$20 Strawberry Food Porn or the Seeds of Insanity

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Welcome to Erewhon, Los Angeles’ cathedral of curated wellness, where celery juice is religion and the home of a single $20 strawberry. Yes, one strawberry. Not dipped in gold, not encrusted with edible diamonds, just a very red, very round, very Japanese strawberry, padded in plastic and treated like it’s on loan from the Louvre.

It’s called the Tochiaika from Elly Amai, and it’s flown halfway across the world from Japan’s Tochigi Prefecture, a place known for its exacting fruit standards and berry boudoirs. Erewhon shoppers, already numb to $18 bone broth and $25 smoothies, are now posting solemn tasting videos of this fruit, as though sampling a sacred relic. “Oh my god,” they whisper, “this is the best strawberry I’ve ever had.” For $20, you’d hope it also grants enlightenment.

Source: Elly Amai - Kyoto - The $20 Strawberry

But beneath the glitz of influencer hysteria and LA indulgence, something more interesting is happening. We’re watching the gentrification of fruit in real-time. What used to be a humble snack has now joined the absurd pantheon of boutique food status symbols, next to $300-a-kilo cherries, $22 lettuce, and hand-massaged avocados. When did produce become performance art?

Yet while Erewhon polishes its strawberries like Ferraris, back in the real world, small market gardeners are still getting their knees dirty to bring honest, ripe, seasonal strawberries to farmer’s markets, school fundraisers, and roadside stalls. No plastic domes, no air miles, no TikTok drama, just fruit picked fresh from the soil, often within 10km of where you’ll eat it.

But here's the issue. The $20 strawberry isn’t actually about the strawberry. It’s about us. The human obsession with perfection. Our addiction to novelty. Our detachment from seasonality. When did we stop celebrating crooked strawberries and start fetishising fruit?

This isn’t to knock Japan’s strawberry artistry, there’s a deep cultural reverence behind that cultivation. But let’s not pretend Erewhon’s plastic-wrapped indulgence is about respect. It’s theatre. It’s lifestyle porn. And it’s helping to widen the gulf between food grown for nourishment and food grown for clout.

So maybe the real luxury isn’t the $20 strawberry at all. Maybe it’s the $5 punnet from the couple down the road. The one with a hand-written sign. The one your kid eats straight from the paper bag on the drive home. The one that tastes of place, not price.

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