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Berries
Every summer, when I was a young boy, my parents would take me to the countryside to go blackberry (rubus fructicosus) picking. My mother would then use these berries to make excellent blackberry pies.
Now, I live in Finland, in the summer my girlfriend takes me blackberry picking. But, mustikka (vaccinium myrtillu) translates into English as blueberry. Instead of using them to make pies, my girlfriend freezes them for use on our breakfast cereals in the winter. To complicate matters further bilberry (vaccinium) also translates as mustikka. This is why all flora and fauna have Latin names so, no matter what the local name, the Latin name is the same globally.
Forest berries have been part of the Finnish diet for hundreds of years. Everyman´s Rights allows people to walk and pick wild berries in Finnish forests, marsh lands, and bogs, provided that they respect the environment.
Sixty seven per cent of Finnish adults go forest berry picking (71% women, 61% men). In a good year the berry crop can be as much as 50 million kilos.
About two thirds of the crop is picked by private individuals for personal use, the remaining third being picked commercially. Nearly 4 million kilos of forest berries are exported annually with the biggest demand coming from jam producers.
In monetary terms the most valuable forest berry in Finland is the lingonberry of which about 25 million kilos is picked each year (commercially 9 – 10 million kg). Other important forest berries are bilberry 15 million kilos (commercially 3 - 5million kg), cloudberry 6 - 8 million kilos (commercially 1 million kg) crowberry 1 - 2 million kilos (commercially 1 million kg) and wild raspberry 2 - 4 million kilos (rarely sold commercially). Away from the forest, strawberry farms are expecting the crop to top 10 million kilos this summer.
Finland has a clean environment with minimal pollution and fertilisers and pesticides (forbidden by law) are not used in Finnish forests. This means that Finnish forest berries are clean and ready to eat straight from the bush – indeed most are organic. Contrastingly, in England over the past 20 years the forest area around London has all but disappeared and car ownership has increased faster than the birth rate. The associated pollution means that my mother no longer goes blackberry picking, believing the few remaining berries to be heavily contaminated with lead!
As in the UK, commercial berry picking in Finland is predominately done by foreign pickers. Finnish strawberry growers prefer foreign berry pickers "Finns have no stamina for the job and stay at home when it rains" and British people consider the work too low paid and beneath them. As reported in Helsingin Sanomat this season, a total of about 400 strawberry pickers will arrive in Suonenjoki from the neighbourhood of Petrozavodsk in the Äänisenranta region of Russian Karelia in order to pick strawberries. A significant number of pickers will also arrive from Ukraine while Thai berry pickers can be found in Lapland. The number of Estonian workers continues to decrease due to the improved job market in Estonia.
Similarly, until recently, commercial berry picking in the UK was done by Eastern Europeans mainly from Poland, Lithuanian, and Slovakia. They were paid the minimum hourly wage. The irony is that they could not afford to buy the fruit they picked! However, the widened European Union and opening of the borders has enabled these pickers to seek better paid work in other sectors of the economy more befitting their qualifications.
The effect on the industry has been dramatic. Last year Hillers, a long-established farm in the heart of Warwickshire, with 150 acres of strawberry fields, lost nearly 50 tonnes of strawberries because they were unable to find pickers. This year, many tonnes of ‘pick your own’ strawberry farmers lost their entire crop thanks to the wet weather.
In a final twist British berry farms are now seeking immigrants from the developing world to do the work that immigrants from the EU are no longer prepared to do.
Mike Bangle is the owner of Talking English language consultancy and can be contacted at mike.bangle(at)phnet.fi
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