Bayberry Scandal: Why I Can Still Eat Bayberries with a Clear Conscience | Grandma Kouzi

This year’s bayberry scandal blew up, thrusting this intensely seasonal, delicate fruit into the spotlight. Whether the bayberries have been soaked in chemicals, which substances are legal, whether they’re harmful to people, what dosage counts as the safety threshold … none of it concerns me in the least.

It’s not that I don’t eat bayberries. It’s that I only eat the ones I grow with my own hands.

The Surprises My Bayberries Have Brought Me

and the Frights

At the entrance to Woren Valley there are two trees. One is a bayberry tree, and the other is a bayberry tree too.

Back when we first broke the ground, the plan was already set: two large, densely canopied trees at the gate. A small farm standing between heaven and earth may do without walls or a door, but it must have two big trees. My dream is that one day the canopies will arch over the road and clasp hands in the sky, forming the portal of Woren Valley.

I’d long known that fruit has a long growing season and lengthy storage and transport times, making it a heavy target for chemical fertilisers and pesticides. But a hungry mouth simply can’t resist the fruit on the shelf, because it’s so good. To eat is to take in toxins; to abstain is to suffer. Before Woren Valley achieved self-sufficiency in fruit, as a seasoned foodie, I went to extraordinary lengths to eat safely. No imported fruit, no berries or other delicate fruits, and I tried to stick with varieties that require peeling and have thick skins—bananas and citrus, for instance …

So Woren Valley’s dream is to neither take in toxins nor suffer. One reason a northerner chooses to farm in the south is that home-grown fruit is available in all four seasons.

A friend who works in horticulture, matching the tree to my needs, recommended bayberry and even helped source mature specimens. Having grown up in the north, I had virtually no concept of bayberries and never once imagined that “door panels” could bear fruit.

Transplanting mature trees is no easy feat. In the early days of establishing Woren Valley, we bought many large trees: two bayberries, three loquats, two crisp-skinned kumquats, a batch of honey snow pears, and a large batch of figs. The result? All twenty-odd figs died outright. Five honey snow pears still linger, half-alive at best. One loquat perished. Every single crisp-skinned kumquat was lost. The two bayberry trees, sturdy as they are, took over a year to establish themselves in this brand-new place. They began bearing fruit in 2024—purely an uninvited delight.

By 2025, the bayberry trees, now acclimatised to Woren Valley, truly came into their own, branches bowing under the weight of fruit. Little red lanterns all over the tree, ripening in wave after wave without a word of warning. “The sound of wind and rain through the night—how many have fallen, who can tell?” A northerner like me—when have I ever seen a scene like this? Facing the bayberries’ mass suicidal ripening, I got through a “rivers of blood” bayberry season.

But that year, the fright the bayberries caused didn’t come from the gory scene. It came from my son’s feedback. He told me the bayberries I’d sent were sour and small, nothing like the big, sweet ones at the fruit shop downstairs. My daughter-in-law said the bayberries arrived nearly gone, and if they wanted to eat some, they might as well just buy their own.

My bayberry trees are genuine Dongkui bayberries—the largest and sweetest variety. The trees are spaced wide apart in open rows, well fed with farmyard compost: top-grade treatment befitting the crème de la crème of Dongkui bayberries. And for my son, I picked the best of the best. Bayberries are fragile; every scrape is a fatal wound. I used purpose-made boxes when sending them, each fruit given its own compartment. From a branch in Woren Valley to my son’s dining table, it took less than a day—dispatched from Fujian at six in the evening, arriving in Shenzhen the next afternoon. Typically, the supply chain for bayberries in city fruit shops is longer and takes more time. If anyone claims you can keep them looking good without special measures, well, believe it if you like.

Bayberries are like this, and so is every other fruit.

Trials and Dilemmas

Since I’ve been growing my own fruit, I’ve come to see all the more clearly just how many pests and diseases it suffers from, and how difficult storage and transport really are. Woody citrus blooms in spring and ripens in autumn and winter, while herbaceous banana takes at least five months from flowering to harvest. Because I refuse to spray, my citrus trees have been stripped bare by insects, and of course, bearing any fruit is out of the question. With the no-chemicals rule as a given, banana plants can’t be planted densely—just five clumps in a few dozen square metres, with an expected harvest of three bunches this year.

Refusing to spray anti-bacterial fruit-preserving chemicals, the dozens of kiwifruit plants along our sixty-metre riverbank produced a mere 26 fruits. I’ve grown several varieties of blueberry—dozens of plants—both in the dry little courtyard at Mount Tai up north and in the humid Woren Valley, and every single one died of disease. If every grower were as reckless as I, they’d be bankrupted to death.

Through a thousand hardships and ten thousand more, once the fruit is finally ripe, another trial lies in wait. Fruit is a living plant organism; there is no fundamental difference between fruit still on the branch and fruit sitting on the dining table. Both are breathing, metabolising, and progressing through ripening, ageing, and decay. Moreover, the life instinct of fruit severed from its branch is to accelerate ripening and complete its full life cycle.

If you want fruit to arrive at the point of sale intact, you must artificially halt the ripening process. The methods include chilled storage, inert-gas sealing, and chemical intervention—often several measures layered on top of one another. The cost of chilled, sealed storage is easy to imagine. The cheapest option is soaking the fruit in chemicals: for the consumer it is the worst of the worst, for the operators in the distribution chain it is the best of the best—right up until the scandal blows up and the entire industry is put at risk. The masterminds vanish without a trace. A few ringleaders are caught red-handed; the rest scatter in a stampede to turn their hand to some other fruit, leaving the growers back at the source wanting to weep but with no tears left.

Unless you do as I do—reckless about yield, reckless about cost—every person in the growing and distribution chain must face these trials and dilemmas. I have no right to make choices on behalf of others, so I’ve flatly chosen to refuse buying from outside. I, who once loved fruit to the point of compulsion, have undergone a cliff-edge withdrawal.

Since withdrawing from buying fruit externally, the way I eat fruit has changed somewhat.

For the 2026 bayberry season, to avoid another rivers of blood, I planned ahead and draped my two bayberry trees in white gauze skirts. Last year, ninety per cent of the bayberries fell to the ground. This year, the gauze skirts caught them all, steady as you please.

The bayberries have ripened. The largest and finest go off to my son. The “benefit” this year’s bayberry scandal has brought is that my son now knows store-bought bayberries aren’t safe, and has finally accepted mine. I handle the rest myself. I pick out the ones that are a touch overripe, just going dark, and eat them straight—the fruit ripened on the tree is lower in acid and won’t make your teeth ache. The rest: the top grade goes into the blender with perilla leaves for juice, the middle grade gets a 25 per cent sugar solution for wine, and the bottom grade goes straight into the compost bin. Every fruit I’ve grown with my own hands is a treasure, and not a single one goes to waste.

Humanity has many ways of preserving fruit. Beyond the chilled storage and the soul-chilling chemicals so common in the global fruit distribution system, there is also drying, fermentation, sugar-packing, salt-packing, and wine-packing. In-season fruit: eat it fresh whenever you can. A glass of perilla bayberry juice, made with no added water, easily puts you through two kilograms of bayberries. The perilla bayberry pulp left over after juicing can also be turned into cold-set jam through a wine-making process, kept in the fridge and eaten slowly. This way, the tens of jin of fruit from my two bayberry trees will keep me going for well over half a year.

 The Frights of Modern Fruit

The real reason this deathly-afraid foodie quit buying fruit from outside isn’t the bayberry scandal. The transport-end problems in the modern fruit production and distribution system that this year’s bayberry scandal has exposed are just the tip of the iceberg. What truly makes me unable to accept is that many more varieties are no longer “fruit” in the traditional sense.

Modern store-bought fruit is, to a large degree, an industrial product. Take stock of the hugely popular fruits of recent years—New Zealand kiwifruit, Chilean cherries, Shine Muscat grapes, Blue Sapphire grapes—and from variety breeding through to growing, storage, transport, and marketing, every step is a link in an industrial food-production chain. Transnational capital, through grow-and-sell club models, controls patents on premium varieties, assembles exclusive full-chain closed-loop management, and maintains scarcity premiums. This kind of “fruit” carries not only the distribution logic of an industrial product but also the breeding logic and methods of industrialisation.

As technology advances, fruit breeding grows ever more precise, effortlessly achieving gene-level purging and suppression. Take fruit with an ultra-high concentration of vitamin C: the impact on the palate is sharp and searing—some people describe it as “half my face going numb from the acid.” Top-tier antioxidants—anthocyanin, proanthocyanidin, and plant polyphenols—all carry high tannin content, giving an intensely bitter, astringent taste, “like chewing wood.” Modern variety-breeding technology can selectively knock out these unpleasant-tasting “junk code” sequences while selectively boosting sweetness and enhancing storage and transport resilience, to suit transnational cold-chain container logistics stretching across months. Fruit produced this way is already an artificially manufactured industrial product—a chip wearing the skin of a fruit.

The direction capital chooses has never been “most nutritious” but “most profitable.” Spotted, unattractive, unevenly sized fruit is culled; anything that won’t keep is deleted by the distributors. Growers can only chop down their trees, replacing centuries-old varieties with seed stock that meets capital’s standards. Retail capital, with nothing more than its purchasing power, can accomplish a single act of varietal extinction. When we buy this kind of fruit, we are casting a vote for capital with our purchases—casting a vote for this chain of selection.

Fruit produced this way grows ever larger and sweeter, with uniform size and shape, yet multiple essential nutrients not only fail to rise—they fall. This problem, in which commercial breeding causes a general decline in the micronutrient content of crops, is called the “nutrient dilution effect.” It aligns with the conclusions reached by Professor Donald Davis’s research team, who monitored 43 varieties of fruit and vegetables in the United States over the fifty years from 1950 to 1999.

Our generation has lived through this process precisely. In the 1960s and 1970s, when I was a child, the fruit I could eat was extremely limited, but the flavours were distinct. Among apples, there was Xiao Guoguang, so sour it made your teeth ache; Red Five-Star, so mealy it felt like it would choke you; and the big, sweet Yantai apple that left you savouring the aftertaste for days. Now, on the fruit stall, the intensely sweet Fuji apple rules supreme—bigger and sweeter than the apples of old—yet it seems I can no longer find the fragrance of my childhood memories. The nutrients in the slightly tart small apples our parents and grandparents picked from the hillsides fifty years ago would now require three or four of those enormous Fuji apples to match, but at the cost of gulping down considerably more fructose—and fructose, as everyone knows, is a well-established health hazard for modern people …

Fruit as a Luxury Good

Following this year’s bayberry scandal, the issues people are raising extend beyond bayberries to other fruits as well. Some have even asked: do we really need to eat fruit?

Not necessarily. There is no nutrient in fruit that the human body requires and can only obtain from fruit.

People can obtain adequate nutrition from vegetables and other foods; eating fruit is not at all necessary. Modern fruit consumption is driven both by the pull of appetite and by being swept along in fashion trends.

Everyone knows the “King of Vitamin C” kiwifruit and the “King of Anti-aging Anthocyanin” blueberry. In reality, whether it is vitamin C or anthocyanin, both are widely present in a variety of fruits and vegetables in nature. The true King of Vitamin C in the fruit world is cili. The Chinese native cili, somewhat akin to a wild fruit, has a vitamin C content running to dozens of times that of kiwifruit. Cili really is not tasty, but the delicious winter jujube has a vitamin C content five times that of ordinary green-fleshed kiwifruit. If the sole purpose is to get vitamin C, there is no need for kiwifruit at all.

The reason kiwifruit is remembered as the king of vitamin C is largely because this fruit is backed by New Zealand and Zespri, with formidable agricultural production and marketing capabilities. Under the pressure of marketing campaigns, kiwifruit has been anointed the king of vitamin C, Chilean cherries have been given the social attribute of financial freedom, and blueberries have been tagged with the label of refined self-discipline.

Many of the “IQ taxes” in the fruit world are also “fashion taxes”, aimed precisely at “high-end consumers”. A chēlízi is simply a type of large cherry. The premium of over a hundred yuan per jin actually comes from an extra-long logistics chain and over forty days of cold-chain storage. This ultra-sweet middle-class privilege is, at bottom, a fashion lollipop fed to people by South American fresh-food giants. So many people are, in reality, paying the class-label premium that matches a long supply chain, paying for the brainwashing of fashion culture.

Coming back to the chemically soaked bayberries that blew up this year: the reason I, as a foodie, have kept my emotions steady is not because I have my own bayberries and needn’t buy from outside, but because a faint memory still lingers. A bayberry scandal is nothing new—over a decade ago, one blew up before, in 2011. It was also bayberries soaked in chemicals, with pesticide residue exceeding the limit. That time, an authority quickly issued a denial calling it “malicious hype, malicious boycott,” and so the world restored its peace, the clouds staying pale and the wind staying light. The world’s hot topics keep emerging in an endless stream—just like the big-head babies, the poisoned milk powder, the gutter oil, the oil tanker trucks—they blow over after a while. I trust that before the next bayberry season arrives, the emotional ripples among the broad consumer base, stirred up over bayberries, will settle back to calm.

The reason I am writing this piece begins with bayberries, but is not limited to bayberries. Can we still eat bayberries? I have not been short of them, eating plenty by my own methods. Can we still eat fruit? From the standpoint of essential human nutrition, it is not something you must eat. Considering the pleasure that delicious food brings, there is no harm in eating it. But when eating fruit, you should be the one choosing, not being chosen.

– This is Foodthink’s 814th original article –

Editor: Xiaodan

Design: Minglin

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