I’d like to meet him someday – the Strawberry Packer, a man of immense skills.
The Strawberry Packer is in charge of distribution, to make sure that the strawberries are properly sorted in each 16-ounce container. If every strawberry in the carton was perfectly ripe and juicy, then customers would come to expect that and would surely end up disappointed.
But the Strawberry Packer makes sure that each container has a nice assortment of strawberries. The ones on top are usually red ripe and pretty, but beneath the top fruits are a few white ones – well, maybe they have a little pink, but they are clearly unripe strawberries. I suppose the Strawberry Packer figures you’ll put a few of the white ones in the windowsill and they may turn red eventually – which would be a nice surprise to say the least.
The Strawberry Packer also likes to put a few with white mold in the carton. They are usually hidden in the middle so as not to be seen from any angle. Somebody’s got to get a few bad strawberries, otherwise they would just be discarded at the packing plant as, well, rotten strawberries, and who wants that?
There is also usually one strawberry that is beyond its prime and one side is a dark, gooey brown. The other side, however, is perfectly edible, so it makes you feel good to at least salvage something out of that berry. It’s a feeling of accomplishment
I don’t know how he does it, to make sure that each and every carton – thousands and thousands of cartons – has strawberries with various levels of edibility, but he does. The Strawberry Packer is an extraordinary fellow.