Change my mind: bilberries aka European blueberries (small, dark red/purple flesh) are superior to the American version (large, blue skin, but white and tasteless on the inside).
That's just farmed blueberries. Wild blueberries are smaller, with blue and much more flavourful insides. It's an unfortunate reality with grocery stores that since people buy based on looks, farms will optimize for what looks good rather than what tastes good.
Maximum size and number of berries are determined by variety, and largely trade off against each other, though (probably climate dependent) some varieties just don't seem to do well at all.
Actual size and sweetness is determined by how much water you give them and how long you leave them on the bush. Optimal picking time is determined by: go down and see when you think they're ready, then wait 2 more weeks before actually picking them; there should be just a handful starting to go bad. With some (but not all) varieties, you can also go by feel: if barely touching the berry makes it fall off, it's ready.
If you only have a small number of bushes and they aren't fully enclosed, the birds will eat them all before they actually ripen. At commercial scale this isn't very significant since the area can't support that many birds for the rest of the summer.
with wine grapes, sweetness (and other flavor qualities) depend on the sunlight times ratio of surface area of leaves to number of "berries". If the weather is great, you can grow more great grapes, but if the weather is poor you prune off half the fruit when it is still small and green (it's called the green harvest), and the remaining grapes come out higher quality, concentrating the sugar from more leaves.
You might try it with a blueberry bush to see if those fruits taste better.
If you remove all the excess water from farmed blueberries, the taste is about the same. You just need to aggressively sweat them.
This obviously doesn’t work if you want to eat them fresh, but there are better berries for eating fresh anyway.
No, it's a different species, vaccinium corymbosum. It's farmed, because it can be farmed, because of the bush size and growing conditions.
Wild European blueberries, vaccinium myrtillus, can't be farmed. If we could, we would, but we can't, so instead we employ hordes of seasonal workers to go out in the forests and harvest them during the month-long season.
Larger blueberries weigh more and so there is selective pressure and growing preferences which lead to large watery tasteless but heavy berries as the preference for crop outcomes.
It's all about ROI.
Blueberries are enormously flavourful but I know what you mean in that occasionally I have come across blueberries that are seemingly grown for size and not taste, and seem bland and barely tart at all. (I've experienced the same with other fruit as well, such as strawberries)
But yea if you think blue berries are tasteless you need to get some actual good blueberries. Unfortunately you've been eating the bad stuff!
The only advantage is that the American ones are easier to grow in your garden and easier to gather.
Frozen berries are exported from Europe though and can probably be found in specialist shops, the French in particular are fond of them (myrtilles). The texture is unfortunately lost but the taste does come through quite well.
I think they are picked and exported frozen from Poland and Sweden among other places.
Some people make a business out of it, gather them whole day and sell them. But I've never seen them in malls, just in street markets and people selling them along the roads in season. I think they don't keep long enough for markets - you have to eat them by the day after the gathering.
We also have the "american blueberries", they are farmed industrially, and some people have them in their gardens (my grandparents for example). They are nice, but nowhere close to the real thing.
There's also 2 different species of wild forest berries, but I'm not sure how they are officially called in English (my grandmother called them "borówki" and "łochinie", but even in Poland it's regional names, most people don't know what a "łochinia" is :) ).
Today, because of this discussion, searching for some info, I found this interesting trivia observation someone blogged about: you can use bog bilberry to clean the color off your bilberry blue fingers. The explanation likely being that they are slightly acidic (it's hard to remove with just water and soap.)
https://www.godt.no/aktuelt/i/eK1GOO/baeret-som-fjerner-blaa...
These berries have many names in scanidinavia too, but in norwegian I would know them as «skinntryte».
I think this is what she called "łochinia", but it grew in the forest so I'm not sure:
They are quite intensively harvested in countries like Finland, Sweden, Poland and Belarus. The frozen berries are then exported. For instance where I live (Austria) I can buy frozen Bilberries at a much cheaper price than regular Blueberries.
If you think this is the worst offender, compare real tiny forest strawberries with that bland stuff from grocery stores. 5% of the volume, 300% of the taste. Even good ripe homegrown ones pale in comparison. Had a hike last weekend and hit the right spot of altitude and their ripeness, got stuck for an hour just nibbling on them along forest roads.
Folks go into the forests and harvest them, selling them to the stores. Similar story with cloudberries. They go for a fairly nice price. (They sell local produce in the major grocery stores here)
The rest of the year, though, large blueberries are all that are on offer if you are buying fresh. IIRC, I can buy both smaller and larger blueberries if I buy frozen.
There was an airline that serves or at least used to serve blåbär juice in-flight in or to/from Sweden. I don't remember if it was like SAS or BRA, but one of them did. Kind of an expensive way to get a taste.
Usually I just go to the forest myself. The wikipedia article says that they grow in quite a number of places around the world. In northern Sweden, they are everywhere, and you have the absolute right to harvest them for personal use, AFAIK.