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Comprehensive Fructus Lycii - Wolfberry - Goji Information
This site is not affiliated with any marketing plan. It really is just a site about fructus lycii which is also known as lycium barbarum, wolfberry, and goji. I really did find out about it from my Chinese co-workers, and I try to eat a little bit every day. I get my supply from Chinese grocers and herbalists around the Cleveland area. I pay about 3 to 5 dollars a pound for dried goji. I don't buy any goji juice, I just make goji/wolfberry tea or put it right in my bottled water and eat the berries at the end. So, if you are visiting with or without an opinion about the hyped-up goji berry, you are welcome to read and find out all that I have found out about it. Check the blog, view the gallery, and by all means, contact me! I also run the site davidj.org and would be happy to receive any emails from any visitors. But, to quote the current/dated venacular, I am seriously trying to keep it real.
I bumped "my story" down a bit so that I could share something interesting. When you are buying your
Goji, if at all possible, try to get it from the Ningxia province. My friend Shooey got some recently and the
whole package was in Chinese. She showed me that the wolfberries came from the Ningxia province. She said
that the Ningxia province is known as the best province for growing Fructus Lycii. So, if you can, try to get your
Goji from the Ningxia province. At my local chinese grocery store, Tink Holl in Cleveland around 36th and Payne, I
found a bag that my friend Shooey said 'is the right one!' 
I have been eating this like crazy! I have a 24 oz. water bottle that I put a good handful in with some water. Then
I drink the water, which becomes like a goji juice pretty quick. The water turns an orange-yellow as I am drinking it.
Then when the water is almost gone, I take off the cap on the bottle and eat the moistened berries.
And Yes! That is me! The man behind this site. I hope you can see my enthusiasm in the picture. I love wolfberries and I hope that this site helps to educate people on them. Can you see the words 'ningxia gouqi' or 'ningxiaguoqi' on the picture?
Apparently, it can happen. I got a bad batch of goji! Here's the story...
Around March, 2006, I was sitting across from my friend Shooey at work when she reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a bag of what looked like red raisins. Me being the inquisitive person that I am, I asked what they were. She said something that sounded like 'Goat Cheese.'
It wasn't goat cheese. She was saying Goji. Now, I didn't know what goji was. In fact, I didn't even know how to spell it, I only knew how to say it. Of course, my American english was butchering the word goji into KOH-CHEE! KOH-CHEE!
She asked if I wanted to try them. Of course! They were a little chewy, kind of like a much drier raisin, and they were more bitter than sweet. Not half bad. I have chewed sunflower seeds my whole life, so I thought that these little red bitter raisins would be a nice alternative. See, I am the kind of chewer that spits seeds. My truck was full of seeds from the past winter and I wanted a way to stop the madness. These had hope as an alternative!
She said the next time that she was at the grocer she would pick me up a bag. Me being the impatient man that I am, I couldn't handle waiting that long. I stopped at a chinese grocery store and made a big fool out of myself trying to say koh-chee.
The next day Shooey wrote down the chinese characters for the red raisins so that I could just show the chinese charactes and get the bag that I was looking for. Meanwhile she loaded me up with more. When I got my bag from the grocer, there were only two english words on it: Fructus Lycii.
I was dying to know more about these things. I hit google and popped in 'fructus lycii'. Suddenly, things started linking together. Fructus Lycii became Lychi berries. Lychi berries became Goji Berries. The results were all over the place but I needed more information. I went to wikipedia.
Since the only words I knew were on that chinese bag, I entered Fructus Lycii.
The only result I received was Wolfberry! So I was thinking, is all of this information around the same thing? Could all these words be linked together?
Wikipedia made some pretty bold statements. I will paraphrase them here.
This stuff gets around!
The part that got me was that the fruit is nicknamed the happy berry because of the sense of well being it is said to induce.
So, by now, I am ready to eat this stuff all the time! It begins to sound to me like the most amazing piece of food that anyone could ever eat. However, the jury was still out on what in the world I should be calling it! Wolfberry just sounds strange, and Fructus Lycii sounds latin for any leechy kind of fruit. The western snowberry sounded pretty cool. Goji sounded like it had been hyped out beyond itself, you know?
To be honest, I still don't know what to call it. What I think I will do is let someone else say it first and then call it whatever they did.
I began eating them a lot more. There was about a week in March where I ate them about a half a pound a day. I had stopped at a few chinese herbalists and they had huge 5 gallon jars of wolfberry. They sold it by the pound.
Shooey went on to tell me that there lots of ways that people in China used wolfberries. Here are a few:
Around the turn of this last century, Goji Berries started being marketed to Westerners. Wikipedia says that the berry contains about 2500 mg of vitamin C per 100 grams of fruit, which makes it one of the world's richest sources.
But what about that part that said pharmacologically? Well there are obviously studies in Korea.