I tried the viral $20 strawberry. It tasted like the end of the American empire

The Guardian

15-03-2025

In Los Angeles, a strawberry – yes, one individual berry – is selling for $19.99. The berries are flown in from Japan, and Erewhon, a luxury grocery store, claims they're so popular it's hard to keep them in stock.
The $20 strawberry, which has been labeled 'dystopian' and a 'social experiment', went viral after a TikTok influencer filmed herself eating it and saying 'wow'. That video – produced by an influencer who happens to be part of the family that owns Erewhon– quickly sparked a slew of copycats: from earnest reviews to parodies and pranks and even an on-camera taste test by ABC news anchors. In one TikTok video, a comedian in a blond wig eats the strawberry while crooning to the 'poors' watching his video: 'This is something you could never afford … I'm going to taste it for you since you never will.'
The strawberry – absurdly priced, with what must be a staggering individual carbon footprint – seemed like an example of elite decadence so extreme that it could only be the product of an empire in decline.
When I emailed one prominent scholar of the Roman empire about the strawberry, he referenced Petronius' Satyricon, in which the nouveau-riche Trimalchio serves his Roman guests appetizers arranged in the form of zodiac signs, dormice rolled in poppyseeds and a roast boar filled with live birds.
My job as a journalist in this moment was clear: I needed to taste the strawberry myself, and I needed to ask more scholars if the $20 strawberry was a sign of the approaching fall of the American empire.
High-end fruit has long been popular in Japan, where prized melons regularly cost hundreds of dollars and occasionally sell for tens of thousands. In 2016, a single bunch of Ruby Roman grapes sold for more than a million yen – about £270 a grape.
Erewhon, the only grocery store to have inspired both a Louis Vuitton perfume and a Balenciaga collection, is not the first to introduce this luxury fruit trend to Americans. Oishii, a company that grows Japanese strawberries in the US, made headlines six years ago for selling a $50 box of strawberries that became trendy with American chefs, who liked to use them as the perfect minimalist end to an ornate omakase meal.
The high-end fruit company Elly Amai said in a statement that its $20 berries 'require a lot of skill and special techniques to grow' and, unlike berries in the US, 'are meticulously monitored for quality and taste'.
'The strawberries that don't meet qualifications are not harvested by the farmers,' Elly Amai said, describing at least 'two checkpoints' for the perfection of each berry, one in Japan by the farmer, and one when the berries arrive in the US.
Other companies have also stepped up to ship luxury fruit from Japan directly to American consumers. Ikigai Fruits, which launched in 2023, sells 'pearl white' Japanese strawberries that cost $128 a box, and extra-large 'Bijinhime' strawberries that cost $258.
Takeru Saito, a sales assistant at Ikigai Fruits, said the company had been founded in part to provide a boost to Japanese farmers, who have struggled to attract young people interested in taking over jobs that are labor-intensive and comparatively poorly paid. 'The number of farmers is declining – and it's an ageing population as well,' Saito said. A government report last year found that 80% of Japanese farmers were over age 60. By selling very-high-quality fruit to an international market, Saito said, 'more farmers can make money'.
In Japan, Saito said, the appeal of luxury fruit is rooted in tradition: fancy produce is a traditional gift for weddings, job promotions and other ceremonial occasions. In the United States, the expensive fruits are more of a novelty. In a statement, Erewhon said that its $20 Elly Amai strawberries 'are picked at their prime' in Japan and 'hit the shelves at Erewhon within 28 to 48 hours', which it described as 'faster than broccoli growing in California getting to markets in New York'.
Flying the berries to Los Angeles quickly enough to preserve their freshness 'costs just as much as the fruits', the grocery store said. It did not immediately respond to a question about the strawberries' carbon footprint.
California farmers, who produce 90% of strawberries grown in the US, were selling strawberries in early March for about 10 to 14 cents each, according to estimates based on data from the California Strawberry Commission. That makes Erewhon strawberries flown in from Japan as much as 200 times as expensive as a local berry. Could they be 200 times as delicious?
It took me several days of calling Erewhon store locations to finally find one with the strawberry in stock. On a Thursday, an employee told me the berries might arrive in the early afternoon. I rushed to the store at 1 pm, and was rewarded with the sight of nearly 50 single berries arrayed on a shelf.
Each strawberry rested on an individual pedestal, which resembles a small domed jewel case, or, as one TikToker put it, a stage. An explanatory plaque from Elly Amai promised 'an explosion of flavor that elevates the ordinary strawberry to extraordinary heights'.
I found myself overwhelmed by the task of choosing one strawberry from the crowded shelf. Given the price tag, it felt like less a supermarket purchase than the start of a relationship. Which of these eerily perfect berries was the right one to bring into my life?
The Onion had just published a satirical headline about Erewhon claiming the $19 strawberry was 'designed to be split', but I took that idea seriously. As a naturally frugal person forced to consume Erewhon products for my job, I decided the $20 strawberry had to be divided between at least three people.
I let the berry reach room temperature, as Elly Amai recommended, and then carefully transported it to a friend's house, along with a control group of cheap supermarket strawberries that cost $4.99 for a box of 16.
Examined close up, the contrast between the berries was startling. The $20 strawberry wasn't any bigger than the cheap strawberries, but it looked very different. Its color was a uniform light red, and its skin was glossy. Each pore around each of its seeds looked smooth and firm, as if it had just emerged from a high-end fruit spa.
I had lived in Los Angeles long enough to know that such beauty is not natural: this berry looked as if it had a personal trainer, a facialist and a team of dedicated stylists. The ordinary strawberry, in contrast, looked blotchy, its skin uneven and some of its pores swollen. Its leaves were long and disheveled.
We cut the $20 strawberry into eight slices, like a miniature cake. I popped one slice into my mouth. It was sweet, firm, neither too crunchy nor overripe. 'This is the platonic strawberry,' I admitted.
We tried the ordinary strawberry next, but we might not have bothered: despite its deep red color, it tasted crisp and unripe, without much strawberry essence.
We went back to eating our minuscule slivers of luxury strawberry, and riffing to each other on how to describe the taste. 'It's kind of like a dog breed – it's been cultivated to be perfect over hundreds of generations,' my friend said.
The more we ate, the more unsettled we felt: there was something uncanny about the flavor of the $20 strawberry, as if the process of perfecting a natural thing had been pushed past the point of human enjoyment. As my friend noted, it was impossible to taste this perfect strawberry without thinking about the hundreds or thousands of imperfect strawberries that had been discarded along the way.
In the past, we had usually eaten at least a handful of strawberries at a time, and the variations in flavor were part of the experience: one berry was more ripe, one less ripe, one a little squishy, one very sweet. As children, the surprise of each berry was mesmerizing, and even as adults it carried some nostalgic pleasure.
It felt a little sad, in the end, to eat just one strawberry and to know that each bite would be exactly and perfectly the same. The experience, my friend said, felt more like sniffing a Le Labo perfume than eating a piece of fruit.
Now that I had tasted the $20 strawberry, I still need to understand whether it was, in fact, a sign of cultural decadence so extreme that it might lead to an empire's fall.
I emailed Michael Kulikowski, a Penn State University classics professor. He had good news: the reason many people associated the fall of the Roman empire with cultural decadence, he said, was that most people knew only a few things about Rome, including that it was very decadent, and that it fell. In fact, he said, Rome's most famously decadent periods came '300 years earlier' than the fall of the western Roman empire, at a time of imperial power, not imperial decline.
Bryan Ward-Perkins, an Oxford historian and the author of The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, made a similar point: the Satyricon, 'the great literary testimony to Roman extravagant decadence', was written in the first century AD, 'when things were going very well'.
Unfortunately, Kulikowski said, there were other signs that the American empire might be nearing its fall.
Kulikowski argues that one reason the western Roman empire fell in 476, while the Byzantine, or eastern Roman empire, survived, was because the '1%' of the western Roman empire grew so powerful that they did not need a state to function.
'They can withhold their taxes. When push comes to shove, they can raise their own private armies,' he said. In the eastern Roman empire, in contrast, the aristocracy was weaker, and they still found value in supporting the bureaucracy of the state.
This was bad news for the current American empire: 'We have reached a very late Roman western state where the 1% does not need the state to survive,' Kulikowski said. 'If the US government stops being able to do much of anything, it stops to matter to them. That's a real parallel.'
The $20 strawberry did not concern him, but the coming effects of Trump's tariffs did: 'A better sign of the fall of the American empire will be when [in a week or two] a pint of strawberries is $12 at the mid-market supermarket,' Kulikowski told me.
As someone who does not think about the Roman empire very often, I found this analysis upsetting. I could only hope that future historians would get it right: whatever came next in the wreckage of empire, the $20 strawberry was not to blame.