Ah, strawberries. A June fruit in Michigan. That’s what our trusted fruit man at one of the local farmers markets would always say. I’ve been rushing the season. All week I’ve been seduced by those plump blushing beauties in their plastic baskets, arriving from who knows where. When I set a bowl of them on the table today, my wife said, “Did you read something about strawberries?” Meaning had someone made an argument for their salubrious qualities? One should eat strawberries? The answer was no. This was lunch lust, pure and simple.
Today the strawberries were a disappointment. All week I’ve been squeezing a lemon over them, dashing them with sugar. Today I put them on the table and let them speak for themselves. They were not eloquent. What they said was, strawberries are a June fruit in Michigan.
I got to thinking. Why strawberries? Who put the straw in the name? It might have something to do with how they grow–sort of strewn across the garden. The term goes way back. In 1000 CE, OED reports, the term “streaberige” is found.Shakespeare’s strawberries appear in Richard III. In Othello, on Desdemon’s handkerchief, they are a symbol of purity. In a 15th century book on healthy eating (how to lose weight, how not to die), strawberries got high marks: “be praysed aboue al buryes for they do qualyfye the heate of the lyuer, & dothe ingender good blode eaten with suger.” In the 19th century children threaded them on pieces of straw and sold them.
Flash forward a couple hundred years. The straws we bought at the local candy store were full of sugar. There was grape sugar, lemon sugar, apple sugar, and strawberry sugar.
When I was in college I saw Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries,” a film about a character who longs for emotional rebirth. I don’t remember seeing any berries in that black and white film. It’s just as well. They wouldn’t have been much to look at. Twice I’ve timed trips to Florence, arriving when the wild strawberries were coming down from the hills, little berries smaller than thimbles, fragoline, served with lemon juice and sugar. Flavor bombs.
Sometime in the next few months bionic strawberries will make an appearance at the local grocery stores here. Overgrown freaks of nature, busting out of their plastic baskets. I think these things are indicative of American excess, sold in 4-packs. One berry is enough. Last year I saw those giants in Italy. Berry science gone berserk. If they’re big, they’ve got to be bad?
Maybe not. Bad. But not terrible. Not poison. We saw a holistic guy for a while who said, Eat your broccoli. Organic? my wife asked. Yes, if you can find it, he said, but the benefits are so significant that even non-organic, even un-organic, even industrial grown inorganic broccoli is good for you. Eat it.
In June we’ll go and pick strawberries at a U-pick farm. It’s work. The plants grow low to the ground, the fruit strewn beneath the leafy plants. It’s work. It’s dirt. It’s sun. It’s handfuls of perfect fruit you can get for only a few weeks. They’re good news.