The costs of the supermarket strawberries are not reflected in the berries themselves, but in wars for oil, government policies that support commodity crops instead of fruits and veggies on small farms, and advertising (disposable money that comes from disposable people who don’t know they are being disposed of).

Taste-testing strawberries is fickle. As soon as they are picked, they start to lose flavor. If grown without stress, they have less flavor, if you eat a warm strawberry while fighting mosquitoes and black flies on a family farm in Upper Michigan, you’ll believe it’s the best thing you’ve ever tasted. Compare that to something cold (usually green inside) out of a clamshell in a cold apartment, and of course, it’s no contest.

Vertical farming is like electric automobiles: it addresses a problem (food and transportation) that’s created because too many people are sequestered in cities to do the bidding of people who build cities. When considered in context of a dying planet, maybe we should stop trying to save the humans that do nothing but exploit humans (and by proxy, the planet’s future).

People buy cars to drive to jobs to buy cars to drive to the mall to buy new clothes to go to the ‘farmers’ markets’ on weekends to prove what individually market-aware humans they are. That makes for some damned expensive strawberries that are 95% water.