Oregon now has an official state vegetable, the potato, which strikes me as a rather bland choice. How did this come to be? It turns out the Oregon Potato Commissioner dropped the proposal on a Friday night so it could churn through the weekend news cycle before the Council on Broccoli Awareness woke up on Monday, and although there was an underground movement to advance the turnip, the potato mostly had the field to itself. An earlier attempt to promote the Green Bean failed for lack of support.
Still, it seems an odd choice for a state that likes to consider itself idiosyncratic, especially since it’s right next door to Idaho, which is already famous for its potatoes and racists almost to the exclusion of anything else. It is true that Oregon produces a crapload of potatoes its own self, and in fact the famous Ore-Ida Potato is a combination of Oregon and Idaho. The company slogan has, since 1965, been “When it says Ore-Ida, it’s all righta,” in spite of which it has been quite a successful brand.
Idaho has been going on and on about its potatoes for a very long time. In 1928 the state unveiled a license plate featuring a very large dumpy brown potato completely surrounding the numbers. It was not popular and was soon abandoned when tourists made a point of stealing them because they were so dumb-looking. Not until 1947 was the potato returned to the license plates, this time in the form of a decal of a baked potato with a pat of butter on it and the phrase “World Famous Potatoes” stamped on the bottom. In 1957 the word “World” was dropped, and to this day Idaho’s plates just say “Famous Potatoes,” which is a shame. It makes it seem like Idaho has individually famous potatoes, such as Spud Webb, or Tim Russet, or Chip from the My Three Sons show, or Stephen Fry. (Or Winged Eel Fingerling, may he rest in peace.)
A lot of state symbols come about because of the efforts of industries itching to promote their products. This is why our state nut here is the Hazelnut and our state pie is Marionberry, developed by Oregon State University. The state animal, the beaver, has a heritage going back two hundred years, when dead beavers were an important economic commodity. In keeping with our imagined idiosyncratic reputation, we have a beaver on our state flag, the only state flag in the country with two distinct sides; more idiosyncratic yet, the beaver is on the back of the flag, although we tend to think of beavers as being in the front. There is also a beaver on the state seal, which is the Steller Sea Lion.
Many state symbols, however, arise because of the lobbying efforts of schoolchildren who are encouraged to learn about natural history and civic engagement all at once. That is how New Mexico ended up with a state insect, the tarantula hawk wasp. Elementary school children throughout the state voted it in handily. The wasp has one of the most painful stings ever and female wasps paralyze large tarantulas with it, drag them into a burrow, bury them, lay eggs on them, and allow the emerging larvae to suck out all the juice and yum from the disconsolate but still-living spiders. It is thought that the tarantula hawk wasp won virtually 100% of the boys’ votes because it was so gnarly, while the girls’ votes were diluted somewhat by prepubescent insecurity and the wish to become a beautiful butterfly.
It was found, however, that the popularity of the stabbing, dragging, egg-laying mother-suckers rose dramatically among women past the age of consent.
NJ’s state fruit is the blueberry, which was developed here in the 1920s. Up to that time blueberries were collected from wild plants. Elizabeth White, a farmer hired local pickers to find the bushes that produced the largest berries and then had those bushes brought to her farm, where she cross-pollinated them to produce plants that consistently produced large berries.
Whitesbog is today mostly known for producing cranberries. Double Trouble is also best known for (formerly) producing cranberries, but if you walk back into the cedar swamp behind their main reservoir, you can still find rows of tall blueberry bushes with clumps of blueberries in season that are the size of grapes. A bit mild tasting, but hey, they’re huge!
I prefer the teeny-tiny wild blueberries that are sold by Wyman’s and are only sold in the grocery stores in the frozen food section. They are much sweeter than cultivars, and have a thinner skin.
A long while back, I nicked some tiny wild raspberry bushes from a local woods and planted them in my yard. I picked very few berries, as the birds always got to them first. But since I love birds, it was well worth it to plant them if they got some free meals out of them.
My house came with a blueberry bush. Each year it produces berries and each year the birds get all or most of them.
For some reason I cannot fathom, the birds mostly ignore my blueberry bushes. I have nine of them. My favorite fruit. Is blueberry the state fruit somewhere?
Blueberries are NJ’s state fruit
I had to look it up. Strawberries are Delaware’s state fruit. They’re okay… but my favorite fruit is the fig. Unfortunately, most people only know figs from Fig Newtons. OMG… not the same thing at all. A fresh fig in season is a mouthgasm.
Just from Fig Newtons? That is so sad. My mom had a little (less than a yard high) fig tree in our yard in Connecticut. Every winter she piled logs around it so it would survive the winter when the snow made a little igloo over it. One winter it didn’t snow and the poor thing froze to death. Funny, I don’t remember it ever producing any figs…
Around here, fig trees just come in Extra Large.
Mouthgasm, preach it, sister!
And then there’s persimmons. Like everything else, if you only know them from the grocery store, you don’t know them. They’re best after a frost, harvested from off the ground.
Or post-frost off the tree, whacked off the branches with a stick and fielded by my coworker, who is a baseball umpire. Down the street from my former boss’s house there was a persimmon tree that the homeowners never harvested. They were a Japanese variety, huge, juicy and flavorful. I harvested them one year, found a single one left intact after squirrels had eaten all the others the next year and the year after that the tree died.
I first had one that a colleague bought for me. Store bought of course, so a bit on the astringent side.
The next ones were a wild North American variety that I found growing in Double Trouble State Park. My girlfriend was mortified when I ate them off the ground.
Persimmons? I like them best dried, but those are available only at certain times of year and in certain places.
In the 1950s we vacationed on Cape Cod (which is mostly sand) and went blueberry picking in the short scrubby forest out behind the place we stayed in, in North Truro. Buckets were just for show — eat ten, save one (more or less). A few huckleberries too.
What’s your state fruit?
Persimmons it is with me! SOOOOO yum! My niece has a large Japanese persimmon tree, and she harvests many flats of them, and weighs all her produce. I think it’s something like 160 lbs this year. She only wants about 1 fruit per week, so I am the recipient of as many as I can consume, so at least 4 or 5 a day for several months. She’s going to try to make fruit leather from some of them, and I’m sure she’ll be successful.
When my sainted Mom had the younger ‘simmon tree, we didn’t know about harvesting them early, so one morning I pedaled over there before work, thinking it was about time to pick them, and spied a very fat and blissfully happy raccoon waddling down the trunk of the tree. No persimmons for us that year.
The native wild persimmons are maybe about the size of an apricot, but so good! I haven’t worked out when they’re ready to be picked and have either arrived serendipitously when they’re just beginning to fall, when they’re still on the tree (not worth collecting) or already gone. I figured if the Japanese variety was ready, the natives would be ready. Nope, gone. I tried harvesting them before they fell one year. Nope, mouth puckering taste, definitely not a good taste. I put them out on the patio table and frustratingly the local moths found them intoxicating and arrived in clouds to eat them. But still didn’t taste right to me!
The grocery store brings them in around Thanksgiving. The local had two varieties this year, a small round one (probably Fuyu) and the usual heart shaped big Hachiya. The Fuyus were hard as rocks and never ripened even though I kept them in the fridge. I put them out on the patio and nothing had eaten them. The one Hachiya was firm when bought, but after several weeks in the fridge it softened and was edible, but not great.
Brown Turkey fig trees are the favored variety in Virginia, and produce so much fruit I gladly let neighbors help pick it in return for taking all they wanted! (There were 4 trees, but that wasn’t my idea.)
I hated fig newtons so much as a child that I’ve never tried a grown-up fig. I don’t see any reason to try now.
Fresh figs are nothing like fig newtons. Please try them!
Seriously!!! Murr! Don’t go through life never having tasted a fig! Not a bit like a Fig Newton. A ripe Turkish fig in season is incredible!
Lotsa figs growing here in Portland, OR. The branches on fig trees (yep- they grow to 12-15 ft here) grow over sidewalks and no one wants them by end of season. We have both the purple and the not purple varieties. This year the giant figs (the first ones to ripen) were as big as fat sausages and 2-3X the size of the later ripening fruit.
The population of Scotland is not much more then the population of Oregon. I very tentatively searched online for Scotland’s national vegetable (bearing in mind that our national flower is a spear thistle and our national animal is a unicorn). It turns out it’s the neep and the tattie, the two main ingredients of clapshot. More conventionally, our national fruit is the raspberry, probably because many are grown here, but a bit of me likes to think that it’s because of the noise we make at fascists.
I’m wondering if it isn’t common knowledge that the neep and the tattie are the two main ingredients of clapshot.
I just wanted to type that for myself.
I’ve never had clapshot, but then there are a number of traditional Scots dishes that my grandparents (both immigrants) didn’t share with my mom or their grandchildren. I found out after my grandmother passed that each New Year’s Eve she made a plum pudding complete with the traditional shilling baked into it, topped with flaming brandy and served it to the neighbors. My mom knew about it, but didn’t think we needed to. Also no haggis, but we did have blood puddings, pork pies and smoked tongue.
Your hilarious puns made me look up the Maryland Kids page for state symbols, where I learned that we have a state fossil (Ecphora gardnerae gardnerae, an extinct snail), a state dinosaur (Astrodon johnstoni), and a state cat (calico, because its colors supposedly look like the Maryland state flag.)
And that reminds me — how are your kitties and what are their avatar names now?
They’re either still or back to being Wally and Clifford. “Higgs” didn’t roll off the tongue when I screamed at them the other day for dumping a tumbler of cold water in my lap.
“them”
Have they partnered up in crime, then? So soon, alas
Hey, besides potatoes and racists, we’ve grown a huge crop of Christian Nationalists, too. Note that half your state, Murr, wants to be part of our state, the fools. We also have a state dinosaur, which I don’t think many other states have.
I’d have to look it up, but I don’t think we have a state dinosaur. All our dinosaurs arrived here by the Bloat ‘n’ Float method–they weren’t born here.
Rhode Island doesn’t have a state vegetable that I can find, but the state appetizer is calamari and the state bird is (of course) the Rhode Island Red chicken!
Mmm. State appetizer. Sure hope ours isn’t fried quahog.
Props for the tribute to Former Zappa & the Mothers guitarist, Elliot Ingbar. (He was renamed “Winged Eel Fingerling” by Captain Beefheart.)
You’re quite welcome. Winged is a staple around here.
New Mexico not only has a state insect, but a state question too — “Red or Green?”
Seriously?
That’s a chile reference, right?