Strawberries used to be a delicacy. The fruit is fragile, prone to disease and requires a very particular climate to grow.
But these days, you can buy strawberries almost anywhere at any time – including in Barrow, Alaska, a polar community with an average annual temperature of -9 degrees Fahrenheit.
So how did strawberries become so ubiquitous, and what are the consequences for farmworkers? The answer takes us on a meandering tour back to World War I, the Hawaiian pineapple fields of the 1930s and a savvy marketing campaign in the 1970s and ’80s.
