After a long morning cleaning up after so many spiders, I had to pick up a few things from the grocery store, and fixed a light lunch of rice cakes with strawberry yogurt and berries on top, which is simple and quick and good for me and my wife.
This teeny-tiny package of blackberries cost $4.
I remember standing in front of a big blackberry bush and stripping off more blackberries than that in one handful and stuffing them into my mouth. Wouldn’t even have to move, just pulling them off a single branch.
I went ahead and bought them out of a sense of nostalgia. They were good, but I’m not going to be able to afford to do that very often.
I’m looking at 20cm of snow outside and thinking that blackberries costing a lot of money doesn’t seem unusual.
Trumpflation? Coffee is outrageous. The only berries I buy are a frozen bag of blueberries for my morning oatmeal. I was buying them fresh and freezing them myself. I think I priced the bag of frozen out to save money, based on memory.
Blackberries are a pain in the ass to pick and keep in good condition for very long, I definitely understand the pricing for that.
Here in the Pacific Southwest (of Canada), wild blackberries (invasive) are infected with Asian fruit flies (a different invasive) so they don’t keep well fresh. We’ll pick a few kilograms over the summer, takes an hour or so, wash & freeze them RIGHT away, or they’ll sprout maggots in short order.
Somehow I can’t wrap my head around blackberrys being something to buy. ;-). Sure can’t get them this time of year, but in that stuff grows everywhere around here, over the hiking and biking trails, in the wild corner behind the house, actually everywhere in the garden if I don’t keep it in check…
The tastiest weeds!
Correcting myself on @2 I also buy avocados and bananas, both berries. Coffee too?
If you every come to the San Francisco Bay Area to kick around for a while, there’s a place in West Marin on the road between Point Reyes and Petaluma named Marin French Cheese Company. They have a picnic area next to the story where one side is along a little creek that’s lined with blackberries. At the right time of the year you can eat your fill for free. When my son was little we would go through there on our way to Petaluma, avoiding the freeway, and the little boy loved picking and eating the berries. Also near here at the old Hamilton Air Force base, there’s a path that’s lined with blackberries. Those get picked over more and they aren’t well maintained…lots of poison oak…but the berries are pretty good.
Tariffs on goods from Mexico may be part of that $4.
Don’t eat blackberries after November 1st. That’s when the devil spits on them. We used to guzzle the blackberries growing by the old canal, a secluded backwater of industrial dereliction. Years later I realised it’s just behind a wartime lead- acid battery factory. Probably explains a lot.
@Hemidactylus#2:
I mean, Trump personally is not the only reason coffee is more expensive, but he is absolutely not helping on multiple fronts. One of the other fronts being climate change, of course: coffee plants are a bit picky about weather conditions, and some of its attackers like the fungal disease coffee rust actually do better when you get torrential rains, so ‘more extreme weather conditions’ means less coffee production.
Here in Oz there are several blackberry bushes on the street. A number of folks grow productive gardens near the footpath and passers by are free to take produce from them.
We usedto go blackberrying a s kids. Filled old ice cream containers with the berries we’d pick from the wild and then enjoyt ehm for quite a while. Mum makes the best blackberry pie.
Have to be careful they haven’t been sprayed first these days mind you. They are weeds here and I must admit to both eating the berries and pulling out the plants providiing them simultaneous sometimes which admittedly seems a bit ungrateful!
Oh and they are sometimes left in place on purpose inclduing in Belair National Park since they provide habitat for the locally endangered Southern Brown Bandicoot.( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_brown_bandicoot )
There’s blackberries, and then there’s blackberries. The ones that grow wild everywhere are hmalayan blackberries, imported into California for breeding stock. We call them road candy – sweet but not particularly tasty. They were crossed with various better tasting berries, especially pacific northwest trailing blackberries, which are tiny and the best tasting of all. That cross gave us Logan berries. More breeding gave us thornless blackberries. I grow four kinds – early, middle, late, and Logan. These are all huge vines, reflecting their himalayan heritage. I have to prune the bejesus out of them to fit them in my small yard. And I still graze on Himalayans when out walking: road candy.
Corporate Greedflation is killing us all!
PZ paid the equivalent of $10.67 per pound for blackberries which grow wild EVERYWHERE.
This is what we face at the ‘less expensive’ stores: $6.99 for 4 chocolate muffins at ~12oz., $18.99 for 22.6 oz. of coffee, $4.99 for 5.5oz of baked potato chips. $18.99 for 73oz of All laundry detergent. $4.79 for 16oz of cheap stick butter.
Don’t even talk about used cars costing almost as much as new ones.
A 50yr mortgage at 7% will DOUBLE the total cost of a home and many people won’t live long enough to really own it.
That is just the tip of the Death Spiral iceberg that we are sliding down.
Buy them frozen? If you have a microwave and a sieve/coffee filter gently heat some water with the microwave on a lower setting in a shallow-ish bowl, remove the bowl and water, and gently set the berries in a sieve or a coffee filter inside the bowl of gently warmed water for a bit. With a little patience they will defrost. Your yoghurt will cool them back down.
Isn’t it kinda wintery where you are? Here in California it is still nice and warm even though the clouds are threatening rain. But I still wouldn’t expect to find any blackberries on the vine here. It’s not the season for them. A little research suggests that winter blackberries come from Chile and Mexico. This is a huge expensive trip for delicate fruits even without some orange moron.
What did this indulgence cost you last year?