I guarantee many radio listeners this week learned a lot – and may have gotten a wee misled by one passage – and were entertained by this:
- NPR All Things Considered – Dan Charles: Breeding Battle Threatens Key Source Of California Strawberries ; Where we learn that California grows about 85% of America’s crop of this non-berry (and maybe not even a fruit). Also here one hears that UC Davis has some prosperous-from-royalties professors who for decades have developed new breeds for the industry, and that said professors plan to take their operation private. The state strawberry industry association, which helped pay UC Davis’s breeding costs, is suing the university for breach of contract. The suit asserts that strawberry farmers had a deal to gain full and affordable access to new varieties. The university says the suit is from a misunderstanding, that it plans to keep on breeding them, and so contrarily on.
On reading this tale of plant breeding and the ag business, the passages that would make many a science journalist exclaim in discovery were these:
Before getting into the details of this dispute, it’s worth a little background on strawberry breeding itself, and where the modern strawberry came from.
“It’s a pretty amazing story,” says , a professor of horticulture and a berry breeder at Michigan State University. It begins with two different berry plants growing in completely different parts of the world a few hundred years ago.
One in Chile produced nice big fruit that were kind of bland. The , in the eastern United States, had berries that were bright red and bursting with flavor, but tiny.
Both species were picked up by European collectors — in the case of the Chilean plant, by a French spy — and ended up close to each other in a French botanical garden.
There, they made babies. “It was a perfect combination.” … The accidental hybrid that resulted from this cross-pollination produced fruit that was big, red and tasted great. The strawberry was born.
So, the strawberry was born! The episode, by the way, was in the 18th century. Does this description not imply that strawberries are a New World excloo, and that an accidental botanical tryst produced the first strawberries not so long ago? Ah, that is not quite right. Seeking to learn more I danced around the internet. Yes, it is true that a hybrid developed in France from wild Chilean and Virginia wild cousins was an important development, ancestral to many in the supermarket today. But the strawberry has been farmed in the Old World for thousands of years with many edible (and reputedly medicinal) variants there. NPR’s Charles somewhat oversimplified the history for his tale. But he has the spirit of it right, and this bit of botanical history adds a charming historic element to his tale.
One on line source that tells a bit more, while verifying the somewhat serendipitous marriage between Virginia and Chile berries, is this: History of the Strawberry, by Vern Grubinger, at the University of Vermont extension. If you really want to dive into strawberry breeding history, turns out there is a book on that: The Strawberry, by a now-deceased USDA berry specialist, George Darrow. By the way Darrow, one learns from the source of first and last resort, was also instrumental 90 years ago or so in recovering from an old, idle farm the founding population of what made Knott’s Berry Farm in Southern California famous. Not a strawberry.
Suspicion that other media had already written up the legal tangle led to:
- Los Angeles Times (May 27) Larry Gordon: Strawberry Expert At Center Of Battle Over Fruit’s Future ; Great atmosphere and much more here on the legal angles and the bitterness of the lawsuit and of relations between UCDavis and its restless strawberry experts. But next to nothing on the fascinating science of strawberries. Gordon is the paper’s higher education writer.
- Sacramento Bee (April 27) Richard Chang: UCD, growers in dispute over strawberry research ; Nothing on breeding techniques, but plenty on legal maneuverings, the entry of lawmakers into the matter, and the sheer size of the UC Davis collection.
Another thing. I thought I’d be able to close this post off by remarking that strawberries are the only fruit that have their seeds on the outside. Well, can you think of another? But, turns out, strawberries – the plump red part that makes such good jam and goes well under cream or in fruit salads – are not even fruit. Not botanically, formally. And those little white things on their outsides are not even, quite, seeds. They are the actual fruit (formally called achenes, each with a seed inside). The fleshy bulk of the strawberry is a pseudocarp, a pulpy swollen and of the stamen and receptacle for the actual fruit, says an explanatory essay at the Carnegie Museums site.
One hopes that from this legal tangle, which includes hopes by the entrepreneurial UC Davis profs to get cuttings from the university’s vast collection of strawberry wild and bred types, in all the diploid and triploid while the U says no way, will emerge eventually a satisfying news feature on the marvelous strawberry.
Another mystery is how it got its name. But that’s enough from me on this morning’s wandering peregrination through strawberry news and lore.
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