Dive Brief:
- Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan say that prairie fruit -- buffaloberry, choke cherry and sea buckthorn are rich in nutrition and should be developed commercially.
- The plants grow in the wild across the prairie states and Canadian provinces. All of them are already known to be edible -- people have been eating the for centuries. But none of them are grown in large commercial quantities.
- Chokecherry can be a better source of antioxident compounds than cranberries, the reserachers said. Bufffaloberries have four times as much ascorbic acid as oranges. Sea buckthorn's primary use would be for fiber.
Dive Insight:
The world is full of plants that, while edible, go largely unnoticed. In some cases, some strange shift in lifestyle occurs and the old ways are forgotten. Europeans once ate sea vegetables, but you're hard-pressed to find anyone outside of the Irish coast who still does. Asian cultures, on the other hand, still eat it. In fact seaweed is the basis of hundreds of Asian snack foods and is part of every good sushi meal.
In other cases, the reason is taste. Prairie fruit falls into that category. No one would argue that the stuff is delicious. People ate it ... sometimes ... because they could. And some enterprising folks have found ways to put prairie fruit into recipes. But by dedicating some science and production resources to the plants, it's likely that ingredients derived from prairie fruit will become a key part of the food industry.
