Grown and Made: Fruits of the Field and the Foods Fermentation and Cheesemaking Leave Behind

The raspberry is the fruit of several Rubus species in the rose family. World production reached 940,979 tonnes in 2023, with Russia supplying 23 percent, and the fruit goes into preserves, pastries, ice cream and liqueurs as well as being eaten whole.

A second Rubus fruit, but with a tangled taxonomy: hybridization and a form of asexual seed production led botanists to group many species into aggregates. Yields can reach 20,000 pounds per acre, yet the Himalayan or Armenian blackberry is treated as a noxious weed in the Pacific Northwest.

Moving to a different genus, cranberries are evergreen dwarf shrubs or trailing vines of Vaccinium, and the berry turns from light green to red when ripe with a distinctly acidic taste. In 2020 the United States, Canada and Chile together grew 97 percent of the world crop.

Dragon fruit, or pitaya, grows on climbing cacti of the genera Hylocereus and Selenicereus, native to Central America and now farmed widely in Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam and Thailand. Its scaly pink or yellow skin hides white or magenta flesh flecked with tiny edible black seeds.

The largest fruit produced by any tree, with mature specimens weighing up to about 55 kilograms. Ripe bulbs are sweet, but unripe green jackfruit has a fibrous, shreddable texture that makes it a popular savory meat substitute, the bridge from plain fruit to a food that is cooked into something else.

Here the path turns to made foods. Whey is the watery liquid left when milk is curdled and strained for cheese. It is used to make ricotta and Norwegian brunost, dried into whey protein powders, and remains a major byproduct of the global cheese industry.

Garum was a fermented fish sauce made by salting fish innards and small whole fish such as anchovies or sardines and leaving them in the sun for weeks. Phoenicia, Greece, Rome, Carthage and Byzantium produced it, and it was also applied medicinally to ailments such as dysentery and dog bites.

Blood sausage is filled with blood, typically from pigs, sheep, cows, chickens or geese, mixed with a filler until it solidifies as it cools. The filler varies by region, from oatmeal and barley to rice, and names range from black pudding in English to boudin rouge in Creole and Cajun cooking and moronga in Mexico.

Ajika is a spicy condiment of Abkhazia and Mingrelia in western Georgia, pounded from capsicum peppers with garlic, salt, herbs and spices, sometimes with walnuts. Red versions look much like Italian pesto, a milder green version uses unripe peppers, and it joined Georgia's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2018.