berry picking in an endless summer
exploring the seasonality of Ontario berries and lessons to my daughter
The summer months of my childhood were defined by berries: June was strawberries, July was for raspberries, and by August long weekend, blueberries (my first true love) were available by the handful. These were the picking seasons of my local Buckhorn Berry farm: brief but brimming windows in which my mother would take us to squat in the heat and pluck a constellation of berries into cardboard tubs for safekeeping.
The actual availability of berries varies beyond the U-Pick windows of my youth, increasingly so with climate changes in southern Ontario challenging what a summer looks like. Berries appear evergreen in Canadian grocery stores and have become necessity in surprising ways for families with young kids. And while there are plentiful cultural dishes, jams, and jellies that require berries in the north, they represent national economic outputs as much as they serve as social fodder on the internet.
recently wrote a beautiful piece asking questions about the seasonality of avocados:It’s interesting to me, always, to consider the ways in which seasonality is erased from a crop like avocado. What becomes a necessity, year-round, and why?
The question of berries being necessity feels personal: my daughter came to accept blueberries this spring by way of the large Moroccan blueberries available at a local grocer. They were wide, plump, and pale blue – a veritable Violet Beauregard after the Oompa Loompas were done with her. The blueberries of my past were low bush, tiny and deep blue, bursting with sweetness if you were lucky enough to find them on the side of a hiking trail. Or they were high bush, the quintessential perfect blueberry: purpley-blue with some sweet, some tang, proudly growing in U-Pick farms.
With changes in my approach to grocery shopping the last few years, my eight-year-old has been asking questions about the selection process of local and seasonal fruits. Why do we need fresh strawberries in the darkest of February days – are we owed freshness in a time of hibernation?
Through my conversations with her, I’ve come to wonder about our year-round access, and what that means not only for families with berry budgets, but for the harvesters needed to maintain berry exports in a globalized economy. When seasonality turns into heritage, and then to commodity, who’s timing are we leaning towards? Are we determining the turn of season based on the eager farm baskets of the public, the longstanding Indigenous Knowledge of the land as it shifts through millennia and climate, or is it dictated based on the prescriptions of industrial agriculture? How do I begin to explain these blurred boundaries of time, season, and culture to an 8-year-old that could take flight from conversation at any moment?
berries as national pastime
With plentiful fields to visit and pick from each summer season, berries are easy to come by through the warmer months in southern Ontario. Dr. Lenore Newman suggests in Speaking in Cod Tongues that berry picking could be considered a national pastime in Canada. While the berry itself may vary by landscape (salmonberry, haskap, blueberry), picking is an act that is so commonplace, performed without much ritual, that it can easily be taken for granted.
The idea of berry-picking as a national activity lends itself to challenges around defining seasonality. As Newman argues, “seasonal foods map out a calendar deeply linked to landscape, and the trick is to imagine why this cadence remains important in an era when fresh food is available year-round.” She sees this as defining a rhythm for our food expectations, carved by both space and time. While Newman maintains our berry consumption is more seasonal, this emphasizes only a fraction of berry-eaters, forgetting what industrial agriculture demands of our landscapes. Monica Degan notes that food-based rhythms also unveil the contested or tense relationships that come with place, where “experience is created, controlled, consumed, or commodified.”
If experience of place is various and contested, it can also be shaped to modify what makes a seasonal window – by grocery store, government, or food and agricultural industry. Even within personal choice, Newman understands seasonality to be embraced in instances where it is “culturally encoded” (such as maple syrup tapping), but abandoned when “doing so greatly limits the diversity of diet, or when a crop is a dietary staple” (such as oats, wheat, or citrus).
contested seasons & migrant worker conditions
Contested seasons take on new meaning with climate change shifting our growing seasons and regions across Canada. A recent post from my local berry picking farm warned that because of the heat waves, strawberry season ended much quicker than usual. While it would typically extend into the early weeks of July, the heat made for riper and shorter availabilities. With these new, shorter windows, the demands for production become heavier for those who harvest our berries and prepare them for export and wholesale: migrant workers.
Journalist Ghada Alsharif reported on the concerns emerging around Canada’s temporary foreign worker program, where 50,000 to 60,000 foreign agricultural labourers come each spring from Jamaica, Mexico, or Caribbean countries to work in Canadian agricultural sectors. Alsharif draws a clear connection between the “upward trajectory” of Canada’s agri-food exports (expecting to meet their target of $95 billion by 2028) and the labour crisis in agriculture that has maintained a dependence on temporary foreign workers. Because of this, these workers are subjected to “precarious working and living conditions, with no clear pathway to permanent residency.”
A 2021 CBC report by Verity Stevenson also identified that amidst cramped living spaces and cruel working conditions (starting at 4 or 5 am and working until after midnight), heightened expectations around harvesting yields is informed by contracts with grocery retailers like Costco. On the Quebec strawberry farm Stevenson reported on, “workers were expected to pick four million strawberries amid a string of heatwaves that ripened the fruit seemingly all at once.”
Shortened harvesting periods, industrialization of farming across Canada, unpredictable weather (heat waves, flooding, and forest fires), and the racist foundations of the temporary foreign workers program also inform what berries we have made available in our stores. While there’s been increased attention to the perilous conditions for migrant workers, these certainly aren’t considered when it comes to matters of the family grocery cart.
superfood berry budgets
A running internet joke for parents in recent years revolves around the “berry budget” – a specific amount of your income allotted exclusively to berries for your children during a grocery trip. The berry budget persists beyond inflation, as any parent can attest to, because children simply devour berries within minutes of bringing them home from the store. It is the disappointment of a modern suburban hunter-gatherer, who works hard to acquire groceries with their biweekly pay cheque, only to see them quickly deplete without the appropriate rations left for the remainder of the week.
It is true that kids will devour berries with little effort; each variety is ideally sized for little hands to plop into their mouths. But it also situates fresh, year-round berries as necessity for children’s health, within the framework of a “wholesome,” easy, nutritious snack. This erases a seasonality that would have been engrained in previous generations. What perpetuates fresh fruits and berries as the superior form of healthy eating, when canning, preserving, or freezing berries for off-season consumption remain viable options?
Berries, or at least blueberries, made the rounds as superfoods in the 2010s. In Ann Shin’s documentary The Superfood Chain, she explores not only whether superfoods really are more beneficial for health and how demands for these specific foods impact global Indigenous cultures that depend on these foods as staples (notably quinoa, teff, and coconut,). Shin’s inspiration to make the documentary was ostensibly based on motherhood:
“When I became a mom, I became hyper aware of the food I was feeding my family. I wanted the very best for them, and so whenever a new superfood came to market, I’d buy and serve it up, no questions asked. But when my six-year-old daughter asked me where her quinoa crusted salmon came from, I had no answers.”
The ties between wanting the best for family health and personalized (often maternal) choices around nutrition sink into broader post-feminist and neoliberal challenges in consumerism. Dr. Tina Sikka questions superfoods in a neoliberal setting: situated as lifestyle, superfoods progress individual choices that emphasize “clean” and “dirty” foods:
“Properties of foods like antioxidants, polyphenols, phytochemicals, and enzymes are highlighted as particularly health promoting, and the more exotic, rare, or new-to-Western palate foods are framed as ‘natural and magical’ in their marketing… [which] makes them purveyors of a distinctly health-based cultural capital for consumers, while also implicating their procurement in cycles of post-colonial economic and cultural exploitation.”
In this food hierarchy, freshness of superfoods is an important pillar in solidifying the family berry budget as a health choice rather than an ascribed status of economic security. A family that can afford not only expensive fresh berries in the winter, but one that is willing to purchase and risk quick rot or waste surely has more social power, and likely has better antioxidants coursing through their bloodstream!
a matter of taste and access
Taste and access (read: food security) tend to get missed in ideas of the healthiness of year-round fresh berries. Buying an on-the-vine tomato during Canadian winter is a waste – they are soggy, hard, and flavourless. In its place, it’s easy to switch to a salsa, a canned tomato, or a tomato-based sauce. While the same could be said about berries, consensus is not always reached, particularly when it comes to the question of what healthy snacks kids will or won’t eat. There are properties in berries that are good! The same is not said of the out-of-season tomato.
A conversation with my grandmother reminded me of how technology has changed what it means to eat fruit. Her childhood farmhouse got electricity just before WWII broke out. Prior to that, her family relied on canning, pickling, and preserving their harvests. My grandmother is now the most proficient berry picker. She gathers endless flats throughout the summer, transforming some into jams and chutneys, others into pies, and more still frozen for winter use. When I was younger, I questioned her persistence in these efforts, knowing she had a fridge and a stable income.
Now I understand it as important practice. Between preserving fruits and growing a small but formidable vegetable garden each year, she maintains a quiet relationship with seasonality that subsequent generations have lost during our shifts away from farming. I won’t romanticize the past, but it strikes me that within two generations, my family has shifted in its connection to food and land so quickly. What traditions or connections to the land dissipate when we don’t pass along the importance of preservation? I feel like a dumbstruck child every time I learn more about fermentation or preservations, as though it’s an alchemy only bestowed upon a few.
My grandmother gifted me some vegetables and herbs to transplant from her garden to mine a few years back, another quiet but sweet gift of food and knowledge. Yet I was an idiot and didn’t think about proper placement on my back deck, and they did not make it through the summer. It was hard to teach my daughter anything of growth and timing when I didn’t appreciate it myself. I maintained a certain busyness, the working single mum variety, that allowed me to dismiss my gardening failures when I pulled up to the grocery store a few weeks later.
With such a cultural emphasis on eating locally and seasonally, there seems to be gaps in what makes for a “cool” way to practice it – a rotating menu of seasonal harvest at a local restaurant provides lesser-known options (wild rice or fiddleheads), and berries remain both nutritional superfood and overlooked for their potentials. The ethic of care involved in selecting seasonal foods (if accessible) isn’t always aesthetic, sometimes it is picking them off a city bush adjacent to a construction site.
I don’t have many answers when it comes to framing the ideal or ethical times to enjoy berries – though I’d reckon it’s the short weeks of summer where one can indulge in a specific form of hedonism, scarfing down an entire tub in a matter of minutes. But when it comes to broader politics of local, seasonal, and accessible, I waver. I’m not Alice Waters, and the reality of price inflation challenges all our kitchens.
But I do know that it’s easier to show my daughter what a natural boom-and-bust blueberry cycle looks like on our humble back deck garden than try to explain the intricate map of berry politics that inform our economic output. We can learn together what the normal looks like in our own garden and use that as a foundation to trace our steps for the next year, the next heat wave, and so on. And if we’re lucky, we’ll have a few of our own small blueberries left over to pry from the freezer this winter, ones that may provide the hope of a spring and new growth to tide us through the darker months.
Thank you for reading! You can find me on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok, or check out AnthroDish podcast on iTunes and Spotify.
Interview
I was interviewed by Dr. Vikram Baliga on his fun and informative Planthropology podcast in May. It’s not often I like being interviewed (nearly impossible for me to avoid turning questions back on people), but Vikram is such a wonderful interviewer and I had a lot of fun answering his thoughtful questions about food as knowledge, and the parallels of food inflation in the US and Canada. Episode is available here:
Paid Subscriber News
This month’s paid subscriber interview is out on July 14th. It will be a transcript from a conversation with Dr. Jo Weaver on the theme of sugar and tension, and her research with women in New Delhi negotiate type 2 diabetes diagnoses with the many demands of their families, communities, and gendered daily experiences.
This is so fantastic, considered, and rich with resources I have to dig into—thank you!