The Politics of Strawberries

How could something as simple as those delicious sweet-tasting strawberries be a source of conflict?  In places where resources are distributed equally or by need, even the simplest things like small tasty fruit can be a source of disagreement.

At Twin Oaks, we have aimed in recent years to maintain around 2000 strawberry plants in the main garden.  The strawberries from those plants are eaten fresh early in the harvesting stage, and later processed to be frozen and used for jam later in the year.

Strawberries are an early fruit in central Virginia, the first one we can harvest in any significant quantity.  So, people are already somewhat desperate for fruit after a long winter.  It’s often at around the time of the first harvest that conflicts around the strawberries start to be heard.  One of the main contentions around strawberries is who gets the first few that we harvest.  Even with that many plants, in the first few weeks of harvesting, there are only going to be a handful to a few hundred strawberries ready to be picked.  This is somewhat of a problem for a community of 100 people who are aiming to share resources and the products of their labour: how exactly does one distribute 50 strawberries to 100 people fairly?  Cut each of them in half and give everyone one piece?   Give strawberries to those who have the most ‘need’ for fruit?  Let the garden shift of 10 people each eat 5 until there are enough for everyone else?  Hide them somewhere and don’t let anyone take any until there are enough to reasonably distribute?

Almost all those answers are either unworkable or will in some way upset some people.  Cutting strawberries into equal pieces and equally distributed, while about as equal as one could get, would probably not be acceptable to most people just for the amount of time it would take.  And then we’d probably need to come up with some way of making sure that everyone got their share and nothing more (how could anyone cut that many strawberries and not pop a few into their mouth?).  Giving strawberries to those who have the greatest ‘need’ for them is also fairly absurd, as I imagine the ridiculous discussions of us trying to define how one ‘needs’ strawberries more than another.  Having the people who harvest the small amount sharing it amongst themselves is done often in early harvests, but this often causes resentment from others in the community.  News about strawberries being ready spreads fast, and hearing that the garden crew is hogging all of them would just prompt some people to go into the garden themselves before the crew could get to them.  Hiding them until there’s a significant amount to go around is something that we do often, but some people won’t agree with this method, and will find them no matter how well they’re hidden.

Aside from the early distribution problem, how much time and money we put into strawberries has also been a topic of debate.  Strawberries are relatively labour intensive compared to other crops, mostly because they stay in the ground for two years, as opposed to almost everything else we grow, which at most last for the growing season, and then die with the cold weather.  Crops that have a planned end can be tilled into the ground and cover crops can be planted, both of which reduce the need for continuous weeding.  Smaller plants like strawberries that are going to be in the same place for two years can’t be controlled in this way.  The nature of the way they reproduce makes it hard to even use human-powered tools like hoes to control weeds.  What this means is that strawberries need to be weeded by hand.  And, with how weeds grow here, even with mulch like ours they still need to be weeded at least once a month, which can seem somewhat discouraging to do in the off-fruiting season when so much else needs to be done.  All of this adds up to many hundreds of work hours spent on the strawberries each year.

Spending all this time and effort on a small fruit crop brings up some much larger questions about what we are trying to accomplish in the garden, and for the community as a whole.  One view would be to look at strawberries from a purely economic standpoint.  Each hour we work in the garden is theoretically one hour we could be working in an income generating business, the income from which we could use to purchase things like strawberries.  Find out the retail cost of a pound similar local organic strawberries, multiply that by the number of pounds we produce, and divide that by the number of hours we put into that crop.  If it turns out that it would take us less time to work in our businesses to make the amount of money necessary to purchase the amount of strawberries we want, perhaps we should just focus the labour there, instead of trying to grow these things ourselves.  This perspective would allow us to create some sort of economic cut-off point, where anything that was less price efficient to grow ourselves than purchasing would not happen.  This is how a lot of the economic system of dominant culture functions.

Another way to look at this situation is to consider other goals that the community has, such as obtaining some degree of self-sufficiency and sustainability.  Those with this perspective would likely argue that we should try to grow as much as we can regardless of the cost, primarily because we are producing what we need by ourselves.  We then won’t be dependent on selling products from our businesses to people who potentially live thousands of miles away, to earn money and participate in an economic system that many of us have strong objections to, and use that money to purchase food products grown further away under conditions we can’t necessarily verify (are these organic strawberries that were transported across the continent really organic?).  This perspective holds that producing local and doing things ourselves is almost always better than dependency on the dominant economic system, even if doing a particular action would be considered to be the wrong economic choice by mainstream economists.

One final disagreement around strawberries is how they are used.  While we usually eat the first few weeks worth fresh, if the harvest is plentiful we often freeze the bulk of them and make them into strawberry jam throughout the year.  While many people appreciate having some sort of processed food product throughout the winter, others won’t eat something with that much sugar added to it (I was quite surprised myself when I saw the amount of sugar that used to make a batch of jam).  Should the strawberries be eaten fresh, should some be frozen and made into desserts throughout the year, or should some be used to make jam-like products, and how much of each?  And, often most contentiously, who decides?

The example of strawberries probably seems fairly silly to talk about in such a serious way, and to a large extent it is.  Strawberries obviously aren’t an essential need of anyone.  The community will survive just fine if all the strawberry plants disappeared forever.  After reading this description, the main thing one could take away from this is that we often spend a lot of time thinking and arguing about relatively unimportant things.

I think that there’s more to take away than just that.  The issues described above about strawberries could just as well apply to many other types of food we grow.  A lot of the dynamics could also apply to any relatively scarce good the community was trying to provide to everyone.

Many of the types of food we have here are not subject to the same dynamics because we can have as much of them as anybody could ever want.  For example, rice is extremely cheap to buy, and we simply purchase as much of it as we eat.  If we start going through it faster, we can simply buy more, with no significant economic strain on ourselves.  This doesn’t just apply to things we can buy cheaply, it can also apply to in-season crops.  For example, July through October we will essentially have as much sweet corn as anyone could possibly want to eat.  Situations like these are close to the creation of an “economy of plenty,” where all resources that people desire are freely available in the amounts they want.  This is the polar opposite of an “economy of scarcity,” where there are a limited number of resources that is much smaller than what people desire.  Viewing the world as an economy of scarcity is a fundamental assumption of mainstream economics.

What is interesting about the strawberry example is that strawberries would be a scarce commodity in a system of private production, ownership, and distribution.  Each of us, living on our own with the amount of money we would make as individuals living the way we do would at best be able to afford a few pounds of strawberries each year buying from producers who were charging as much as they could for their fruit.  But, through the elimination of private ownership, and through the principle of resource sharing, we all are able to have much more than we could as individuals living alone in a default state of competition, with a much fairer distribution.  While far from perfect, changing the way a resource is distributed moves something like the distribution of strawberries from being a scarce resource more towards one of plenty.

However, strawberries are clearly still scarce (at least far from unlimited), and the politics of a ‘fair’ distribution should not be ignored.  The debates about things like strawberries are important not because we have a need for strawberries themselves (despite some heated arguments I have personally overheard), but because such discussions are about how we try to fairly distribute resources in general.  Who gets how much, when, in what form, and who decides?  At the moment, we are arguing about things like strawberries, which are of relatively little importance.  However, I often wonder how we would handle ourselves if we had to have these discussions about resources that were actually scarce and necessary for our survival.  If the global economy continues to deteriorate, the price of rice may suddenly become a major issue.  The same goes for things like healthcare.  Or, potentially one day, something as important as water.  How would egalitarian resource sharing fare with very little resources to go around?

~ by Ethan Tupelo on 02010.07.08.