The towns of rural Canada are complicated places, their subtle foodways hidden from the outsider passing by on the highway. My hometown of Roberts Creek now boasts high speed internet and the village cafe makes a decent latte, but it is still a quiet place. In the 1970s when I was growing up it was largely isolated from the outside world, home to an uneasy mix of draft dodgers and loggers, libertarians and commune-dwelling flower children. Although we all gave each other space, the long misty winter seasons when the seasonal work of fishing and tourism slowed were filled with shared provisioning, tangled networks of family and friends sharing things hunted, foraged, or grown. Seafood dominated our foodways, but a key place was reserved for a summer's worth of berries. We fought the local wildlife for strawberries, trapping endless slugs in beer cans. We tended raspberry canes that clung to the thin glacial soil and we drove up mountains to fill ice cream buckets with low-bush blueberries. But by sheer volume, our berry of choice was the blackberry. Part wild thing and part mutant pest, the blackberry was picked by almost everyone in town, and filled our winters with pies, crisps, jam, and wine. The promise of blackberries begins in the spring with a flush of delicate white flowers that carpets the great mass of the briar and calls out the bees that fill hives with a honey that is almost spicy in its intensity. The vines grow everywhere that nature is disturbed; every roadside, every empty lot or forest edge, rising in giant mounds five and ten feet high. The berries slowly ripen, hard green nubs swelling into sour redness and then maturing into collections of the deepest black drupelets. Hot sunny conditions stunt the berries slightly, but intensify the flavour, and a sudden rain can swell the berries to tastelessness. Harvesting is thus best done in intense bursts of activity, when the bulk of the fruit is at its peak. The thick tangled canes with their large razor thorns that can penetrate denim and canvas exact a toll for each berry picked. The common blackberry, Rubus fruticosus, is a controversial and omnipresent force in the Lower mainland of British Columbia. Imported to North America in the 1880s from the mountains of Eastern Europe, these sturdy and imposing plants sprawl over any empty patch of ground, crack concrete, tear through abandoned buildings, and create giant thickets of impenetrable and heavily barbed vines. No one plants them; the seeds hitch rides with birds and wildlife; to the observer they seem to burst from any bare patch of ground. One of my students wrote a thesis on the fight to remove the blackberry from local parks, as they can prevent the germination of rare and endangered plants such as the Garry Oak. Removal requires patience, attention, and ideally a goat or two. Although they are the definition of an aggressive plant, they provide delicious, wonderful fruit in quantities that can make a person weep at the bounty that is the natural world. Farmers can coax up to 20,000 pounds per acre out of blackberry vines; it is difficult to really say what a sprawling wild patch can yield, but it is enough for birds, bears and humans to eat their fill. At first glance blackberries appear to be a wild food, and as such fit within the pride of place wild foods take in discussions of Canadian cuisine. Patricia Hluchly sees wild foods as one of the three defining features of Canadian cuisine; she highlights a cuisine deeply tied to …