Berries to new-style strawberries

Life if full of little disappointments, and one of those little disappointments is biting into a big, red strawberry and finding that what looked deceptively luscious on the outside is nothing but a tasteless chunk of white yuck.

When I was a kid, strawberries were actually tasty. And on the inside, they were red. You bought them from a local farm stand and your mother made strawberry shortcake. Even the frozen strawberries, while not quite as good as the real thing, were red and tasty.

As a Durgin-Park waitress, one of our tasks was to hull pint after pint of strawberries for strawberry shortcake. These strawberries, too, were red and tasty. Diners would sometime challenge us, claiming that they just knew that the strawberries were frozen. We would hold up our red fingers to prove that, nope, we used fresh. (By the way, we didn’t have any fancy purpose-built strawberry hullers. We used spoons. I still do – only I use a grapefruit spoon – on the rare occasion when I make strawberry shortcake.)

But mostly I don’t buy strawberries.

Yes, I like them on my cereal in the morning, but bananas are cheaper – and they’re available year-round. And, in summer, when they’re affordably available, blueberries are safer. Even if you can only get the really tasty ones, the tiny blueberries, from the farmers’ market at the height of summer, the larger industrial berries that you get at the grocery store tend to taste okay.

Not so with strawberries.

I’ll wander through the produce section thinking, maybe I’ll get me some strawberries. And then I see that all they have is Driscoll brand – Driscoll seems to have the monopoly at the local grocery chains – and I take a pass. Driscoll tends to disappoint. Too often, no matter how swell, how perfect they may look, they end up being white and tasteless.

Plus they’re bigger than they used to be, back when I was hulling strawberries at Durgin.

Is there a correlation between tastiness and size? There sure is for blueberries. Size matters and small is definitely better.

What about strawberries?

Does lousy taste come with larger size?

The answer is yes. Sort of.

It turns out that those land-of-the-giants strawberries have been cultivated because they’re easier to pick – whether by humans or through mechanization. And, given how ill-paid, physically demanding, and tedious fruit-picking is, fruit-growers tend to run into fruit-picker shortages. When the berries are larger,

…a migrant fruit picker can pick a greater mass of strawberry with each muscle movement. If you ever wonder why strawberries are now as large as plums used to be, the tight labour market is the reason. (Source: The Economist)

So Driscoll – which dominates the scene, whether in The States where there’s a labor market or in the UK where there’s a labour market – came up with the larger, firmer strawberry.

And when you focus on larger and firmer, something often gives, and what gives with strawberries is taste.

Seems to me that a strawberry without taste is just not worth it. Guess if I get a hankering for strawberry shortcake, I’ll have to wait for the farmers’ market to come around again next summer. That or head to Whole Wallet and pay a gazillion bucks for a pint of fancy non-Driscolls.

Meanwhile, I’ll just give the berries to industrial-strength strawberries. Blech…

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When I was in the software biz, and we were doing product releases, we’d say, “fast, good, cheap: pick two; cuz you can’t have all three.” Trade-offs, I guess, are universal.