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I tried the viral $20 strawberry. It tasted like the end of the American empire

A single strawberry flown in from Japan is selling for $20 in a hip LA grocery store. Does it symbolize the worst of American excess, or is

the Guardian

I had lived in Los Angeles long enough to know that such beauty is not natural: this berry looked as if it had a personal trainer, a facialist and a team of dedicated stylists. The ordinary strawberry, in contrast, looked blotchy, its skin uneven and some of its pores swollen. Its leaves were long and disheveled. We cut the $20 strawberry into eight slices, like a miniature cake. I popped one slice into my mouth. It was sweet, firm, neither too crunchy nor overripe. “This is the platonic strawberry,” I admitted. We tried the ordinary strawberry next, but we might not have bothered: despite its deep red color, it tasted crisp and unripe, without much strawberry essence. We went back to eating our minuscule slivers of luxury strawberry, and riffing to each other on how to describe the taste. “It’s kind of like a dog breed – it’s been cultivated to be perfect over hundreds of generations,” my friend said. The more we ate, the more unsettled we felt: there was something uncanny about the flavor of the $20 strawberry, as if the process of perfecting a natural thing had been pushed past the point of human enjoyment. As my friend noted, it was impossible to taste this perfect strawberry without thinking about the hundreds or thousands of imperfect strawberries that had been discarded along the way. In the past, we had usually eaten at least a handful of strawberries at a time, and the variations in flavor were part of the experience: one berry was more ripe, one less ripe, one a little squishy, one very sweet. As children, the surprise of each berry was mesmerizing, and even as adults it carried some nostalgic pleasure. It felt a little sad, in the end, to eat just one strawberry and to know that each bite would be exactly and perfectly the same. The experience, my friend said, felt more like sniffing a Le Labo perfume than eating a piece of fruit.