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.