Register of Formulation · Observation VII
There is a berry everyone has heard of and almost nobody has tasted outside a bowl of granola, and another one that has been growing in European hedgerows since the Middle Ages without anyone saying a word to it.
Everything that separates them was settled one Tuesday morning in February 2008, on an American television set.
IBondi Beach, one spring morning
A thirty-metre queue outside a café at Bondi Beach. Surfers coming back from the water, joggers, three girls rehearsing the photo before they have even ordered. It is nine in the morning and already too hot to be standing in a queue.
Twenty Australian dollars a bowl. I wait forty minutes. I mention the number because forty minutes is roughly how long it takes to start asking questions about yourself.
The bowl is genuinely pretty. Bright purple, crunchy granola, banana slices arranged with an architect's care, a thread of honey. Fine. A little sweet. I walk back towards the beach with one question I cannot shake: how did a berry no European could name twenty years ago end up worth forty minutes of my life, on a beach fourteen thousand kilometres from the Amazon?
II5 February 2008
The whole commercial history of açaí in the West hangs on one date: 5 February 2008. On that day, on Oprah Winfrey's set, Dr Mehmet Oz, a cardiologist turned television personality, mentions the antioxidant capacity of a small Amazonian berry. He sells nothing. He recommends nothing in particular. He just talks about it.
That was enough.
Within months, dozens of sites appear selling açaí pills to lose weight, prevent cancer and extend life. Sometimes all three claims on the same page, which should have alerted somebody. Fake Oprah and Dr Oz endorsements in pop-ups. A free trial model that helps itself to your card and is about as easy to cancel as leaving a cult.
In 2009 Oprah and Dr Oz sued around fifty companies for fraudulent use of their image. In 2012 Central Coast Nutraceuticals paid a $1.5 million settlement to the Federal Trade Commission. Too late. The word açaí had entered Western consciousness as the superfood. Not through its biology. Through fifteen seconds of airtime and the machine that started up behind it. It is that story we are taking apart here, not the berry.
IIIThe actual berry, out of its set
Raw açaí, at home, is a perfectly serious food. The Caboclos of Pará and the Amazon delta have eaten it for centuries. But not as dessert. As a dish. Savoury. With cassava flour and dried fish. Nobody there has ever considered adding granola. The question does not come up.
The fruit is high in lipids, which is rare for a berry, and carries decent proportions of anthocyanins and polyphenols. Its lab-measured antioxidant capacity sits at roughly three times that of blueberry, for fresh pulp. Three times blueberry is good. It is not a miracle. Blueberry is already excellent, and nobody ever claimed it extended your life.
The trouble starts with transport. Açaí is extremely perishable and loses part of its compounds within hours of picking. What reaches France, Australia or the United States is frozen pulp, sometimes dehydrated, often with preservatives, essentially always already processed. The berry landing in your bowl is no longer quite the one that was picked. And it is about to be mixed with something else.
IVThe bowl, or how to ruin a decent berry
The açaí bowl you find in Bondi, in Brooklyn and now in Marseille is not a health food. Frozen pulp blended with agave syrup or sugar, because raw açaí is barely sweet and frankly austere to a Western palate. Industrial granola on top, often loaded with added sugars and refined oils. Banana, honey, peanut butter, chocolate shavings, imported exotic fruit.
An average bowl holds between 40 and 70 grams of sugar. A Coke and a half. The Coke, at least, does not claim to cure you.
You pay twenty dollars for a dessert that promises you health and delivers sugar. In the frozen aisle the same bowl would be called a berry sorbet and cost three euros.
It is not the berry's fault. It is the fault of the staging around it.
VThe hero growing right next door
While açaí was crossing the Atlantic in a refrigerated plane to become a myth, a berry was growing quietly in Europe, in the gardens of Burgundy, the hedgerows of the Vosges, the forests of the north. Blackcurrant. Ribes nigrum.
Four times more vitamin C per gram than an orange. More anthocyanins per gram than wild blueberry. And above all a type of anthocyanin found in neither American blueberry nor açaí: delphinidin and cyanidin rutinosides. New Zealand and Japanese teams have worked on them for some twenty years, on vascular function, recovery after exertion and cognitive function.
Used in European pharmacopoeia since the thirteenth century. Herbalist monks used it against joint inflammation. It appears in nineteenth-century French materia medica, filed as tonic, diuretic and anti-arthritic. That was also the century that filed mercury under restoratives, so let us give the classification the credit it deserves: an intuition, not a proof.
Britain remembered as much during the Second World War. Citrus ships had stopped coming, and the government had blackcurrant syrup handed out free to young children to cover their vitamin C. That syrup still exists. It is called Ribena, and it sits in the soft drinks aisle today.
It grows in France without irrigation. Its season runs from May to August. It freezes without losing much. It costs a fraction of imported açaí pulp. It simply never got its slot on Oprah.
It is probably the most underrated berry in Western Europe. Burgundy has grown it since the nineteenth century and mostly turns it into liqueur. That may be where the misunderstanding starts.
VIThe real trap: superfood logic
Açaí is only a symptom. The real subject is the logic that has run the shelf for twenty years: the isolated miracle food. The idea that one berry, seed or root from far away holds on its own what the food next door cannot supply. That a complex nutritional problem is somewhere waiting for its hero.
It does not stand up on any floor. What protects you in a diet is variety, never the star: the ones that hold up rotate dozens of plants through the seasons rather than betting everything on a single ingredient, however photogenic. And freezing berries in the Amazon to eat them in Sydney or Lyon carries a carbon cost that is hard to defend, quite apart from what intensified harvesting does to the ecosystems that produce them.
Above all, the idea has no historical footing. Every traditional pharmacopoeia, Amazonian ones included, works through combinations of local plants, never through the cult of a single one. The superfood is not ancestral heritage: it is an early-2000s marketing invention, born in North America.
That logic turned the plate into a quest. Find the berry. Unlock health. Move up a level. It is a role-playing scenario, and coming from us, the irony will escape nobody.
No berry is going to save you. A varied plate has done it all along, without ever asking for anything in return.
VIITo finish
We do not blame açaí for being a berry. We blame it for having served as a Trojan horse for a logic that impoverishes whoever adopts it, precisely as it claims to feed them. The real subject is not açaí. It is what its mythology made us forget.
There are, in our hedgerows, our forests and our gardens, plants that do what açaí claims to do: better, cheaper, and without a plane ticket. Blackcurrant for anthocyanins. Rosehip for vitamin C. Wild Vosges blueberry for flavonoids. Elderberry. Sea buckthorn for fatty acids and vitamin E. All of them grow within twenty kilometres of your door, and most can be picked for nothing.
This is the first instalment of a series that intends to deal with them. Not as folkloric alternatives to imported superfoods, but as what they are: what we had within reach the whole time, and stopped looking at because it did not come from far enough away to seem serious.
N.B. Federal Trade Commission, Internet Marketers of Acai Berry Weight-Loss Pills to Pay $1.5 Million to Settle FTC Charges, 2012 · ABC News, Oprah, Dr. Oz Sue Over Hurtful Acai Berry Claims, 2009 · Schauss A.G. et al., Antioxidant Capacity and Other Bioactivities of the Freeze-Dried Amazonian Palm Berry, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2006 · Hurst R.D. et al., Consumption of an Anthocyanin-Rich Extract Made From New Zealand Blackcurrants Prior to Exercise, Frontiers in Nutrition, 2019 · Watson A.W. et al., Acute Supplementation with Blackcurrant Extracts Modulates Cognitive Functioning, Journal of Functional Foods, 2015 · Vitamin Welfare Scheme, December 1941: blackcurrant syrup issued free to British children under two.
