The Surprising Strawberry

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 976 Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2016

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

2016's strawberry solstice fell as the UK's strawberry pickers embarked on a bigger crop than ever before. Strawberries have become a supermarket staple - no longer a seasonal treat. But as our appetite for the berries has increased, production it seems, is becoming more complicated.

Californian strawberry farmers, who produce one of the biggest crops in the world, are facing some of the most challenging times in recent history. Back in post-Brexit Britain, fruit farmers are looking for assurance that they'll still attract pickers from the continent.

Yet the strawberry is interwoven into our culture like no other fruit, and when good, can be the flavour, scent and colour of summer. Chef Jeremy Lee, author Jane McMorland Hunter, farmer Marion Regan, professor Julie Guthman and winemakers Ron and Judith Gillies help Sheila Dillon unravel the surprising story of the strawberry.

Presented by Sheila Dillon Produced by Clare Salisbury.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program.
0:05.0	Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure.
0:10.0	We hope you enjoy it.
0:12.0	Very good question.
0:15.0	What defines a strawberry?
0:17.0	It is immediately evocative of sunshine and summer.
0:21.0	And it heralds the summer like nothing else.
0:24.0	It's the time of the season.
0:28.0	Almost crisp on the outside
0:31.0	and then yields beautifully within sweetness.
0:34.4	But there's a very delicate sowness to a strawberry as well.
0:37.4	Shocking exuberance of us, you know, between its tempering and it's not like anything else.
0:42.6	And so the only thing you can liken it to is does, you know, when you look up for
0:46.5	meeting a strawberry, do you just, is it somewhere outside?
0:49.5	And inevitably hopefully it is. It is. The time of the season for the free.
0:59.1	The strawberry's been intertwined into our lives for a very long time. But in becoming more an everyday
1:05.0	supermarket pickup and less a relishable summer pleasure, we've created problems.
1:10.2	Its future in some important growing areas is hanging by a tendril.
1:15.0	The very ingredients of the strawberry industry success have now become its threat.
1:23.4	We'll get to the threats later, but let's find out first
1:26.5	how long we've been falling in love with the strawberry.
1:30.3	Consider midsummer's night this past June.
	...

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