In my family, Sunday mornings have traditionally meant a bit of a slow sleepy start to the day followed by a large plate of fresh made pancakes topped with strawberries. It’s something we’ve been doing for years, and my kids are accustomed to waking up on Sunday to their favourite breakfast waiting for them on the table.
This week, however, thanks to some unknown individuals who've decided to bury sewing needles in random punnets of strawberries, these tasty red fruit have been removed from sale. What likely started as a single act by a disgruntled employee of a strawberry farm, transport company or fruit wholesaler in Queensland has now spread across the whole east cost of the country, with the latest contaminated strawberry discovered yesterday in a punnet sold at my local Coles Supermarket in southern Sydney.
Coles Engadine in Sydney
What possesses somebody to contaminate food in this way is something that I’ll never understand, but if their aim was to hurt the strawberry industry and piss off consumers, it’s a fair bet that they've succeeded.
Most disturbing of all is that given the vastly different locations where the contaminated fruit has been found, and the variety of brands affected it is likely that there have been several copycat offenders who have decided to get in on the act after the first offences hit the media.
So for this week at least, my kids are just going to have their pancakes without their favourite fruit accompanying them, and I don't know about them, but I'm not very happy about it.