The blueberry constant

Rudolf Zimmermann, “Heidelbeeren” (1919.08.11), Deutsche Fotothek There are two ways the universe—and edible plants, in particular—might turn out to be, supposing you didn’t have much experience with it, or them, and were reasoning from first principles. The first way is the one conjured up by recipes that call for “three cloves of garlic.” Have you seen garlic? Its cloves come in radically different sizes. Garlic, as everyone knows, is added to recipes for flavor. If “three cloves of garlic” is a consistent unit of measure, it must therefore be the case (or so reasoned a younger me) that a clove of garlic comes into the world instinct with as much flavor as it will ever have, and as it grows, dilutes. Only under these conditions would it not matter whether you took a large or a small clove: only if the sum of flavor in each clove was constant. A similar reasoning follows from recipes that call for “six to eight leaves of basil.” For such an instruction to make any sense, the tiniest…