What have they done to the strawberries?

[altivo]

Three weeks running now, I have bought strawberries at the market. "Product of California."

Strawberries are one of my absolute favorite fruits. I should know that when they look this perfect, they can't be real, and indeed, they aren't. Larger than any strawberry has a right to be, but the color looks right. Not much fragrance, which should be a dead giveaway. But, aching as I am for real spring, and egged on by sale prices, I buy.

I guess they use so much crude oil based fertilizer in California now that the fruit has given up and turned to wax. These "berries" are red as if they were ripe, but hard and crunchy as wood and tasteless as sawdust. I suppose someone has decided as well that the only purpose a strawberry serves is as an ornament for the salad bar. Who would try to eat it? After all, it's nothing like a McDonald's hamburger, which seems to be what most people think of as "food" these days.

Time was when you brought home a box of strawberries and it was necessary to wash and slice them immediately. I used to sprinkle the sliced fruit with brandy to stave off the mold that would rapidly appear even in the refrigerator, and we would make a point of eating them all up within 24 hours. They were so sweet you never even thought of adding sugar, and the strawberry flavor and aroma so strong that it would linger in the air after just opening the fridge for a moment.

Well, no more. These things that pass as strawberries can sit out at room temperature for days without any apparent change or deterioration. They have no juice in them, but are as dry as cardboard (which actually has more taste, I suspect.) You can drop them on the floor and they won't burst and splatter the way a real strawberry does. Instead, they bounce, and when they come to rest, they bear no bruise or mark.

No doubt some university plant experiment station spent years "perfecting" these, and California's agribusinesses were eager to put them into production. No waste, no rush, hard enough to be packed (and perhaps even picked) by machines, durable enough to be shipped cheaply (do they even bother with refrigeration at all?) and as perfect in appearance as any face-lifted, tummy-tucked, nose-jobbed, bleached-haired Hollywood starlet. The saddest thing is, probably most people have already forgotten what the real strawberries were like.

As the Red Delicious apple (perfect, smooth, shiny, bright red, and with all the flavor and texture of a painted doorknob) came to take over the US marketplace almost completely in the 1950s, pushing aside dozens of better tasting varieties that weren't as pretty or as easy to pack and ship... As the "strip-mined" (thanks, Garrison Keillor, for the metaphor) tomato, those hard crunchy tasteless things that look red but were picked green and gassed to picture perfection while still tough enough to survive a fall from the second story to the concrete without a fracture took over in the 1970s... Now the wax strawberry is about to push real, ripe, local fruit out of your marketplace. What next? Can sweet corn be made from pressed wood pulp? Peaches from candle drippings perhaps? Melons are already marching inexorably toward the same tasteless, wooden fate already enjoyed by the apples and tomatoes.

Does no one care? So it would appear. I actually had the experience a few years back of coming across some genuine, ripe, locally grown tomatoes in the supermarket. I stood and watched in amazement as one shopper after another would pick up one or two and then put them back down with an expression of dismay or disgust. They were RIPE. Heavy, soft, full of tomato juice. What a tomato should be. But these shoppers obviously thought there was something wrong with them. Give them those rubber tomatoes from California any day. None of this genuine ripe fruit stuff for them, no sir.

Sigh. Two months before real strawberries come from our own garden, and the plants keep producing for a week or two. Three months before a real ripe tomato emerges. I must be getting too old and crotchety.

Comments

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I know exactly what you're talking about. Back when I was growing up we had a couple of old apple trees and access to endless amounts of wild strawberries. Those things might not've been big or good-looking, but they were all taste. Imports are nice and all, but I think there's always going to be demand around here for the kind of domestic product that tastes like it was squeezed together from two dozen foreign specimens.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

This is really bad news. I somehow hoped that folks in the rest of the world were not suffering from the US disease. You see, here it is the appearance, the look of the outside, that matters. The inside can be totally rotten, but if the outside is beautiful then it will win applause and approval.

[quickcasey.livejournal.com]

You are right. I was a a buffet dinner for a friend's daughter's graduation. On the fruit tray were strawberries. Cool, I thought. And got a couple on my plate. I saved these for last, to enjoy what I thought were strawberries. Nope, dyed balsawood. Vague strawberry taste, like Kool-Aide. Something isn't right here. No-one misses real fruits, and vegetables anymore. I think the pod people took over years ago.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, that makes sense. Since pods are vegetables, they don't approve of us eating vegetables and are working to convince us not to?

[doco.livejournal.com]

And yet, the energy-eating fridge centers of today (one particular Samsung model I saw at the electronics store recently consumes 700 kWh per annum!) have up to four vegetable compartments, special Zero-Degree frosting zones, seperate regulatory circuits, ventilation circuits and fancy names like "FirstFresh" or "Easy Open SuperDry Zone" for something that used to be a simple plexiglass drawer ten years ago.

One wonders why.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the ones with monitors or televisions built into the door. Why the H--- would anyone need a refrigerator that connects to the internet?

[chakawolf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we eat California strawberries too, and they have been very disappointing as of late. There are Mexican strawberries, but they are (reportedly) treated with pesticides that are illegal in the states.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Now this surprises me. I would have thought Texas was a good candidate to grow strawberries, rather than bring them in from (ack) Governor Ahnold Land. A little irrigation might be needed, but warmer weather earlier should mean an early crop that could be sent north for cash.

[furahi.livejournal.com]

I live in Mexico, a couple of weeks ago we needed to buy some strawberries for an uncle that came over from Germany, who wanted to make jelly (marmalade ?).
It was so hard getting real strawberries, took us several trips to the market and seing in different places, they were all just odorless..

But the ones we finally found were awesome, really really great strawberries.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

My mother always tells me:
They breed strawberries for size, not for taste. So the larger the strawberries get, the farther genetically separated they likely are from good tasting ones.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

True in my experience, and not just of strawberries. Size generally comes at the expense of quality in other respects. Take the Wolf River apple variety, for instance, a single example of which can weight over two pounds. No flavor at all. Like they're full of water.

The larger the watermelon, the more water and less sugar inside. And so forth.

[hgryphon.livejournal.com]

Hello there!

I heard a nutritionist on the radio talking about how the so-called "perfect" tomato we grow on a special farm with it's genes tinkered with for "optimal" nutrition actually has less nutritional value than a standard tomato grown in a garden 50 years ago. He said it has more to do with fertalizers and how that changes the chemical processes the produce goes through, preventing it from absorbing the trace elements it would otherwise pull in naturally trying to find the same food in the soil...

I heard a government watchdog last night say that they are now developing tomatos that grow with human gene sequences in them. I can't imagine why they'd do that, but it's being attempted... All I have to say to that is soylent green is people...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I got my bachelor's from an agricultural university. When I was there, they were working on tomatoes. The object was to get a tomato that would survive shipping better, and last longer without becoming moldy or mushy. They succeeded. The product no longer had any juice in it, was hard and crunchy, could stand being rolled downstairs without bruising, and could be picked green. The idea was to turn it red at the receiving end by exposing it to ethylene chloride gas. Voila, the modern 'tomatoid', available at your local supermarket year round.

[hgryphon.livejournal.com]

That is severely disgusting...

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

Maybe you could add strawberry juice to the strawberries to make them more strawberry-like? I'm kidding of course. Although I wonder now if that would work... but don't listen to me, I know very little about food, I just eat it.

Seriously.... You're not old and crochety, or at least if you're crochety you have good reason for it. Food as most of us know it today is but a shadow of what it should be. A very big shadow, of course, because they're growing for size these days as has been mentioned, but a tasteless bland shadow. I'd be pretty sure that if there's no taste, there's also no nutrients, either.

The only way around that is to grow your own, as it sounds like you do. But of course nothing's ready to harvest now. Now is the early spring of our discontent, I guess.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

If we rely on the supermarket chains for our fruits and veggies, then our discontent extends to the entire year now. Even in August, the tomatoes are crunchy and tasteless. The apples of September are Red Delicious, an oxymoron if ever there was one. And in June, the strawberries are shipped in from... guess where...

[ducktapeddonkey.livejournal.com]

Three words.




Grow yer own.


;)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

And I do. But why are we putting up with this trash from commercial growers the rest of the year?

[cats-haven.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with you there, my friend. Strawberries that actually look AND taste good are very hard to find unless they are in season. Had been able to keep the land I was going to buy last year, I'd be watching those first vines reaching out with buds to promise many a good treat.

I miss having a garden. I miss the taste of real food, not this stuff we find in fast food places like McDeaths. Seems even beef, chicken and pork are loosing that distinct flavor they used to have only a few years ago all because of the hormones and special feed they give the damn animals. Trust me, there is a definite taste difference between a steak that is from a machine fed cow and one that was raised with a lot of grazing in a meadow and normal un-enhanced feed.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, the factory cow or chicken is probably glad to give it up, while the free range animal still has something in life to look forward to...

[cats-haven.livejournal.com]

True, but I think I'd rather have a steak that tastes good than one that looks good and tastes like crap.

[animist.livejournal.com]

Very well said. I can't think of anyting I could add to this except to note that this seems to be a sign of the general way the USA is going now.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Alas, yes. All looks and no substance.

[equiphile.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I think I know that situation. Everytime I visit Napfény I bring an apple to her. Mostly from the garden of someone, or if it's winter, then from a supermarket. And on one day I found extremely bueatiful apples. Really they looked much more than any other apple I've seen before, so I bought one for Napfény ofcourse. Then, when I gave it to her, she seemed to don't like it... What is kinda unusual from her, so I tasted it and... and it was really terrible, something like Tivo explained those strawberries... So this is where the world leads... if you don't grow fruits for yourself, then you won't eat good fruits...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

This is really sad news. I had thought that folks in Europe still had the good sense to keep these plastic commercial products away from their tables and markets. If you can find real strawberries in a month or two, give Napfény one or two for me. My horses love them.

Eek.

[favouritewindow.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry to hear that, Tivo. Those strawberries sound absolutely awful. Here, when I have strawberries, I buy them from Woolworths (a chain here in SA), and they taste great. Not saw-dusty at all. I find it difficult to believe that SA supermarkets might have fresher stuff than the US, though... are you sure that this wasn't just a bad batch?

Re: Eek.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's a question of freshness. The fruit here is picked before it is really ripe, because ripe fruit has too short a shelf life and won't tolerate rough handling. In a sense, what we get is actually "too fresh" because it is immature.

Paranoid health regulations enter into the problem too. That isn't so much a federal issue, but a local one. Where I live, for instance, county health regulations forbid "reselling" of farm produce unless the farm is "registered and licensed". If I grow apples, I am allowed to sell them from a stand or shop on my own land, or in a farmer's market, but I cannot sell them wholesale to a supermarket that would resell them to the public. The licensing process is prohibitive to all but the largest producers. So in effect the retailers are actually forbidden to sell local produce. Instead they have to obtain fruits and vegetables from a licensed wholesaler who probably buys them by the trainload from really big producers, most of whom are in California. Whatever those California superfarms choose to sell, that's all the choice we get even 2000 miles away.

The profit-maximizing behavior of big business enters into it at the supermarket level too. Most markets are owned by gigantic national corporations. They are vertically integrated, and literally own everything from the farm where the food is grown to the processing plant that packages it to the trucks that carry it across the country, the warehaouses, and the retail store. They wouldn't make as high a profit if they bought local produce and resold it locally in each area, so they don't do that.

Local farmers still do grow and sell some fruits and vegetables, but mostly it's the excess of what they grow for their own use. Because they have no outlet other than their own direct sales, the consumer can't get local produce (which is picked when ripe and sold immediately, in season) unless he or she travels around to individual farms or farmer's markets to get it. In general, this is prohibitive, especially in these times of high fuel costs and limited time for such pursuits.

It's all a very unhappy situation. (And don't tell me libertarians would make it better. At the heart of the problem is the big business: the giant produce farms, the giant supermarket chains. The regulations were created to suit them, and under libertarianism they still would be able to do as they please to maximize their own profit and underserve their customers who have no alternative source of supply.)

You might wonder what local farmers do grow under these circumstances. The answer is, very little variety. They grow what they are still allowed to sell, and the available buyer is, ultimately, those same giant food businesses. Most of what they do buy here in the midwest is animal feed. Most farmers grow corn and soybeans and a little hay. This is sold to the big agribusiness and used to fatten meat animals. It's terribly inefficient and wasteful from everyone's point of view, except that of the big businesses who own the bulk of the process.

[kaysho.livejournal.com]

Well, we've also been trained now to expect that we can get any fruit in any season, so we put up with stuff like this so we can have strawberries for nine months out of the year instead of getting them for just a few weeks and having to make pies out of them very quickly.

There's still nothing finer than fresh backyard fruit, even if you can only get it for a very short time every year.