Strawberries?

My Varda Group colleague Alex García Wylie has just sent me this interesting story about one of the many hidden costs of intensive strawberry farming in Spain.

Intensive strawberry farming is an environmental issue, and also a gastronomic and cultural issue.

I belong to a generation for whom strawberries were available only for little more than a month each summer. One of my nicest childhood memories is the shelf of a patisserie in Paris coloured with intensely red strawberry pies, around the middle of June each year.

In my mind these strawberry pies are the equivalent of Marcel Proust's madeleines in Remembrance of Things Past.

But nowadays, it is really exceptional to buy a strawberry pie with the right taste.

Hardly an excuse for not writing as well as Proust...