Sep 03 2007
Is this why strawberries are so sweet?

The reading below is from a promo mailer for “The Sun”, a literary magazine. I received the promo in the mail a year ago and promptly lost it. Always searching for a copy of that bit about strawberries that I thought was so beautiful and so Yogic in meaning, one day I learned Yoga teacher and friend, Elyse keeps a copy of it in her car! Here it is, enjoy….
Strawberries are too delicate to be picked by machine. The perfectly ripe ones even bruise at too heavy a human touch. It hit her then that every strawberry she had ever eaten-every piece of fruit-had been picked by calloused human hands. Every piece of toast with jelly represented someone’s knees, someone’s aching back and hips, someone with a bandanna on her wrist to wipe away the sweat. Why had no one told her about this before?
- Alison Luterman, “What They Came For”
