"The strawberries taste like strawberries!"

It isn't exactly the magical candyland of Willy Wonka,  
but it just so happened that when my parents and I were travelling in Peru, they were consistently amazed at the fierce flavors of seemingly commonplace foods. They remarked that they felt they were discovering tomatoes, grapes, lettuce, eggs and even meat for the first time, as if just now, after over half a century of "knowing" the flavors of these foods, they were really tasting them. 

We also ate new fruits unknown to us, like chirimoya, granadilla, and snozzberries.

Ok, not snozzberries ... "who ever heard of snozzberries?"

How sad, we remarked, that we have to go back to the US with its flavor-homogenized diet.

And why is it that the food in the US doesn't come close to the vibrant lip-smacking delight of strawberries that taste like strawberries?

Food eaten locally in Peru is not produced in industrial quantities the way that agriculture for export is or food grown in the US. It is not planted with GMO seeds that are manufactured to resist plagues, have harder shells, and withstand extreme temperatures. Fields are not smothered in petroleum-based fertilizers to compensate for lack of natural minerals and vitamins in the soil which have been leeched due to over-production, mono-cropping, and lack of rotation and "fallow" land (the practice of leaving a segment of land unplanted in order for it to recuperate its pH balance and nitrogen levels). Industrial agriculture overuses land to the point where plants need external elements to support their growth because soil nutrients are absent. So the "flavor" is fertilizer.

But in Peru the food is produced for eating, not just for selling. Land is ripe with nutrients and consciously maintained healthy in order to pass down to the next generation. That means they are filled with vitamins, minerals, and healing properties that get lost when the focus is on yield, export and profit. 

Food for export is harvested before being ripe and shipped in storage containers to the land of US box stores where it is displayed in styrofoam and plastic wrap, as disconnected from the land as possible. So strawberries with a sticker from Peru will not taste the same as strawberries bought at a local market in Peru.

But we buy it. We buy the whole story: still-green tomatoes, peeled, sliced and packaged carrots, boxed meals and canned vegetables. Because its easier to pay $50 for groceries than to scrub and peel potatoes or even harder, consider the impact of our purchase on the health of the land or our bodies.

I think if we actually knew what food was supposed to taste like, that is the flavor of Mother Nature and not of Monsanto, we would start to demand higher quality food. Maybe we wouldn't be able to handle it: our senses have become de-sensitized to the point where blandness is banal. And a strawberry is just a strawberry, after all, right?

When we eat, we should use all of our senses. And have faith that Mother Nature knows best what a strawberry should taste like.

I think with some creativity, we can bring around this change. After all, as Willy Wonka says, "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."

Comments

[Katie Holmes]

I had seen your post last week, and it hit home yesterday. After eating strawberries from our backyard garden, I ate other strawberries at a catered function yesterday, and thought, "This doesn't taste like a strawberry!" The difference between something laden with pesticides that has set for who-knows-how-long before being eaten and something organically grown, picked the same day, is amazing.

And I think that, to some extent, people are starting to think about this. At this same event yesterday a woman told me that she has started buying organic vegetables from a local Amish farm because the lack of pesticides helps her asthma. At least I hear more and more folks wondering where their food came from and what was used to grow it. This encourages me!

Thanks for your post, Alex!

[justin]

Nice post, I love straweberries, there good for my diabetes. Good info, we all need to start boarding the organic train for sure.