Suffering For Sweetness: Why Arkansas Strawberries Are So Good
I recently finished James Michener’s epic nonfiction travelogue book Iberia and was thinking about a particular line in which he chronicles a debate between two Spaniards over viticultural regions. “The wine in that region is no good, “one man declares, “because the grapes haven’t suffered!” I wondered if there was any truth to this, not knowing anything at all about wine production, but also thinking about a comment my mother made when we recently hung out in her native Arkansas and sampled some locally grown strawberries. “I think these are some of the best strawberries in the world,” she declared. I didn’t disagree. But much of the Ozark Plateau has notoriously bad agricultural soil. Did suffering in the bad agricultural conditions make them tastier? I unpacked this a bit and found that she may be correct– with science to back up her case!
First, we might note why the conditions for strawberries aren’t great, and it has nothing to do with the red state’s politics and its hideous human of a governor. It’s mostly the soil. But the soil varies from region to region, and it’s worth noting how much of the good soil is dedicated to large commodity crop production. The Natural State has a substantial agricultural economy at upwards of $20 billion in economic product. A large portion of this is poultry and egg production at an estimated $5.1 billion. Beef and pork production are relatively small portions of this. And of the cropland in the state, soybeans generate about $2 billion and rice about $1.7 billion— unusual compared to northern Midwestern neighbors who are more corn and soy.
Agricultural data are tricky because they’re measured primarily in dollars, bushels, or bushels per acre, while some crops aren’t measured in bushels. But aside from the major crops, peaches are a big one, as are tomatoes. The comparison between commodity crops like rice and soybeans and produce is kinda sorta shocking.
The strawberry economy of the state, though, has a long and storied history going back more than a century. But while it availed itself of technological and agricultural innovations of the 20th century, it was also largely unable to compete with the large-scale industrial farming of the fruit primarily in areas like Florida and California, which dominate the national market these days. We read an article in a class I took in college about sustainable agriculture that asked this question of whether industrialized agriculture couldn’t actually produce fruits and vegetables with a lower carbon footprint than something local that was less efficient as a matter of yield-per-input or per unit of land, even if it was 3,000 miles away. It’s a bizarre question to consider, and not one I’m particularly thinking about when I’m trying to support local farmers, but suffice it to say that it’s hard for small producers to survive against a national agricultural economy that favors huge scale.
That, my friends, is a question for another day!
So, what about that soil?
Plants are pretty smart, so they can figure out how to economize when they’re presented with shortages of nutrients, water, or stress from temperature or light. At least some plants can do this. A lot of adaptation is evolutionary. Domestic crops in particular are things we’ve been dealing with for thousands of years, and at least for a century plus with fairly rigorous scientific management. Environmental stressors can force plants to allocate internal biological resources more efficiently, aimed at ensuring the preservation and production of seeds. It’s all about that seed production, baby!
This can come in the form of additional concentrations of flavonoids, tannins, terpenoids, or sugars– the things that make us want to consume things like strawberries or wine. It can also come in the form of developing more expansive root systems to seek out more nutrients or more water. We have evidence of this from wine-growing regions and from fruit production, where techniques like Regulated Deficit Irrigation expose plants to a specific level of water stress in order to encourage the “economization” within the plant. Wines grown in the more challenging climates– and I say “challenging” because it is indeed much harder to grow in such regions- can contain all manner of tasty bits and even be better suited to aging. Climate change, of course, will introduce new challenges and, I daresay, new methods to manage those challenges, whether that means new hybrids or varietals, new irrigation methods, or, well, other things we haven’t even thought of yet.
So, turns out Michener’s guy– and my mother, both- were probably correct. And the strawberries were, I must say, some fine strawberries. Unfortunately, they only are in season for a very short window– before it gets super hot in the summers. But it’s a great reminder that seasonality in most places is a reality rather than an inconvenience in an age in which we expect the opposite. And I’d rather have a bit more seasonality if it means tasting the magical, luscious Arkansas strawberries we had on our trip. It’s also a reminder. Just as the plants can thrive when they economize, so, too, can we.
