Eat This Newsletter 262: Forage
Hello
Not much news this week. People seem to be preoccupied with other things, among them the price of eggs. Here’s a chart that touches on the matter, from the USDA’s food dollar series.
It shows that the 2023 farm share of the food dollar was 15.9 cents (down from 16.0 in 2022). Farmers, however, have costs, and those amounted to 6.8 cents. So the amount that went to actual farm production — food, or the ingredients for it — was 9.1 cents. A detailed breakdown of the so-called marketing share has yet to be released.
Fruit Free for the Foraging
It’s getting to be marmalade season for many of us. I see notices on the socials happy that “the Sevilles have arrived”. And I gloat, a little bit, because not only is my marmalade store abundantly full, such that I can skip this year, but also because all my oranges I gathered from the ornamental trees that dot the landscape here. Their fruit normally falls to the ground to rot, although there is a dedicated coterie of ex-pats who know better and who gather each year to make marmalade that they sell to help refugees.
Then I saw someone linking to Falling Fruit, which I’m sure I have mentioned before. It is an interactive map that aspires to be “the best tool available to the contemporary forager,” which it does both by allowing foragers to add information directly and by importing all manner of other databases. You can select which species you want to look for or investigate a particular address, and the inventory includes all sorts of edibles, not only fruit.
Of course I had to check it out for bitter oranges, and now I’m torn. The one just down the street is mapped, with a note that it is private and permission should be sought to pick, but the many that I favour, in the park nearby and free for the taking, are absent from the map. As a good citizen, I should add them.
Serbia’s Grapevines Exhumed
Jancis Robinson’s website has a fascinating article on a long-lost herbarium of grapevine varieties in Serbia, found in a library cupboard of a grammar school in Sremski Karlovci in northern Serbia. The collection dates to 1812–1824, making it the second oldest in the world. Among the 55 varieties are some that still have seeds, which made it possible to compare their DNA with existing varieties. This research has already thrown up some results that challenge current orthodoxy, including “the true Tamjanika Bela (the Central European variety, not Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains), collected in 1823”.
What now? Milica Rat, the researcher who found the boxes of herbarium sheets, is said to be “frustrated by the impoverished state of viticultural research in Serbia”.
There’s still much to do, but precious little funding for researching this priceless resource. The Balkan Peninsula appears to be an important centre of plant and grapevine biodiversity in Europe, and Serbia lies at the centre of that. Proper research into the sensational materials in the Volný Herbarium could put Serbia firmly at the heart of wine in Europe.
Maybe some fruit foragers will now be inspired to add to the single mapped grapevine in Serbia which is “growing out of the sidewalk infront of a hardware store” in Niš, some way southeast of Sremski Karlovci.
Take care
