Raspberry Beret

When Prince wrote his famous song about the raspberry beret, implicit was a recognition by the musician of the unique colour of the fruit. It was not the first recognition of this fruit in music, and indeed there was even a band that bore the name Raspberries, and if you are a child of the early seventies, you may even remember their hit “Go All The Way”. Certainly the raspberry has come a long way for a fruit that has only been cultivated for 500 years.
That is not to say that the raspberry wasn’t consumed by humans until then. It seems most likely that it has been eaten for as long as humans have been around, or at least where it was available. And according to the plant historians, this was Asia, although there is also evidence of types that are native in the Western World also.
Roman records of raspberries date back to the 4th century, but it does not seem that they were cultivated then. Instead, it is believed that it may have been the crusaders, who wrote about a delicious fruit with sweet strong aroma that they encountered on their way to Jerusalem, who brought them back with them. This would relate well with the evidence that cultivation only began in the 1600’s in France and England, and then later in North America.
The first written mention of raspberries in English is in a book on herbal medicine which dates to 1548. And it seems that the herbal doctors were quite correct, as modern science has borne out their confidence in this little fruit. The range and potency of antioxidants in raspberry has been proven, and these components help prevent damage to the cells of humans (and animals). Also, the raspberry has antibiotic properties, which means that it aids against irritable bowel syndrome and other infections. As well as this, research with animals has shown that raspberries have the potential to inhibit cancer cell proliferation and tumour formation, especially in the colon. And finally, raspberries, and a tea made from raspberry leaves are said to relieve the nausea associated with pregnancy, and even to assist with an easier delivery.
Raspberries are part of the rose family, and it is from there that they get their slight prickles, though they are not barbed like their close relatives, the blackberries. Each fruit is in actual fact an aggregate of many tiny fruits called druplets, each of which has a separate seed. Apart from red raspberries, there are purple, orange, yellow, white and even black types, though at our farm we only have the red type.

Food Miles

Food and Farming campaign group “Sustain” recently issued a report entitled "Eating Oil: Food supply in a changing climate." 
The central argument of this report is that buying food that has had to travel to get to your plate mops up fossil fuel in its transportation and distribution. Both international and national transportation of food is criticised. Even home-produced food now has to travel twice as far to get to the supermarket shelf compared with 1978. (I have ample experience of this as follows: if I wish to supply strawberries to Tesco in Clonmel, they must be delivered to the Dublin depot. This means fruit would have to travel 250 miles to do the ten mile journey from Cahir to Clonmel, an utterly wasteful practice, which means that the fruit you get will also be a day older than necessary). In fact, between 33% and 40% of road freight is now due to food being transported. 
Sustain argues that this means that the food supply is inefficient and unsustainable. 
Take a strawberry for example: An average strawberry might contain 10 calories. However, to fly it here from California takes twenty times more energy than this. What a waste of aviation fuel. And I am sorry to report that at the height of the Irish season, supermarkets were importing American fruits, both last year and again this year.
Even in the case of the much more efficient ocean transport, for every calorie of vegetable shipped from New Zealand, an equivalent amount of oil is burned in getting it here. 
Road transport is of intermediate efficiency. To get an apple from Italy to Ireland by road takes as much energy as to get it from China to Rotterdam by ship. 
Of course, none of this is sustainable. Report author Andy Jones has said that the food system has become almost completely dependent on oil. One shopping basket of 26 imported items travelled 241,000km and released as much Carbon Dioxide as would cooking for a family of four for six months. 
Sustain said the one way to reduce food miles is by choosing seasonal, home-grown products, and by buying direct from the farmer. On average, this option is 50 times more energy-efficient than purchasing imports.