That’s not my understanding:
"Fruits that can ripen after picking — including melons, peaches, apples, avocados, mangoes, pears and tomatoes — are called climacteric fruits. In these fruits, ripening is hastened by chemicals, primarily ethylene gas, that are produced inside the fruit and convert stored starch into sugar even after picking.
Non-climacteric fruit produce little or no ethylene gas and therefore do not ripen once picked; these stubborn fruits include raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, watermelons, cherries, grapes, grapefruit, lemons and limes."
But I’m pretty sure that I’ve tried smelling them; and couldn’t pick up any scent, from a reasonable distance to have one’s nose from a strawberry in the grocery store (pre-covid). And a strawberry that has good flavor is a strawberry you can smell from at least several feet away.
The city I live in was want to known as the strawberry capital of the world Torrance California. We are close to the coast and have a temperate climate and our soil is heavy clay. I have had very good luck going very tasty strawberries in my own yard. I can’t really comment on varieties because I haven’t paid much attention to that
A strawberry taste datapoint, ignore it or make of it what you will:
I’ve never liked strawberries; to me they have always had unpleasant bitter component, dating back to my childhood in the 1960s. The only strawberries I ever liked were wild strawberries (tiny compared to “regular” ones) that I picked and ate while I was summer camp in Vermont sometime in the 1970s.
Fast forward to the present day. I’ve reluctantly started eating a few strawberries every day, in a fruit/yogurt/nut bowl I concoct because it’s supposedly healthy. Still thinking “yuck” about the frozen strawberries I’ve dropped in.
But I recently bought a bag of organic strawberries from Costo, and damn if they don’t smell and taste delicious. Why are they different to my tastebuds?
The only thing I can think of is that they are organic (like the mountaintop strawberries of Vermont) and there is something on non-organic strawberries that I’m very sensitive to.
I’m not really happy with that explanation, though. I’m all for buying organic when possible to save the environment, but I’m less convinced that human bodies react differently to organic/non-organic produce in the short run.
The best strawberries I ever ate were bought from a market in Brittany. We had been advised to get there early for the best produce so we were in a cafe with our café complet by seven o’clock.
The stallholders were still setting up when this elderly guy trundled an equally elderly barrow, with, maybe, a hundred punnets of strawberries. By the time he had parked the barrow, there were already a couple of dozen people queuing up. After buying a couple of punnets I went back to my wife at the cafe to finish my breakfast. Shortly after, the strawberry seller came over for a coffee and sat near us.
With my limited French, I asked him where the fruit came from and he pointed vaguely up at the hill behind the village. The waiter, explained that he had a small plot and got up at 4 am to pick what was ready and walked a couple of miles to sell it.
I have grown my own and picked commercially grown from local fields, but none ever matched those French ones.
“Celebrity” is a pretty good tomato. It’s been a popular home variety for quite awhile.
On another front, I’m highly skeptical that anything about “organic” culture makes a vegetable or fruit tastes better, even with a faint tang of residual manure.
People do have wildly different sensitivities, and it’s possible you are tasting something on the conventional berries that most people can’t taste.
It’s also possible that whoever’s producing those specific organic strawberries is selecting the varieties they grow for flavor. But the problem with most grocery strawberries IME isn’t that they’re bitter, but that they’re flavorless. A mismatch of soil and variety, or bad weather, or poor nutrition could however cause bitterness.
That’s a good sign right there!
Nobody in the USA, whether organic or conventional, is putting fresh manure on this year’s strawberries. Not legal, and not acceptable for organic culture; anything going on that close to harvest needs to be fully composted.
Many organic growers don’t use any fresh manure, and some don’t even use composted manure. Some conventional growers use fresh manure, though these days, if they’ve got any sense, not on something to be eaten raw by humans.
Some organic vegetables and fruit are also tasteless, because these days some organic (at least according to USDA) producers are also shipping crop long distances and are also growing for produce that stands up to shipping, that holds a long time on the shelf, and that produces high yields of pretty-looking fruit; plus harvesting it unripe. Some conventional produce grown for local markets that care about taste has good flavor. Flavor’s also affected by weather in the particular season, and by overall soil type. But I suspect that, if all other factors are equal, the organic will indeed taste a little better, because it’ll be growing in soil holding a better balance of soil organisms, which play a large role in getting fully proper nutrition to the plant. I don’t know if anybody’s ever done the studies to show it one way or another, though. It can’t be done by buying produce in the stores, because that doesn’t control for variety, soil type, weather, degree of ripeness at harvest – for some things even time of day at harvest can make a difference.
All I’m saying is that 90% of the reason that store-bought tomatoes are less than optimal eaten fresh is because of the way they’re picked and ripened, not the variety.
Now if we’re talking someone growing heirlooms (where they actually grow well) and the commercial varieties side-by-side with optimal nutrition, light, water, etc… and then picking both at the peak of ripeness and saying that the heirlooms taste better? Of course they do.
But I’d be willing to bet that the optimally grown commercial variety is pretty good as well. It’s probably light-years better than a commercially grown heirloom variety that you can buy in the grocery.
And I agree; organic is just a byword for scientific illiteracy. People are scared of the dreaded “chemicals”, to the point where they won’t use synthetic anything, despite the fact that in a lot of situations, you can actually have less environmental impact with judicious use of synthetic stuff versus less effective organic alternatives.
Whole other subject, and I’m not going to keep hijacking this one for it; but I am going to say that organic farming is as much or more about what the farmers do than it is about what the farmers don’t do; that much of both what is and isn’t done has nothing to do with use of synthetic chemicals; and that the entire way of using pesticide and fertilizer inputs, synthetic or not, runs on different principles and functions differently in the system.
Nor am I going to keep arguing, after this post, about whether there are cultivars that are tasteless or close to it even if harvested fully ripe. I know that part of my trialling of varieties in my particular growing conditions – which I do a great deal of – has to do with flavor; and that everything from beans to potatoes to most definitely strawberries and tomatoes does indeed vary in flavor by variety under the same growing and harvesting and post-harvest conditions. I know that companies advertising to commercial growers often advertise accordingly, and that studies comparing varieties sometimes do, and sometimes don’t, compare flavor results and that the ones that do such comparisons do find differences. And I’ve already said that yes, the otherwise best-flavored variety can have poor or no flavor if grown, harvested, or handled improperly; and that some commercial varieties have some flavor. But none of that means that almost the only reason store bought tomatoes are often flavorless is “because of the way they’re picked and ripened.” It’s a factor. It’s one of the major factors. It’s not the only major factor.
(I apparently posted the above once before I’d finished the post. Sorry about the late edit to fix that --)
It is also the case that like most naturally very sweet fruits, wild strawberry plants take a long time to concentrate the sugars and then typically have a rest period where they produce only small unripe fruiting bodies, producing full fruit typically twice a growing season (and probably corresponding to some kind of migration season). Cultivars bred or modified to produce large fruit continuously (“day neutral” cultivars) are favored by growers because of their regular production but are necessarily less flavorful because they are constantly using up nutrients to produce sugars and polyphenols that give the fruit its flavor and aroma. The larger the fruit is, the less concentrated the sugars will be, too; those “juicy” baby-fist size cultivars of strawberries just dilute the sugars.
Apropos of nothing, but the strawberry is not botanically considered a berry but is actually an accessory fruit; that it, it is not seed-bearing body produced by an ovary, but rather a flowering structure that containing many ovaries (the ‘seeds’ embedded in the outer flesh of the fruit.) So what you are eating is basically a stunted and bloated flower. Delicious!
Actually, “June-bearing” strawberries are reported to be the most common types grown for commercial production. Those tend to produce heavily over a short period.* So-called everbearing and day-neutral sorts typically produce smaller crops two or more times during the growing season depending on temperature. Individual variety traits and growing conditions seem more important in determining flavor than general classification; I’ve not seen evidence that “everbearing” strawberries are less flavorful than June-bearers.
Every supermarket and Costco in America seems to have a pallet of strawberries in those little one- or two-pound tubs, along with similar pallets of blueberries, blackberries and so forth. And even the commercially grown varieties are delicate enough that I can’t imagine they’re harvested mechanically. So I assume there are massive farms someplace with dozens of people harvesting the fruit by hand. It utterly amazes me.
It is backbreaking work done almost exclusively by migrant (and mostly immigrant) labor. Having briefly worked as a fruit picker (apples, not strawberries) I can authoritatively say that this is miserable work done for low pay that is invisible to end consumers but without which we would not have cheap fresh produce readily available.
Picking strawberries for a couple of hours at a time on a nice day while setting your own pace can be fun. Picking strawberries all day long for weeks at a time – very hard on the body.
There has been some work done on alternative methods: