“We got some good runners this year,” Jack Algiere, Stone Barns’ vegetable farmer, said to me last summer, trying to explain how, as if by magic, the number of strawberry plants had multiplied from 500 to 4,000.

 

Feigning understanding—what do runners have to do with anything?—I crouched down to examine the crop. These weren’t the fist-size berries you’d recognize from supermarkets and hotel buffets. Each one was small and plump, and when I popped one of the dark, red jewels into my mouth, it burst with warm juice.

Thanks to the big food chains, brand-name cartons of shiny, symmetrical berries are as ubiquitous as General Mills, shipped to supermarkets year-round from farms in California or Chile, Oregon or Argentina. What you don’t see on the labels, however, is the fact that it costs more than 400 fossil-fuel calories to fly a single 5-calorie strawberry from California to my neighborhood supermarket in New York City, according to nutritionist Joan Dye Gussow.

 

But increasingly, shoppers are beginning to identify other names, those of local farmers, like Jack, who grow strawberries bred for their delicious flavor rather than their uniformity. One taste of his Tristar berries (so-called because of their three-month growing season) and you’ll see why these summer fruits are worth waiting for.

 

 

 

2 quarts heavy cream

1½ cups condensed milk

2 vanilla beans, split lengthwise, seeds scraped

3 sheets gelatin

 

1 lb strawberries

½ cup sugar

 

2 lbs strawberries

1 cup sugar

 

 

 

Mix strawberries and sugar and let stand at room temperature for 1 hour. Strain and reserve.

 

Layer strawberries and granite on top of the panna cotta and enjoy. Serves eight.

 

 

Story by Dan Barber. This article originally appeared in Plenty in July 2008.

 

Copyright Environ Press 2008