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