee News. This week, Guy Trammell, an African American man from Tuskegee, Ala., and Amy Miller, a white woman from South Berwick, Maine, write about blueberries, yes blueberries!

By Guy Trammell Jr.

Breakfast stops on summer family road trips were a childhood treat for me. I realize now that we only stopped north of the Mason Dixon Line. I was allowed to order what I wanted, and it was always blueberry pancakes with hot chocolate or orange juice. The colorful berries were pushing to emerge from the golden stack as I spread the melting butter, and I recall the first time a restaurant offered blueberry syrup to enhance this delightful experience.

I later learned to make my own blueberry hot cakes, and even go further and bake blueberry muffins.

In college, I worked briefly at Tuskegee’s George Washington Carver Agriculture Experiment Station, one of the oldest U.S. stations with continuous operation. There, I had the distinct honor and privilege to work directly under one of Dr. Carver’s proteges, Dr. Booker T. Whatley. He was a gruff, no nonsense personality whose command of the sciences was legendary. He could lecture in elaborate detail on the genetic properties, processes and resulting products of his research, and also, in simple terms, explain to a novice how to implement his research creations and improve an agricultural business or project.

Dr. Whatley’s research was vast. He created new ways to use science, including combining sweet potato varieties of both white and orange flesh to create cattle feed for desert herds. His prized creation was a 25-acre farm that produced over $100,000 in profit during its first year of operation. He set up a working model, and loved showing it off at the annual Professional Agriculture Workers Conference. This was a pick-your-own farm, with plums, muscadines, peaches and blueberries. Whatley created a blueberry grove that to this day produces fruit from June through August, two blueberry growing seasons.

One of his farm prototypes was purchased by Tuskegee’s Josie Gbadamosi. Josie has transformed it into the Shady Grove Blueberry Farm, a pick-your-own business. The luscious berries are big and juicy. Josie’s brother, Cookie Jones, was a dessert gourmet who made the very best blueberry cobbler. Unfortunately he transitioned recently, but Josie produces blueberry tea, and blueberry tisane, a delicious and nutritious beverage. I am looking forward to enjoying some at this summer's Rhythm and Blueberry Fest on the farm.

And yes, blueberries are a very healthy food, with antioxidants, vitamins and minerals. However, I simply enjoy them in a meal or as a snack.

By Amy Miller

Maine is filled with blueberries - pies, and fields and stories.

It may be that Cherryfield once had cherry trees lining the Narraguagus River flowing through its center, thus giving the Maine town its name. It also may be that the fields of blueberries plentiful in this Downeast town turn red in the fall, thus giving this historic town its name.

But however you look at it, 2023 Cherryfield is known as the wild blueberry capital of the world. Yes, the world.

And Maine, it turns out, produces more wild blueberries - also known as low-bush berries - than anywhere else in the world. Yes, the world, according to the PBS show America’s Heartland and many other Google-able sources. This brand of berry, native to Maine, thrives in its glacier-churned soil and challenging seasons.

A bunch of us Mainers a few years ago went down to Alabama to visit Tuskegee, our sister city, secure in the knowledge that if nothing else, Maine rules when it comes to blueberries, only to learn that Alabama too takes pride in its blueberries.

Let’s be clear, though: Maine’s state fruit is wild blueberries, not just any blueberries. Tuskegee and other southeastern states are renowned for rabbit eye blueberries, better suited to the heat and drought they face in that corner of our country.

While I cannot vouch for claims made by Mainers that our wild blueberry is juicier and more flavorful than the high bush berries, I can definitely assure you they are much smaller. And yet, the animal on the top of our Maine food chain - the black bear - is famous for enjoying berries. Even the moose, which has no predators in Maine, is known to munch on these tiny treats.

Each year, sometime in July, I bring a few large yogurt containers up to the super-secret, but not-so-secret  blueberry patch near my house. And each year I am surprised to learn again that hours of picking these delicious but minuscule bits does not come close to filling my buckets. So you really have to love these little guys to stay in the game long enough to get a supply of them worth freezing. Or you have to believe those who say they're packed with natural antioxidants and be attached to the idea of antioxidants.

Most of Maine’s wild blueberries now are mechanically harvested by commercial operations, but some farms let us pick blueberries by hand, as Indigenous people have done for thousands of years.

The wild plants were first established as the glacier receded 10,000 years ago and were used by native Americans, but the commercial industry began in the 1800s, according to the University of Maine Extension Service. Wild blueberries were first picked fresh by hand, then raked and canned and now are mostly mechanically harvested.

Although it’s the wild berries that put our state on the blueberry map, we also have high-bush berries, available even just a few miles down the road.

But anyone who has spent any time off the paved byways of Maine, the most forested state in the nation, knows you can find the wild ones galore and for free.

Amy and Guy can be reached at ColorUsConnected@gmail.com

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Blueberries ripe with antioxidants and memories in Maine and Alabama