When: July 8
National Blueberry Day on July 8th celebrates one of the most genuinely nutritious fruits in the American pantry. Blueberries are native to North America — they were a staple food of indigenous peoples for millennia before European contact. The cultivated blueberry we know today was developed only in the early 20th century, when a New Jersey botanist and a woman who'd grown up eating wild blueberries worked together to domesticate them.
Wild blueberries have been eaten in North America for at least 13,000 years — they're one of the oldest food sources on the continent and one of the few fruits native to North America.
The blueberry is one of very few commercially important fruits that originated in North America and was never cultivated anywhere else before European contact. Indigenous peoples across the northeastern woodlands — the Wampanoag, Ojibwe, Algonquin, and others — harvested wild blueberries for at least 13,000 years. They ate them fresh in summer, dried them for winter, mixed them with fat and dried meat to make pemmican, used them medicinally, and incorporated them into creation stories. The blueberry wasn't introduced to this continent. It was already here, and people had been eating it since the land was newly free of glaciers. The cultivated highbush blueberry — the large ones in every grocery store — did not exist until 1916. Elizabeth White, a New Jersey farmer's daughter who grew up eating wild lowbush blueberries on the Pine Barrens, wanted to domesticate them. She hired local pinelands residents to identify the finest wild specimens — paying them for cuttings of any bush that...