AI Summary
5 min readAmerica's Forbidden Fruit and Forgotten First Soda
When British-born Nicola Twilley first came to the United States, she was shocked by the purple candy. In the UK, purple Skittles are black currant flavored. In America, purple means grape. This seemingly trivial difference turns out to be the legacy of a massive federal eradication campaign that wiped black currants from the American landscape for most of the 20th century—a campaign driven by an imported tree disease, a government panic about timber, and a fungus that needs both pine trees and currant bushes to survive.
The Fungus That Killed the Currant
Black currants are a tart, complex berry with a flavor that Lily Hislop, a tree crop breeder at the Savannah Institute in Wisconsin, describes as "a blackberry and a pine tree together." Europeans have cultivated them since at least the 900s in Russia, and by the 1500s they were popular across Northern Europe. European settlers brought currants to North America in the 1600s, and by the late 1800s, about 7,400 acres of currants were growing in the United States, mostly in New York State.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (03:04) **Listener Question: Why is Black Currant Common in Europe but Rare in the US?** - The hosts introduce a transatlantic flavor divide, where purple candy means grape in America and black currant in the UK.
- 2 (05:49) **What is a Black Currant?** - Lily Hislop, a tree crop breeder, describes the flavor, family, and global history of currants.
- 3 (07:30) **The Great American Currant Ban** - European settlers brought currants to America, but a federal ban in 1911 nearly wiped them out.
- 4 (08:36) **The White Pine Blister Rust Disaster** - The fungus that caused the ban was accidentally imported from Europe via infected tree seedlings.
- 5 (11:41) **The Federal Eradication Campaign** - The US government launched a massive, violent campaign to rip out all currant bushes from the landscape.
- 6 (14:23) **Why Europe Kept Black Currants** - Canada and Europe chose to save the fruit rather than the tree, leading to the modern flavor divide.
- 7 (15:03) **The WWII Boost for Black Currant** - During World War II, black currants became a national health staple in the UK, cementing their place in candy.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Fan favorite Ask Gastropod is back, and we’re celebrating the season by solving a pair of trans-Atlantic mysteries! First up: if you have a purple candy in Europe, it’s nearly guaranteed to be flavored with a tart little berry called blackcurrant—while the same color candy in the US is almost always grape. One intrepid Gastropod listener wanted to know: why the difference? We’ve got the story of how a tree so important it was on early Americans coins inspired the botanical witch hunt that made a delicious fruit illegal this side of the pond—and how to try the fabulous flavor we're missing out on! Plus, lager and ale lovers around the world would be deeply confused by the warmly spiced soda that Americans call “root beer.” So where did this non-alcoholic beverage come from, what are these mysterious roots, and why is it called beer? It’s a tale of tea, teetotalers, and a ubiquitous ugly baby—and because we at Gastropod will put our stomachs on the line to get to the truth, we attempted to brew the original recipe to taste it for ourselves.
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