You can get both of these at my grocery store. Right next to each other. Sometimes the same brand, sometimes different. I grew up eating off the tree/large bush and found all different sizes on the same tree. Main difference is the flavor.
Anyone who spends time in nature will tell you about varietals. You are being deliberately aggravating against readily accessible fruit. It’s still fruit. It’s still healthy. It’s strange you would gatekeep berries.
Damn. Nature doesn’t stand a chance!
Odds are the ones on the left are Driscoll’s genetic berries. Neat youtube documentary on Driscoll’s monopoly on the berry market.
*not shown - flavor is inverse to size.
They are different species after all, another difference could be seen slicing them and putting them side by side, the pulp should have a different color too
Or storebought blueberries and wild bilberries?
I’m not a native speaker of English, and I’ve only recently learnt that the ‘blueberries’ I grew up foraging from the woods are in fact bilberries. Which is kind of interesting because although most people will call them blueberries, we have a regional name for them, ‘brimbelles’, that’s kind of similar to bilberries when you squint your eyes.
It’s the same in Finland, I was raised thinking that I was eating blueberries when they were, in fact, bilberries.
You did eat blueberries. In Scandinavian languages bilberries are called blueberries (blåbær, blåbär), because what Americans calls blueberries didn’t exist there (the American sort was only introduced to Europe in the 1930s).
English isn’t alone in deciding what is a blueberry and what isn’t.
I stand corrected.
Huh, TIL!
High bush vs low bush blueberries. They’re so different they may as well be a separate berry.
There’s also rabbiteye, which are similar to high bush but have lower cool hour requirements. Maybe it’s a subtype of high bush, but horticulturists around my area note a distinct difference in them.
Do you call them that because the bushes themselves look different?
The wild sort grow in low shrubs up to maybe mid-shin whereas the one you bu from the garden centre is more of a bush
Yeah, they are like chest to face high, depending on your height.
Thanks! TIL
