From The Food Encyclopedia by Jacques Rolland and Carol Sherman
The most widely distributed fruit in the world, blueberries grow wild in Scandinavia, the British Isles, Russia and North America. They grow in the Arctic regions and are an important part of the Inuit diet. This abundance of wild blueberries is the reason that cultivation started only recently. A New Jersey woman named Elizabeth White deserves most of the credit for "taming" the blueberry. Every year, she offered prizes for the largest wild blueberries. A Department of Agriculture botanist became interested and started crossbreeding the winners in 1909. The result was the superior berries we have today.
