Wild Blueberries: The Ultimate Antioxidant Superfood

Blueberries are the new superfood, packed with the antioxidants anthocyanin and resveratrol. Prevention magazine refers to them as "Youth berries." A craze for blueberry drinks, yoghurts and even dried berries is sweeping the world. But how much bang for our buck are we getting from cultivated supermarket blueberries?

Supermarkets sell punnets of blueberries that on first inspection can easily be mistaken for grapes. Pretty, blue, tasteless grapes. The one and only basket I bought was full of huge, gorgeous, round berries with a rich, full-blown look about them. They appeared perfect but tasted under-ripe and sour. When you're paying up to $6.00 for 150g of berries, this is disappointing.

Because I know how they should taste.

No cultivated berry will measure up to the sweet, intense, tart, sun-warmed flavour of a wild blueberry you've picked yourself. They TASTE like blue should. Like bottled sunshine, fresh air and the smell of sun-warmed leaves.

They may technically be the same species but small, wild blueberries easily outshine the cultivated varieties on the taste and nutritional fronts. In this instance smaller is better.

Granted, those of us who don't live in the north-eastern US or Canada are at a geographical disadvantage and can't afford this level of fussiness. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

But you can now buy packets of frozen wild blueberries in grocery stores. Packed quickly after picking, they retain their nutritional strength and taste and are well worth looking for.

I come from a family of obsessed berry pickers. Blueberries primarily, but we've been known to go foraging for wild strawberries, raspberries and blackberries. However blueberries are the prime target. My father and I have been known to pick 90 litres of wild blueberries between us in Elliot Lake (Northern Ontario) in the summer. On average it takes us three hours to fill a 4-litre ice cream container each.

Armed with water, sun hat, sunscreen, bug-spray, sturdy boots, and several empty plastic ice cream containers, we drive for half an hour along logging roads to the prime picking areas near Elliot Lake. Occasionally we'll pass a tree festooned with a plastic supermarket bag, an informal marking used by fellow pickers to remind them where prime spots are. If you're a picker, you don't need to do yoga. It's a workout in itself, bending, stretching, squatting, swatting mosquitoes; getting so absorbed in plucking a heavily-laden blueberry bush that you forget to move and end up holding poses at which a yogi would blanche.

Then sunburned, but with the hunter-gatherer urge momentarily satisfied, we head home, sit on the deck and clean the berries. This involves picking out any insects that've managed to hitch a ride, leaves and twigs. The berries are then bagged (unwashed) and frozen for year-round consumption. A goodly quantity are kept in the fridge for immediate consumption: blueberries in porridge, blueberries with milk and bread, blueberries with vanilla ice cream, blueberry pie, blueberry muffins... blueberrytastic.

So if you're ever in Northern Ontario, the Eastern Provinces or States and see someone by the side of the road selling wild blueberries, take a chance and go for it. Your tastebuds will thank you.