Opinion: Are tariffs going to obstruct our access to blueberries?

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Right now, the blueberries in our refrigerator come from Mexico and Florida. They are a little too sweet for my tastes — I’m a New Englander by birth and a Minnesotan by choice and I like my blueberries small, sour and harvested by hand — but my tastes aren’t relevant.

Every day, my eldest son, Nico, eats a bowl with breakfast, ideally the biggest and sweetest blueberries we can find in the store, then we send him with a container of normal-sized berries to school for lunch.

Nico is autistic and has Down syndrome, and his food needs are specific. Depending on how you count (do different flavors of oatmeal, for example, count as different foods?) he eats about 13-20 different foods, and blueberries are among the healthiest of the lot.

So we always have blueberries, even as their price, size and flavor shift throughout the year, their country of origin always printed on the label affixed to the plastic clamshell. It makes our participation in a global food web instantly clear every time I open the refrigerator. And I’ve always found it interesting to pay attention to where the various fruits come from as we progress through the seasons.

Now, though, it seems likely that tariffs are going to slice apart that web. It’s not the biggest pending crisis from President Donald Trump’s obsession with recreating failed Great Depression trade policy, but it is the one I find myself thinking about every time I make lunch.

Thirteen different foods is a lot! Nico has sensory issues, which make it hard for him to process unfamiliar foods. He began simply refusing to eat most things around the age of 2. We really didn’t know what to do, and for a while everything about food generated nothing but stress.

Finally, though, we learned to follow Nico’s lead. For a while, he pretty much had nothing but Honey Nut Cheerios (thanks General Mills!), took vitamins, drank milk and ate blueberries. Gradually, food by food, always letting him decide, we’ve built up his diet. But he likes predictability. He likes to have roughly the same foods every day for each meal, and that’s fine. Still, blueberries are pretty much the only food luxury he wants, and so even if they are expensive in January, we buy them.

We’re eating mostly Mexican blueberries now, but as summer comes, more berries will arrive on our shelves that originate in the American southeast and from California. Then the Upper Midwest comes into its own. Our farmers markets overflow with local crops, but Michigan sends its best to our stores, and then Canada joins in. As the Northern Hemisphere turns to winter, the true miracle of the modern age takes place: Blueberries from the Southern Hemisphere, especially Peru and Chile, fill our grocery shelves.

I spoke to Sarah Taber, a small farmer and crop scientist who told me she did her postdoc in blueberries. Right now, she says, “the concept of the plan is that produce of Canada and Mexico is supposed to be exempt” from tariffs, but that 10% tariffs will impact shipments from Peru and Chile later in the year.

But, first of all, there is no tariff that can help U.S. farmers grow blueberries in January, because that’s basically not possible. And second, according to Taber, because “nobody knows what’s about to happen, [farmers] are not able to get loans [even] to do normal stuff. Never mind people trying to expand.”

So will we have blueberries here next winter? The International Blueberry Organization (which I didn’t know existed even a few days ago) pointed me to a webinar by Agronometrics, a company that analyzes market data for the fresh produce industry. Apparently, the Peruvian blueberry industry has been thriving and expanding rapidly over the past few years, so prices would have likely been going down.

With tariffs, though, if they go into effect, that 10% price bump will be passed onto consumers like us in the short term. In the long term, Peruvian and Chilean producers will attempt to find new markets. The webinar notes that both countries are well positioned to do so both because of their geographic position and their free trade agreements, but the U.S. market is still the biggest by far, so there’s no reason for us to worry right now. There will (probably) be blueberries on the shelves all year, even if prices rise as tariffs rise.

Hard times call for adaptation, but when in a situation where needs are particular and especially when related to sensory disabilities, adaptation may prove impossible. We’ve been through food disruptions before, as recently as during COVID. During COVID, when we saw Japan shut down their schools in late February 2020, my wife and I made a comprehensive list of everything that Nico, in particular, would need and started laying in supplies. But while I didn’t think the first Trump administration did a good job handling the pandemic, the initial disruptions and empty shelves weren’t the fault of the president.

But if the shelves empty this time, it will be.

Clearly, this is not just a story about me, my son and his favorite berry. It’s not even about the specific kind of planning that families like ours have to do, where predictability is our watchword.

We’re all connected with all kinds of global systems that we depend on. Behind the numbers and trade data are people — families like mine, like yours. Many of these systems are invisible rather than printed on a label, but they surround us nonetheless.

Still, I do have a child with needs that are specific, rather than special, and over his lifetime I’ve been struck by how easily a functional society can meet those needs. All we have to do is not crash the global economy. That feels like a pretty low bar to clear.

David M. Perry is the associate director for undergraduate studies in history at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He’s the co-author of “Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe” and the newsletter Modern Medieval.