The Unstoppable Rise of the Strawberry Should Worry Us

It tracks growth in the use of plastics, but we are unlikely to resist the allure of unsustainable practices.

- David Fickling

I'm still old enough to remember when strawberries were a rare treat. When I was 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 fruit, barely more exotic than potatoes. This is all due to remarkable innovations in recent decades that have 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 tonnes are grown every year for each tonne that was produced in the early 1960s. In 2023, 10.5 million tonnes 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.