Blueberries were growing here long before anyone planted the first apple trees. (Apples originate in central Asia and were developed into the fruit we know in western Europe). Indeed, had the Wampanoag Native Americans not shown the early English settlers at Plymouth how to collect blueberries, dry them and keep them for winter, they would've likely starved to death. Various native peoples had gathered blueberries for hundreds of years and in some places the berries were awarded a high status with spiritual aspects.

And what goes around comes around, because blueberries these days, are very in vogue. Their health benefits have sent them soaring up the desired fruits chart. It turns out the chemistry in blueberries is simply amazing.

Today, blueberries are added to everything, muffins to yogurt, because of the health benefits attributed to them. Indeed, global consumption surpassed 1.4 billion pounds in 2016, and the U.S. production alone topped 750 million pounds.

The Blueberry Council website bullet points the following: North American per capita blueberry consumption grew nearly 50 percent between 2010-2015. Fresh blueberry sales amounted to $1.5 billion in 2015, up 7 percent versus 2014, making blueberries number 2 in fresh berry dollar sales behind strawberries. Frozen blueberry sales reached $189.6 million in 2015, up 4 percent versus 2014, making blueberries second in that market. Finally, Americans are now nearly twice as likely to buy blueberries as they were in 2004, with 84 percent of consumers citing awareness of blueberry health benefits, up 115 percent.

Blueberries like acidic soil; 4.8 PH is perfect. Cultivated bushes are perennials, taking eight to twelve years for a bush to reach its highest yield. The fruit is harvested by hand, though machine harvesting is also employed. Pickers wear five gallon buckets on their belts. The harvest in Florida is the earliest, beginning in April, while Michigan, the largest producing state, harvests from July to September.

Much of this is a new phenomenon. In the 19th century blueberries were mostly harvested from the wild and the Shawangunk ridge was famous for them, which were known locally as "huckleberries," with pickers working every summer up on the ridge through the World War II years. Old timers can tell you that when there were still trains running out of Ellenville, whole boxcars were loaded with locally harvested blueberries bound for New York City and its restaurants. And there are still the ruins of berry pickers' shacks up near Sam's Point, rotting slowly away in mute testimony to a bygone lifestyle.

The change from wild "low bush" blueberries to modern cultivars began with the work of Elizabeth White, daughter of a New Jersey cranberry grower, and government botanist Frederick Coville, who together produced the first "high bush" blueberry plants through crossbreeding blueberry, raising the fruit's profile around the world.

As cultivated blueberries took hold and the days of the berry pickers and their unique ridgeline community came to an end, blueberry picking went from romantic hard work in the hills to unromantic labor in the fields and a separate revolution in the popular understanding of berries and other foods began. By 2000, everyone was talking up antioxidants and "free radicals" as a means of neutralizing all that stresses us out on a cellular level.

Blueberries are endowed with reasonable amounts of the vitamins we've all heard of, including A, B and C, but they also have a certain amount of important minerals such as magnesium that we otherwise don't get enough of in the normal American diet. Furthermore, blueberries are about 14 percent carbohydrate, mostly due to their low 9 percent sugar content. But they also host a lot of anthocyanin which makes blueberries the world leaders in antioxidant activity.

And so, year by year, blueberries have risen in the consciousness of people seeking good health in their diets; among the 25 fruits and 27 vegetables most commonly consumed in the United States, wild blueberries have the highest total phenolic content per serving (phenolic compounds are made by plants to protect themselves from everything from radiation to insect bites). And among all their healthy chemistry are also a couple of compounds generating enormous scientific buzz: resveratrol and pterostilbene, the same elements that make red wine good for you, lead medical professionals to speak in terms of anti-aging, mimic the effects on genes of caloric restriction, and maybe even suppress cancer. In addition, combined in supplements these properties of blueberries appear to have even improved brain function in elderly rats.

And so Ellenville's Blueberry Festival, while celebrating the grand tradition of the now long-gone huckleberry pickers and those freight cars full of berries headed for the city, is also smack dab in the middle of the cultural rise of Vaccinium angustifolium (wild blueberry) and its hybridized cousin V. corymbosum (high bush blueberry).

The festival itself grew out of an earlier fall music festival. Major credit must go to John Adams and Marc Fried, who were the first to promote a blueberry festival and get it off the ground. Fried is still involved; he'll be tasting blueberry pies as one of the judges of the annual contest this coming Saturday, August 12. Adams, meanwhile, has focused his sights on making Wawarsing's old Colony Farm on Route 209 into an agri-tourism draw for the entire region.

See you all on Canal Street between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. Saturday!