The best reason to eat our strawberries is taste — once you try the real thing, it’s hard to go back to grocery store berries. But you might also consider this: industrial berries tend to be soaked with chemicals. In 2015 the Environmental Working Group reported that industrial growers in California use up to 300 pounds of pesticide per acre of plants. By comparison, sweet corn usually gets 5 pounds per acre.
Testing conducted by the US Department of Agriculture in 2015 and 2016 revealed an average of eight different kinds of pesticide per strawberry sample, compared with an average of two for most produce. “Ninety-nine percent of the samples tested had detectable levels of at least one pesticide,” according to the website Mercola, “and 1 in 5 samples had residues of 10 or more chemicals. The most contaminated sample had 22.”
The USDA study turned up 81 different pesticides in the samples from growers in the U.S., Mexico, and the Netherlands, including carbendazim, a hormone-disrupting fungicide linked to male reproductive damage, and bifenthrin, a pyrethroid insecticide classified as a possible human carcinogen. Mercola reports that “40 of the 1,174 samples contained pesticides that are actually illegal for use on strawberries.” 
And even the organic label may not be a safeguard against chemical infusion. That’s because the standards for organic certification apply only to the practices of the certified grower, not to the practices of nurseries where he or she may buy their starter plants — and most nurseries sterilize their soil with fumigants before planting.
So the best way to avoid consuming a chemical cocktail with every berry is to know the story of every berry you put in your mouth.
Come on out to the farm, and we’ll tell you the story of our berries. They’re clean — free of pesticides unless some infestation forces us to intervene, on which case we’ll let you know.
The food writer Mark Bittman has eaten just about everything you might put on a dinner plate, and he’s written about a lot of that food — how it tastes, where it comes from, and what it does to your body. He was the first food-focused columnist for The New York Times, and his book 
In a world where the goodness of anti-bacterialism is taken for granted, encouraging bacteria to infect your food seems almost as wrong as flag-burning. Don’t the hand-sanitizing stations screwed to the walls of all our public buildings confirm the status of bacteria as a public enemy? The word itself sounds unhealthy, like saying it too often might turn your tongue white or make your skin break out.
But the truth is that we need bacteria to stay alive — certain kinds, anyway. By 
prohibit the growth of harmful bacteria and encourage the growth of lactobacillus, which thrives in the presence of salt. The fermented vegetable most of us are familiar with is sauerkraut, which is cabbage preserved by lactobacillus, and while cabbage is included in many popular ferment recipes, it’s far from the only vegetable that lends itself to fermentation. Almost any vegetable can be fermented, but the process alters flavor in unpredictable ways which may not harmonize with the original taste and aroma of all foods.
but conventional supermarket produce works, too. Many recipes and how-to guides are available 
My first ferment moved into the eating stage today, after just five days in the crock. That’s on the early end of the fermenting window, and I did wonder if I was jumping the gun, but I was curious, so I took off the weights. This is what I saw: a lot more brine that I started with. I had read that there might be mold and strong, off-putting odors, but I found neither.
I’ve been wanting to do this ever since I first made friends with lactobacillus, but I’ve been dragging my feet. Smiling at a milky-sounding bacteria is one thing, whereas cultivating it in your kitchen is something else — that takes a push from a friend. My push came in the form of a fermenting crock from Humble House — that’s the tall thing on the right in this picture. You don’t have to have one of those — a big jar or any number of other vessels will work — but a nice crock has so much tool-appeal that you’ll be eager to use it. Thanks, Kate! You also need a heavy bowl and a knife that’s sharp enough to hold its line all the way down to the cutting board.
