A Healthy Fruit Celebrates Its Holiday

A cranberry like me thinks of itself as the self-sufficient type.

- Kate Lowenstein and Daniel Gritzer

A cranberry like me thinks of itself as the self-sufficient type. Millennia ago, as one of a handful of fruits native to North America (along with blueberries and Concord grapes), I eked out an existence in the sandy, acidic, waterlogged soil of glacier-formed bogs and other inhospitable spots in the continent’s colder regions. In an environment that many plants would have found impossible, my shrubby vines flourished, my little green fruits turning white, then pink, then red as autumn deepened toward winter.

Native Americans picked my wild berries, eating them dried with deer meat, mashing them into antibacterial poultices for wound healing, and transforming the red skins into dye. When the Europeans arrived, my vitamin C helped them avoid scurvy.

Even after I became a cultivated crop (circa 1816), better-nourished modern humans benefited from the antioxidants in my skins and flesh, which offer anticancer, anti–heart disease, and antibacterial properties. I also help prevent urinary tract infections, thanks to my unusual abundance of chemicals called proanthocyanidins, which keep bacteria from sticking to the tract’s inner surface.

Despite these attributes, my fame could have remained limited. After all, my raw flesh is an acquired taste, to say the least—so tart and tannic that it takes more than a small amount of sugar to make me palatable. I might have been a mere novelty that shows up at the farmers market for a short season—the way, say, gooseberries or fiddlehead ferns do, stumping home cooks unfamiliar with how to incorporate them into a meal.