The strawberry’s unstoppable rise should worry us

As a child growing up in the 1980s on the outskirts of London, they appeared for a month or so to herald the arrival of the hottest time of the year. Their air of rare luxury during the brief height of the English summer helps explain their indelible association with the Wimbledon tennis tournament, where more than two million are consumed each year.
How things have changed. My own children are likely to grow up thinking of them the way I think of apples or bananas — affordable, year-round fruits, barely more exotic than potatoes. This is all due to remarkable innovation in recent decades that has turned a once-rare crop into a harvest on the scale of the global coffee or leather trades. It’s also a sign of how such progress can make efforts to protect the environment harder.

The growth of the strawberry has been headlong, and shows few signs of slowing. Nearly 14 metric tons are grown every year for each ton that was produced in the early 1960s. In 2023, 10.5 million metric tons were harvested — more than the output of avocados, and roughly double the crops of tobacco and cocoa beans.
It’s impossible to separate this growth from the rise of petroleum over the same period — because plastics, pesticides and jet fuel are as essential to the modern industry as seeds and rainfall.
Tender, sweet and quick to rot, the history of the strawberry is shot through with challenges of growing it and getting it to market. Traditionally, they were mostly prepared or eaten close to where they were harvested. One theory about