Black currants were banned in the USA (2017)
foodtolive.com
foodtolive.com
We actually had to go search online and figure out why I'd never heard of them.
We do have licorice candy, but it will be black, not purple, and it wouldn't be mixed with other flavors of candy, since a large number of people seem to hate it. (Sometimes mixed jellybeans will include licorice.)
I think berries (and peas) are among the easier things to grow locally, and I sure wish more people in the cities and things did, we'd have more for the birds ..
Of course, this story is a reason we can't just have 'uncontrolled agriculture' but so, I'd just say let people grow the native species of whatever they can eat and leave us all alone, gardening is a human right ..
I tell you, the pines aren't worth it.
Are gooseberries grown in India different, or could you pickle, say, British ones to produce the same effect?
This is the one I’m talking about (Amla)- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllanthus_emblica
I'm still disappointed that Strongbow never brought their "Dark Fruit" cider to the US. I first tasted blackcurrant by drinking one in London about ten years ago.
(Gotta cook 'em right though, well except the flowers, you just harvest those before the ants do and make a delicious summer soda for the kids ..)
I hope they don't lose the requirement to at least list it as a distinct ingredient. I hate that part of US nutritional labels, you should never be able to just declare something is "spices".
https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/mdard/docu...
Also, I have lots of black currants here and some lovely eastern white pines and they seem to get along juuuust fine.
As a Brit in the US losing currents is a shame, and an interesting reason, but there others we get in the US that are much rarer at home.
For example several here aren’t found in the UK (or used to be hard to find): https://gizmodo.com/the-18-tastiest-berries-that-grow-wild-i...
A quick search for bær (berries) on the website of the biggest online grocer here in Norway shows: blueberries from Poland, Italy, and Spain, raspberries from Poland and Portugal, blackberries from Belgium and Netherlands, redcurrants from Norway. Perhaps they only travel well inside EFTA.
Blackcurrant (Cassis) and redcurrant (Groseille) taste quite different, they are nice sprinkled atop fraisier cake for example.
One of my favorite little berry is the Myrtille. They are tiny little balls, dark purple all the way through, and lovely when cooked on a tart crust. Trader Joe has a frozen berry tart from France that includes it. Yummy!
I have a mountain of experience freezing wild maine blueberries and wild strawberries. They both freeze just fine and can be eaten as is after thawing, a little mushy but still clearly the proper flavor profiles.
My grocery has an entire section of frozen berries.
Frozen berries will travel just fine and be delicious anywhere. Most berries don't cross significant borders because A HUNDRED YEARS AGO they couldn't travel well, and so local tastes diverged. Consider, gooseberries are easy to find here in new england when they are in season, but you still wouldn't see something like a gooseberry soda, because that's just not that popular of a flavor.
You probably mean the 'European blueberry', Vaccinium myrtillus.
Blueberies are called Bleuet in Canadian French. And in France today they are sold with the same two names on the packaging (blueberies, bleuet), but often people will call them myrtille anyways! A point of contention for me as I am alwahs sad to hear Myrtille and be served Bleuet :)
For instance, @bombela says that "North American" blueberry is 'bleuet' in Canadian French. In France, 'bleuet' is a flower.
Yes, that's why the majority of berries in the US are grown in Mexico. The largest selection of blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries in my local groceries are all from Mexico. There's one specific store that has a really great produce department, and from time to time, they will have local blueberries from a farm in state, but that's only while they are in season.
Not so if you put the frozen berries in! The low temperature in the fridge lets the berries thaw up very slowly, turning it all into a cool slush, which crumbles at the lightest pressure. Can be varied by crushing/mushing the berries for even more taste. Very pleasuring texture!
I had blackcurrants in things, but I’m not sure that I ever had them fresh in England. But it’s definitely…it’s weird for such a common flavour to be missing here.
I think many Americans are skeptical because of the reputation British cuisine has…but I mean…the packaged goods are different and call be biased but they’re almost always better than their American equivalents.
Now if we could just get the marris pipers here…that’d be great.
There are alternative blackcurrant cordials for diluting which are much cheaper and taste good. I think every British supermarket has their own brand one.
Ribena's just Ribena. It's mixed with water almost exclusively, lemonade at a push, but blackcurrant cordial would be used for snakebites or rum+Guinness. Surely I'm not alone on this?
Of the actual snake variety, or are you meaning some kind of drink?
One can have a 'snakebite and black' adding a dash of black currant, also a 'black nasty' being a 'snakebite, pernod and black currant'.
I can’t imagine many non-US soft drinks companies try to come to the US and compete against Coke and Pepsi companies outside of maybe niche stores.
Definitely not widely drunk. Nor is Robinson Orange Barley, which is still my fav drink, despite being somewhat older than the typical market.
(Brit in US)
There is a bit of difficulty getting Cadbury's chocolate due to Hershey owning the trademark in the US. They shut down most grey-market importers.
Even in Kraft singles…it’s like there’s this similar thing going on there. It’s different but there’s this common plastic tasting thing going on there that I can’t stand either.
I feel bad because my kid loves cooking grilled cheeses and always wants me to try them but I can’t stomach it. At the same time though…it’s so much cheaper, that I still buy it for him. I’m kind of like this with wine- like, I’m not buying the expensive stuff because I already like the cheap stuff and the last thing I’m going to do is develop more expensive tastes if the cheap thing is fine for me right now.
Here in Canada we tend to know more about UK stuff than people in the US. We get imports the US doesn't of various products Kinder chocolate/toy eggs for one.
> It might seem extreme, but this measure was necessary to save the logging industry at that time.
And later:
> The situation has turned so serious that it threatened the existence of US pines. As they are the main element of the logging industry, it must have been dealt with as soon as possible.
(Not sure how blackcurrents keep over long distances compared to oranges as well)
For the British, things were especially bad. Numerous captains and sailors had personally demonstrated and convinced themselves that scurvy could be prevented with fresh citrus, but were unable to convince the "classically trained" physicians who made Naval policy, who were still pushing things like "you need more air in your tissue". One of captain Cook's expeditions had good results with malt and wort preventing scurvy, so that was official practice even as navy admirals demanded lemons.
The connection between citrus and Scurvy was finally proven in an animal model in the early 1920s, before we even understood what "Vitamins" where.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cur...
Similarly, I thought elderberry was just a silly word that Monty Python made up to be funny.
Elderflowers are also used in drinks, both cordials and liqueurs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambucus
They're very common in Canada. Have a row of them on my hobby farm in southern Ontario. My wife makes a casual $100 or so a year picking them and selling to local eastern European immigrants.
Grew up with currants and gooseberries all the time in central Alberta, where they grow tastier in the more northerly climate, in my opinion.
I'd say it's stronger and more nuanced than mint.
It wasn't really banned too well....
These sentences don't seem to have a very strong connection with each other:
> Getting black currants banned has been deemed minimally effective for disease prevention. Therefore, some states start reversing the federal ban on this berry. However, Europe still remains the producer of 99% of the world’s black currants stock.
"It is not so bad"?
> Today, these plants are successfully grown in New York, Connecticut, Oregon, and Vermont. Yet, the majority of Americans can only enjoy processed or dried berries. It’s not so bad considering the benefits of eating dry fruits.
(I see what I did there (o;)
Either way, the article seems mostly fine to me.
I used to predate my blog posts in Wordpress by years. Why would you use todays date? No one reads blogs in order, how pedestrian to follow the old rules.
You can also fool some of Googles date metadata, it's not just the day it's first indexed. Reddit by incompetence screws with it.
But I've never seen a content farm do it.... yet.
Webarchive first snapshot 8th Nov 2020 - http://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://foodtoliv...
The idea there is a pre-AI internet is not true.
AI will go back and change the past. Not even Google/Web Archive can record it all. Is it AI pre-dating or was it missed on Web Archive here? (A: The Facebook comments seem real, so missed by Web Archive, but if Facebook deletes/makes private the data then we are back to not knowing)
1) "[...] some states start reversing the federal ban on this berry [because the ban has been deemed ineffective for disease prevention]".
2) "[Even though some US states are reversing the ban] Europe still remains the producer of 99% of the world’s black currants stock".
Regarding the second example, it is just an excuse to have an internal link to another article on the same site praising dried fruits. "It's not so bad [that Americans can only enjoy processed or dried blackcurrants] considering the benefits of eating dry fruits.". The reasoning is quite crappy, given that the linked article does not imply that dried fruits are better than non-dried fruits, but it is to the level of precision that one might expect from a filler blog on some health-food online store.
Redcurrants on the other hand..