What is Canada's national fruit?

A couple of years ago this space made the case for the “versatile, nutritious, abundant, delicious wild blueberry” as Canada's national fruit.

qcna.qc.ca - Pucker up – embrace rhubarb as Canada's national vegetable

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Peter Black

peterblack@qctonline.com

A couple of years ago this space made the case for the “versatile, nutritious, abundant, delicious wild blueberry” as Canada’s national fruit. “It’s grown from coast to coast to coast, a leading export product, and a staple for all manner of wildlife – indeed beavers have been known to snack on the berries.” Crickets lurking in the patches greeted that call to action. As a consequence, this campaign was … fruitless. Undaunted, we now take up the cause of the national vegetable, it being the peak of the growing season, with root, stem, seed, flower, fruit and leafy veggies galore piling up in markets, groceries and on roadside stands across the land. Let’s start with the same criteria for determining the prospective national fruit, namely, the candidate must be native to Canada, meaning pre-European contact, and must be found in most parts of the country. The list of vegetables meeting that test, alas, is a boringly short one. According to botanical research and anecdotal history based on the diet of Indigenous people, we’ve got the “three sisters” – and that’s about it. Corn, climbing beans and squash. Hardy, versatile, nutritious and … well, without butter they’re awfully bland. As useful as they are, the sisters are doomed to be wallflowers at the grand vegetable ball. So, with due respect to the legumes that fed our predecessors in Canada for eons, we need a slightly more glamorous contestant. From time to time, a movement arises promoting a certain vegetable for national edible icon status. A Facebook petition has been out there for a few years “to declare the fiddlehead the national vegetable of Canada.” There’s not much by way of argumentation for the furled fronds of the young fern save, “In Canada, the fiddlehead occurs in parts of all provinces and territories.” (Again, without butter … )

A more feisty championing of a patriotic plant appeared in The Globe and Mail a few years ago, in response to the kale craze at the time. In the piece titled “Beyond the kale: Why cabbage should be our new national vegetable,” food writer Sarah Elton states, “This vegetable represents the essence of our country; it connects us to our past but also speaks to our future food culture.” Plus, who doesn’t like coleslaw, cabbage rolls and sauerkraut?

The humble cabbage does at least earn historical bonus points for having been brought to Canada by explorer Jacques Cartier in 1541. While the French attempt at a colony at that time did not take root, the cabbage certainly did.

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Still. The cabbage as the symbol of Canada’s vegetable glory? The idea has a certain unpleasant whiff to it. Well, then, what about rhubarb? What’s that, you say? Rhubarb, a vegetable? Preposterous! Although, like fruit, it almost always ends up as dessert, with a generous helping of sugar, botanically speaking, rhubarb is a vegetable, in the family of buckwheat, which is not actually a grain, but a plant whose seeds can be ground into flour. Like the lowly cabbage, rhubarb is an import, although with a much more exotic history. It arrived in Canada in the 1700s, with whom and when exactly is not known, although George Washington apparently planted a patch in 1788 (cultivated, no doubt, by his slaves). The initial popularity of rhubarb is due to man’s undying quest for regularity. Rhubarb’s medicinal powers, especially its capacity to relieve constipation without causing painful cramps, made the plant a highly prized commodity. It even sparked a Holy Grail-like search for the source of the “True Rhubarb,” the one whose powder had the most effective and gentle impact in purging the pipes, as it were. In the style of the mountain-top quest for universal truth, the “True Rhubarb” was traced to the Himalayas. Since then, rhubarb has been less sought out for its laxative effect than as a healthy and incredibly versatile vegetable to be turned into an infinite number of delicious desserts and, we might add, a cocktail – the rhubarb sour, which, of course, rhubarb is. In its simplest form, it’s a very Canadian snack. I recall as a kid, my mother chopping a stalk from the patch behind the garage, and me sticking the end into a bowl of sugar for that unique, puckering taste of sweet and sour. Rhubarb as Canada’s national vegetable? Don’t want to provoke a rhubarb, but such an idea would not make us the laughing stalk of the vegetable world.

qcna.qc.ca - Pucker up – embrace rhubarb as Canada's national vegetable

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