The sky is still falling, right?

Agribusiness is in the news. Perhaps my attentions are tuned in after having read Paul Roberts’ The End of Food and I’m noticing articles that were previously off my radar.

We have this article in today’s Globe and Mail about engineering tastier vegetables to meet consumer demands. Initially, I can’t help agreeing with Jamie Reaume, executive director of the Holland Marsh Growers' Association: “The overriding concern that always pops up when you start to deal with vegetables is what was wrong with the original taste and why are people trying to improve it?” Then I remember that we are human, always striving to create something better, whether it be to sell or to savour.

I’m certainly not as gloomsday centered as the target Star reader, given the tone of this article on the California über-strawberry. Those big red strawberries we see in grocery stores, available nine months of the year for as low as $2 a pint are obviously bad news, given that they’re grown 5,000 km away and are engineered in every possible way. Packed within a tiny paragraph, however, is the truth of food production on a large scale: high volumes and crop specialization yields fruit that is more efficient and produces fewer greenhouse gases per pound than fruit I would grown in my backyard. But forget about that. They’ve got to be bad in other ways, so keep feeling guilty that we’re all ruining life as we know it.

Speaking of California strawberries, I’ve got some in my fridge that I bought on sale for a couple bucks the other day. Time for a smoothie.