Lilac Colored Glasses

There is an interesting little twist to strawberry season here in Belgium.

Where I come from, May is the huge strawberry season. The summer still brings strawberries but it also ushers in my absolute favorite fruits:raspberries, blackberries and cherries (which I rarely eat because I’m allergic, but sometimes it’s worth the swollen, itchy tongue and throat).

Anyway, Belgium has relatively similar weather to Pittsburgh so you can imagine my surprise last year when I started seeing pints of beautiful, huge, red, ripe strawberries in the grocery stores in early March. And cheap! Seriously, the cheapest I’ve ever seen strawberries. Like, €1,30 for 250 grams cheap (in Americanese that’s $1.75 a half pint).

So I asked CB about these crazy cheap strawberries and he told me to buy them now while I could. They’re so cheap, he told me, because they’re from Spain and in May the Belgian strawberry season would begin and the prices would almost double.
I did a double take on that one.
I sort of thought that when you have to import foods that are trucked in coolers across 3 countries the price reflects it much more than homegrown produce.
And in the U.S. it definitely does. But not in Belgium.
See, it turns out that labor here is so expensive (ask me to explain the Belgian social security system to you some time…when you have a week or so) that it’s actually cheaper to import strawberries from Spain than to have people pick them here.
And sure enough, the lovely, cute, shiny little Belgian berries are here.
At a whopping €3,99/pint.

I guess I’ll be waiting it out till cherry season.

Related posts:

1. I Plan on Posting, Honest I Do