Berries are the purest food. I don’t mean this in some sort of moral or sense, and I don’t mean that they are the healthiest food. What I mean is that berries can be eaten — they want to be eaten, in fact — with absolutely no processing. They don’t need to be peeled, cut, milled, or cooked. In a healthy, unsprayed patch they don’t even need to be washed.
This summer has seen an early bounty of fruit. In my garden both the planted raspberries and the wild black raspberries have been bearing prolific crops. I don’t grow blueberries, because a u-pick place near Cooperstown has seven acres of well established and beautifully cared for bushes, which have ripe fruit a full two weeks early
There’s no particular mystery to why the year’s been so good. The spring arrived on time and warm enough to make plants happy. We’ve had a few dry spells, but for the most part rain has been regular. In short, it’s been a perfect growing season.
This makes it a great opportunity to compare the different varieties of raspberry, since it’s safe to assume that their fruit is at its peak, not just for this year but for any year. Two of the types are distinctly more vigorous than the others, with canes higher than my head heavy laden with fruit. One of them produces classic red berries, but these are incredibly tart. The other has large, purple berries, which can taste great if you manage to pick them at the absolute peak of ripeness, but which are otherwise a bit bland. The others, one yellow, one blush are noticeably less prolific, but they have superior flavor.
This tastiness extends beyond the fruit, unfortunately. I don’t spray anything in the garden, and raspberries are remarkably hardy plants. The one pest is Japanese beetles, and these show an obvious preference for the same varieties that produce the tastiest fruit. Even though all the plants are right next to each other, the beetles congregate heavily on some of them while ignoring others.
I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that insects can taste. I take it for granted mammals and birds and even fish will take a great deal of care when deciding what to eat, but something about bugs makes them seem far less particular. I’m not shocked that they prefer a raspberry plant to a maple leaf, but I am that they prefer one type of raspberry to another.
In first thinking about this post and then writing it I’ve struggled to come up with a coherent explanation for why I should have this intuition, and I don’t think there’s a good reason, or any reason at all. I simply felt something to be the case (maybe it’s because insects look robotic?) and then decided it must be so.
According to the article linked above at least some insects can taste with their legs, which makes me think that the experience probably isn't so analogous to ours. Without getting too spooky about what we even mean by a word that attempts to describe in interior, somewhat subjective sensation, I do think it's worth keeping in mind that the beetles on my raspberry plants probably aren't having an elevated aesthetic experience of each leaf they nibble.
But they are undeniably capable of subtle discernment, and that's weird enough.
