The half-life of uranium-238 is about 4.5 billion years….half of a certain quantity of this radioactive element will decay in 4.5 billion years. Blueberries have an even longer shelf-life meaning you can buy blueberries, put them in the refrigerator and travel to Mars and when you return, they are just as fresh as the day you bought them.
This is not true with many other of our favorite fruits. How many times have you longed for a perfectly sweet and juicy peach during the hot days of summer? However, when you go to the market all the peaches are hard and need a few days to ripen. When you try to claim your prize, you find that the peaches have over-ripened and now are soggy globs. The same thing happens with plums. Bananas might give you a week or so from being green and firm before ripening and quickly turning into brown mush…not bad, but you still end up throwing out half the bunch in two weeks. We are all familiar with strawberries turning into a mold culture in your refrigerator. Not so with blueberries which are ready from the day you purchase them through the next millennium.
And blueberries are consistently tasty. They are delicious and taste exactly the same whether you buy them in July of January. Strawberries are totally hit or miss. It is possible to buy a basket of strawberries that have no taste at all. Watermelons which you can only purchase in summer, are delicious about 50% of the time and honeydews are only good if you are eating them in the tropics. Cantaloupes are good some of the time and have a very short season and they don’t make oranges the way they used to.
Blueberries have been treated as a second-class fruit in our diet. They don’t get the love of apples, peaches and oranges. They are very healthy as they are loaded with anti-oxidants. I just wanted to give blueberries their proper recognition and hope that you come to appreciate their reliability and consistency and make them a regular part of your meal planning.
Paid for by the Hammonton Blue Berry Growers Association.
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