I was in the grocery store, trying to convince myself that it wasn’t unethical – I mean, not very unethical – to buy strawberries.
From Mexico.
In Nova Scotia.
In February.
How far had they travelled? What was the cost to the planet of a lot of us buying those (no doubt heavily sprayed) berries from so far away? Not to mention the plastic clamshell they came in.
But they were so red and round. They weren’t exactly luscious, because those cultivated big berries from far away can’t match the fragile juiciness of local berries in season. But I could almost taste them.
I popped a plastic clamshell of berries into my cart. I didn’t exactly look around guiltily, but I felt as though I should.
Those strawberries reminded me of a story my mother used to tell. The youngest in a large family, her older brothers went off to Europe to serve in World War II. One of them came home from the war in December 1945 with a bag of oranges, and all the children got an orange in their Christmas stocking.
“I never tasted anything like it,” Mum would say, more than 60 years later.
Pushing my shopping cart around the store, I kept looking at those strawberries. And I kept thinking of my mother and the Christmas orange. That precious orange had brought with it the gifts of novelty and scarcity. It had been picked in season and brought carefully home in a soldier’s duffel bag.
I turned my cart around and wheeled it back to the produce section. A man was standing beside the strawberries, and politely moved aside so I could put back the ones in my cart.
“Expensive, aren’t they?” he said sympathetically.
“In too many ways,” I agreed.
On my way home, I consoled myself with visions of local strawberries in late June. Tender, sweet, juicy and, when I buy them at the farmers’ market, picked that very day.
It’s not about scarcity, I mused, back at home unpacking my groceries; it’s about seasonality. After all, I can gorge myself every day when strawberries are in season. I thought again of my mother and her single glorious post-war orange. How lucky I was to have the lavishness of a whole strawberry season to look forward to.
