April 26th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews 4lbs of strawberries for $5 at Metro

I consider a good price for a one-pound (454 gram) clamshell of California strawberries to be $2.99–higher in the dead of winter. So when I saw two 907 gram clamshells for $5 at Metro, I was awed (I believe you could also replace one of the boxes with a honeydew melon, but I don’t own knives sharp enough to cut honeydew rind, so I stayed away from that).

My grocery-shopping escort declined a box, claiming he could not eat 2 pounds of strawberries before they went off. I scoffed at this, but quailed at the prospect of 4 pounds, so I just got the one. As it turned out, they still charged me the sale price even though I didn’t buy the sale amount (this is one of Metro’s usual, and nicer, policies)–so my 907 grams cost $2.50. Score!

Unlike much sale-priced produce, my berries aren’t underripe. They are nice and dark and, for imported berries, fairly soft. That’s still not *very* soft–Cali berries always have a bizarro crunch factor that is completely absent in lovely delicate local berries. But the local berries won’t be ready for, minimum, another month, and one of the stranger aspects of globalization is the taste it creates for out-of-season fruits. I want berries *always*, not just the six weeks you can pick them in southern Ontario. So Cali berries it is.

These are, I think, the best of their kind I’ve seen. They are nice and sweet (most of them, anyway) and very few off berries (just one in the box so far, and even that was likely edible). I am very impressed. And what’s more, it was not my box–I looked at the others stacked up and the Yonge & College Metro (can’t vouch for any others) and they looked uniformly dark red and healthy. Yum.

Running into this sale was fortitous for a Sunday when I skipped lunch in favour of a poetry vending machine launch and wound up eating a giant burrito at 4pm, because a big fistful of berries plus cereal made a really great supper around 8 that evening. Life is good…but I can’t wait for Ontario berries.

RR