Cranberry

My daughter just ate a fresh (well, fresh out of the freshly opened bag) cranberry.

No. I unfortunately did not have my camera ready.

Now, I like cranberry juice. I like cranberries in cake-breads. I like cranberry sauce too.

But who the hell was the first person to eat a 'second' cranberry?

If I tried a cranberry...'in the wild' ....like back in prehistoric Massachusetts. I most certainly would not have grabbed another one to eat. I would probably be trying to file off the taste left on my tongue on the bark of the nearest tree, or scrubbing it off with some lichen.

So was this a delicacy that the early European settlers in The New World, enjoyed? Something that they ate at the first Thanksgiving. Hmmm? Now I'm betting that the native americans (ya know, the folks that were here first) probably used them for medicinal reasons or perhaps used cranberries to make dyes for clothing etc. But eat them? Doubt it. Don't think they had an abundance of sugar back then to make cranberries palatable.

I bet I know what happened.

It was a 'Let's Play A Trick On The Foreigner' gag. Some 'Indian' gave a gullible Pilgrim a cranberry and said "Try this. It's good" (Then elbowed his buddies and whispered "watch this! You think his face was funny before!!") After the spluttering and laughter died down the indian probably continued with what would equate to what today is known as A Man Walks Into A Bar-joke. Which may have started "A Pilgrim Walked Into A Longhouse"

Anyways...I think us eating cranberries today is just a fluke of nature. Eating wild berries is supposed to help clean out the gene pool isn't it? Keeps village idiots from becoming the leader, and such. Eat a yucky berry....get very sick and almost die. Stupid enough to eat two of them...well this should be a no-brainer. So what's the deal with the cranberry. It is obviously a failure as a measure to keep the idiot population in check, so it must have some medicinal value .(oh yeah, UTIs)

But I'll eat some cranberry sauce tomorrow for sure.