The temporary perfection that is a ripe Northern California strawberry | Opinion

There are people who fixate on a single thing. A friend of mine fixates on blueberries. The rest of us cycle through coffee, chocolate — whatever gets us through the day.

For me, especially this time of year, it’s strawberries.

When I lived in Sacramento, I’d make a habit of driving out along Jackson Road a couple of times a month. The farm stands there aren’t curated. They’re practical, seasonal and unapologetically local.

You buy what’s coming out of the ground right then: squash, onions, melons, lemons, limes and tomatoes. Whatever is ripe, and whatever didn’t need to be engineered to survive a cross-country truck ride.

Until you have eaten produce that wasn’t bred specifically with shelf life in mind, it’s hard to explain what is missing from the supermarket version. It’s not just freshness. It’s specificity, texture and flavor that doesn’t flatten out after the first bite.

In the Sacramento area, you’ll 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’t travel well, which is the point. You’re eating something that wasn’t designed to be durable. It was designed to taste like itself.

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’t get from anything shipped in when picked ripe and eaten within a day or two.

Sacramento has its own version of U-pick culture, quieter and more understated than the Brentwood orchards or the coast.

Strawberries are the anchor

There’s 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.

You pick one, then another. By the time you’ve filled a basket, you’ve already eaten a third of it.

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 and Capital Public Radio. They arrived as refugees with agricultural knowledge and not much else.

The trade they learned here passed from Japanese American farmers to Hmong immigrants to Iu Mien families, a chain of knowledge that took root in Sacramento’s flatlands and grew into roughly a hundred farms across the Sacramento and Sonoma valleys, according to Comstock’s Magazine. Many of the first-generation farmers are aging out. Their children have more options.

It’s a fading legacy.

S-T Strawberries on Jackson Road has become a regular stop for me. The farmer whose family has farmed this land since 1975 came from Thailand after the Secret War forced his family out of Laos. He confirmed what the hand-painted sign out front already says. At the corner of Sunrise and Jackson Highway, these strawberries are the best — small, easy to miss and exactly right.

Many are little clapboard stands. At the window, deep red berries sit in baskets.

My drive home takes me on a climb out of the valley and into the Sierra, evergreens replacing concrete medians as the road gently winds up toward Truckee. My basket of strawberries was polished off somewhere around Colfax. By then, there was nothing left but the stain on my fingertips.

Katherine Levy is a writer and photographer based in Tahoe Vista, on the north shore of Lake Tahoe. She writes on California culture, regional food and the communities that shape the landscape. She can be reached at katherine.levy.opeds@gmail.com.