Nobody in Australia gets very excited about strawberries. After all, they are only strawberries.
It’s only for the few weeks every year at the beginning of the winter when the prices soar & people start punching each other across supermarket aisles that anybody notices strawberries at all. This increase (this year we saw nearly $9 per punnet) is due to the end of the season for the southern states (October to May) not quite overlapping with the start of the Queensland & Western Australian strawberry season (from June to October). Once this happens, strawberry equilibrium is restored, prices return to normal, and everyone forgets about them again. After all, they are only strawberries!
It’s somewhat remarkable that the Australian strawberry industry can maintain production to suit our needs at such consistently low prices, even more remarkable that as consumers we expect it to. One of the many ways we are spoiled in this country is that we have an agricultural, food production & retail infrastructure which transcends the forces of nature. For some reason it has become somehow essential for the city supermarket aisles to contain a consistent range of products all year round, and through the cunning application of climate & technology this has been achieved. But at what cost? Have we lost an appreciation of seasons in this country? To me, it is yet another way that the good fortune of Australian society has done little more than to encourage our lack of understanding, and to feed our already overgrown sense of entitlement.
As an arrogant Australian teenager living in London, I was bemused by the excitement that strawberries would create at summertime parties & functions. I was given endless bowls of little, rock hard, tart, juiceless little pellets to eat from someone’s garden served with cream, and was supposed to make appreciative murmurs until I’d managed to chug them all down. I couldn’t honestly understand why anybody could be excited about something that was so genuinely crap. It wasn’t until nearly 20 years later, back in Australia, that I realised it wasn’t the strawberries themselves that English people were excited about, it was the fact that they were having strawberries at all. Strawberries meant Wimbledon, Pimms & lemonade, The Boat Race, and Sunshine (possibly). It represented three months away from uni or school, holidays to Brighton, and an exceedingly brief opportunity to wear clothing that exposed your limbs to the elements. Eating strawberries wasn’t just about eating from the season, it was a way of celebrating the season, and the enjoyment of them was based on something so much deeper than simply having, or not having, good fruit.
We are more than a little spoilt in this regard, and it goes a long way beyond simply getting whatever we want. I think many modern chefs who’ve grown up in Australian cities (I include myself in this) lack a native concept of seasonality. Everyone knows what it means, in fact at the moment it’s a real buzz word – but we don’t ‘feel’ it or use it in the way we would if we had lived it and breathed it. Seasonality in a lot of our kitchens is like an accessory – the same as ‘organic’, or ‘free range’, ‘ethical’ or ‘free trade’. It’s not a genuine food parameter, but rather a concept we optionally adopt when it suits us to style the food on a menu.
As for strawberries, they are often taken for granted – and have been relegated to a ‘staple’ category of fruit. More often used as a garnish than an ingredient, and way too often cut into fans by apprentices to hide the desserts that they clumsily damage.
I’m not sure I have the answer – perhaps there isn’t one. But next time my two children decided to casually demolish a punnet of strawberries in 35 seconds, I might grab a couple for myself and see what they taste like, and I’ll try to be a little more thankful for some of the things we have.
There is some great info on the Australian Strawberry industry here at www.strawberriesaustralia.com.au
