<\/p>\n
Ripe strawberries from S-T Strawberries, on Jackson Road.<\/p>\n
Katherine Levy<\/p>\n
There are people who fixate on a single thing. A friend of mine fixates on blueberries. The rest of us cycle through coffee, chocolate \u2014 whatever gets us through the day.<\/p>\n
For me, especially this time of year, it\u2019s strawberries.<\/p>\n
When I lived in Sacramento, I\u2019d make a habit of driving out along Jackson Road a couple of times a month. The farm stands there aren\u2019t curated. They\u2019re practical, seasonal and unapologetically local.<\/p>\n
You buy what\u2019s coming out of the ground right then: squash, onions, melons, lemons, limes and tomatoes. Whatever is ripe, and whatever didn\u2019t need to be engineered to survive a cross-country truck ride.<\/p>\n
Until you have eaten produce that wasn\u2019t bred specifically with shelf life in mind, it\u2019s hard to explain what is missing from the supermarket version. It\u2019s not just freshness. It\u2019s specificity, texture and flavor that doesn\u2019t flatten out after the first bite.<\/p>\n
In the Sacramento area, you\u2019ll mostly see a handful of varieties: Chandler, Albion, Seascape, Monterey and San Andreas. The Chandlers come first, usually through May. They are smaller, softer, almost perfumed. They don\u2019t travel well, which is the point. You\u2019re eating something that wasn\u2019t designed to be durable. It was designed to taste like itself.<\/p>\n
The Chandlers are winding down, but Albion, Seascape, Monterey and San Andreas will carry the season into July. The larger, firmer varieties still carry the same intensity you don\u2019t get from anything shipped in when picked ripe and eaten within a day or two.<\/p>\n
Sacramento has its own version of U-pick culture, quieter and more understated than the Brentwood orchards or the coast.<\/p>\n
Strawberries are the anchor<\/p>\n
There\u2019s something about walking the rows early in the day, before the heat sets in, scanning for a particular shade of red that signals peak ripeness. Not the glossy, uniform red of a grocery store clamshell, but something deeper, slightly uneven and sometimes still warm from the sun.<\/p>\n
You pick one, then another. By the time you\u2019ve filled a basket, you\u2019ve already eaten a third of it.<\/p>\n
Most of the farms along these roads are run by Iu Mien families, a Southeast Asian ethnic group from Laos who fled persecution after the Vietnam War, after being recruited by the CIA to fight communist forces in what became known as the Secret War, according to reporting by ABC10<\/a> and Capital Public Radio<\/a>. They arrived as refugees with agricultural knowledge and not much else.<\/p>\n