The Strawberry's Rise Should Worry Us

I'M STILL OLD enough to remember when strawberries were a rare treat.

- Bloomberg

As a child growing up in the 1980s on the outskirts of London, they appeared for a month or so to herald 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 over two million are consumed each year.

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.

The growth of the strawberry has been headlong, and shows few signs of slowing. Nearly 14 metric tonnes are grown every year for each tonne that was produced in the early 1960s. In 2023, 10.5 million metric 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 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.