An excellent recent article that, in the context of strawberry production,
highlights some of the tradeoffs in industrial agriculture: reliable,
mass-production can lower price and increase avaialability, but at the expense
of foods that have real flavor.

>From "Fruit Gardener", July & August 2006 issue, vol 38, #4. 
Published by California Rare Fruit Growers

Article: California Strawberries  [pp 14-17, 23]
Subtitle: Compromises underlie ubiquity
Author: David Karp

Some interesting quotes:

[from pg 14]
"Certain fruits such as pears and lemons taste much as they did 50 or 100 years
ago, but California strawbberries have been radically transformed by industrial
agriculture. No other fruit evokes in me such profound ambivalence: Meeting
with growers and breeders across the state over the past 3 years, I've been
amazed by their horticultural wizardy, which produces year-round crops of
attractive, reasonably priced berries, but frustrated that the ensuing
compromises so often entail mediocre flavor."

[p. 17]
"Caught up in their daily struggles, most [California strawberry] growers would
sooner raise wombats than highly flavored but perishable strawberries."

[p. 17]
"Genuine specialty growers of old-fashioned [strawberry] varieties are
vanishingly rare in California."

Alas, it's the old heirloom varieties that actually have flavor. As is common
with David Karp's articles, it is loaded with color photos, in this case of
rare strawberry cultivars. 

Tom Billings