This right here is the finest dessert i've ever bought. And i can't make it myself.
It's because it's got black currants in it, and those were banned for about half
a century in the United States. That really is so so good.
That terrible terrible ban actually tells a bigger story about history.
Okay let's walk and talk. So i broke my real camera lens a couple weeks ago— just got to
get that off my chest— that's why i'm vlogging on the Insta 360 like a skateboarding 16 year old.
Anyway, the more important story is this. The black currants. This is actually a black
currant and pear streusel. They are tart, they are sweet. A couple weeks ago i had this pie
for the first time and i was blown away. I'd never heard of black currants before.
There are estimates saying that only one percent or something of Americans have ever even had them.
I searched far and wide in groceries and farmers markets.
No luck. There's a reason for that, though. That's the white pine.
These are the Smithsonian samples of white pine blister rust.
It's not a bug nor a beetle, it is a disease caused by a fungus and it kills.
This infographic from the US Department of Agriculture circa 1939 shows the toxic cycle.
See, blister rust, lived on white pines. But instead of going from white pine to white pine,
it hitched a ride on berries like gooseberries, and the worst offender, black currants.
The black currants were a crucial hiding place for this fungus that obliterated white pines.
This shows how black currants could be like a power-up for the fungus,
carrying it from one white pine to another. This fungus worked its way down a tree
and into the trunk, killing it. And that was really bad.
The problem started around 1900. They didn't instantly know currants' role in it,
but they saw that the pines were dying. The pines were grown in Europe and threatened by
blister rust there, but it was a bigger deal in North America where they were all from.
That was bad. Depends where you look, but white pines had a value of anywhere
from 400 million to a billion dollars. They represented the logging industry and
they were going to be destroyed by blister rust. So Americans in the 1910s had to make a choice.
They chose to abandon my sweet sweet berries. All right, I'm off to my local grocery store
because they have a really good international food section, including British foods.
So yeah, in British culture, black currants like these — they're a known quantity. They're
in scones, they're in juice. In fact, this company is related to the group that gave
British school children black currant juice during World War II to give them more nutrition.
But to me, to an American, it's kind of weird. And for me it represents an alternative
berry verse — yes i just said berryverse instead of universe
and yes i am proud of myself. Let's get a look at this berry.
It's beautiful. In America, they started
by regulating white pines, then in the mid 1910s they centered on black currants and other berries.
I just read World War Z, that book about the zombie invasion. This year by year log
of current terror is basically the same thing. Confusion, fear, and stuttering public action.
The big thing you read about is the Plant Quarantine Act of 1912,
which allowed the Federal Government to restrict imports and empowered states to regulate more.
In practice, a patchwork of state laws made the currant ban a reality. I love this headline:
"plants once respected now hunted as outlaws." Eventually, in addition to banning farming
almost everywhere, they just ripped out black currants everywhere they could find them.
The message was clear: currants equal death. By the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps,
that depression-era social program, spent millions ripping out black currants and
gooseberries across the country. Their motto: "every bush must come out."
Oh yeah. I'm so excited right now.
Oh my god, it's like if grape juice got out of the juice box
and got a job, maybe a law degree. So good. All right, so what is the actual takeaway
from all of this. Why does any of this matter? I suppose you could be skeptical of whether these
removal programs were effective, or maybe you could be interested that the Federalization
of these programs kind of began at the same time there was a Federal income tax being established.
So government had a changing role in this time period, in ways that we notice
and in ways that we never realized. But, honestly, these are getting a little into
hot take land for me, and i don't know enough to say that the decision was right or wrong,
or that we could have done anything better. There's a picture that i'd like you to look at.
This shows some school children in Mississippi in 1930, after a drought. They're eating currant
cookies sent to them by the Red Cross from abroad. These kids had a flavor in their childhood that
most Americans just didn't. For me, i guess it's the history that fascinates
me. Accidents of fungus and finance shaped things as simple and disconnected as our taste.
Improved fungicides and breeding have meant a lot of the currant bands have been lifted,
but that legacy means that these berries are still obscure in the U.S.
The streusel and the juice that are so delightfully foreign to me
were predetermined to be scarce by the economic imperatives of 1900s loggers' interests.
Knowing why my sweet berries are so hard to get even today — that makes them even sweeter.
Alright, that's it for this video. Thanks for watching. If you haven't been here before,
I do personal and uh history type videos on this channel. And i really do love these
black currants. If you can subscribe or like this video, that'd be awesome. Also if you have more
experience with these delicious delicious berries than i do, let me know. I'm sure that a lot of you
do and i'd be interested to learn about it. All right, that's it for this one. I'm gonna
sit here and sip for a little bit longer. That's so good.