The Future of Food

The other day I came to a realization...About strawberries. I was thinking about when I was young my family would get strawberries (only for dessert) and we would slice them up with some short cake and then COVER them in sugar. They were so good! What wouldn't be, covered with sugar? I got to wondering why strawberries, of all the berries in the world, would need sugar added to them? So as I was cutting up some conventionally grown strawberries at work, I was very disappointed in the general lack of flavor. Later, I cut some organically grown strawberries and marveled at the wonderfully sweet taste! That's when I had my realization!! Conventional strawberries just don't have the same flavor because of how they are grown. To some this may be common sense; and surely it should have been to me, a produce manager of 4 years.

So it got me thinking: how strange is it that we have zapped all the sweetness out of berries that we would need to add sugar to them! This is so absurd! Can you imagine making a pitcher of orange juice from concentrate, and then adding a cup of sugar like it's freaking kool-aid? Maybe that's where we're headed. Granted, strawberries are sprayed more than any other fruit, so oranges will not be the same kind of case. But we lack all kinds of nutrients in our soil (that's why we have multi-vitamins) because of how we farm so badly.

I guess the realization happened because I have all this farming information in my head, but I don't feel like I see the actual results of it very often; mostly because I only eat organic. When you go back to conventionally grown produce, you are often sorry that you did.