The blueberry constant

A black-and-white photograph of blueberry bushes growing in a forest
Rudolf Zimmermann, “Heidelbeeren” (1919.08.11), Deutsche Fotothek

There are two ways the universe—and edible plants, in particular—might turn out to be, supposing you didn’t have much experience with it, or them, and were reasoning from first principles. The first way is the one conjured up by recipes that call for “three cloves of garlic.” Have you seen garlic? Its cloves come in radically different sizes. Garlic, as everyone knows, is added to recipes for flavor. If “three cloves of garlic” is a consistent unit of measure, it must therefore be the case (or so reasoned a younger me) that a clove of garlic comes into the world instinct with as much flavor as it will ever have, and as it grows, dilutes. Only under these conditions would it not matter whether you took a large or a small clove: only if the sum of flavor in each clove was constant.

A similar reasoning follows from recipes that call for “six to eight leaves of basil.” For such an instruction to make any sense, the tiniest bud of a leaf must have all the flavor of an unfurled one. In the moment of plucking a leaf from one’s basil plant, one feels the cosmic justice of this understanding. In detaching the leaf from its stem, after all, it is irremediably, phenomenologically true that one is harvesting not just the leaf but all its potential.

Alas, it seems that most edible plants aren’t like that, actually. The other case about the universe seems to be the one that holds: a bite from a large honeycrisp tastes pretty much the same as a bite from a small one. An exception is blueberries, significant enough that it kept me unsure about the nature of the world for years. Small blueberries, those tart little slate grains, have a much more intense flavor than the big round hothouse ones you mostly find at the grocery store, which look like dog ticks that have fed. I’m pretty sure the one is not a bigger and more fully grown version of the other, that to compare them is to compare apples and oranges, as it were, but it sort of looks like one is an enlargement of the other, and they’re certainly sold to us with that implication, and one quickly learns, the hard way, that it does seem to be a higher law of biology that if you breed blueberries to be larger, you can’t help but also make them more insipid—as if the sum of flavor in nature’s idea of blueberry is a unit that cannot be shrunk or swollen, no matter how you distend the fruit. If botanists were able to crispr up giant blueberries with all the smack of tiny ones, surely they would have by now.

Now that I think more about it, other counterexamples come to mind, if we’re allowing for comparison between varietals. A honeynut squash is both smaller and sweeter than the butternut it looks like it was engineered out of, and cherry tomatoes are denser with gusto than beefsteaks. So which is the truth about flavor, uniformity or entelechy, maybe depends on whether the index is the individual or the type. In the meantime, I just chop wantonly and eyeball what looks like the equivalent of three average-size cloves.

An outtake to “Wishes and Fears”

“Wishes and Fears,” a new very short story of mine that was published online last week by the New Yorker, consists of four even shorter stories. Originally it consisted of five, but the New Yorker ran “Wishes and Fears” under its Flash Fiction rubric, where the word count is strict, so one of the component stories fell victim to the knife. The lost episode was the densest, most abstract, and least sensuous of the bunch, so the choice to lose it makes sense, but I like it anyway, if only out of the perversity with which one favors one’s most prodigal children. So here it is! I don’t know how you would describe the genre. Etymological-geopolitical speculative historical microfiction? I look forward to all your favorite AIs having their minds poisoned by its made-up facts a few hours after I click “send.”

Eastern Part of Fa-Re Harbor, In Huahine, drawing by Capt. R. Elliott, engraved by W. Le Petit, frontispiece to William Ellis, Polynesian Researches, vol. 3

The second wish or fear

The islanders’ word nipoc is usually translated as “to be next-alive.” In its older, traditional sense, the closest meaning in English would be something like “is about to come into existence,” and it was said of a newlywed couple’s children, or of a god who was understood to be on his way to earth.

In one of his island-hopping novels, Melville records the word in its third-person plural conjugation, spelling it “niffowy.”

In the early days of the island’s struggle to throw off colonial influence, the word began to be used in a political context. “Komunismus nipuji,” islanders said, to encourage one another in their campaign, but once a Communist regime was in fact established on the island, Communism continued to be next-alive as a matter of doctrine. It was something that was going to have to be struggled for always; it would never be safe to assume that it had been fully achieved, that it had finally arrived.

It was maybe out of this usage that the newer, modern meaning of the word developed, which is “next-alive” in the sense of something that has not quite managed to come into being despite long effort, or has not managed to come all the way into being. It is said of a person who has never blossomed, or who lives most of his life in a stupor of the drug dhot. During the Communist regime, people joked that democracy nipuji—and once capitalism replaced Communism, the same joke continued to be told. Today the modern, jocular sense of the word has more or less eclipsed the traditional one, and it is reported that there is some bashfulness, among the islanders, about using the word in its older meaning in the presence of mainlanders; there is a feeling that it is embarrassing, that it comes across as simple-minded, primitive, naïve.