Urban Food Terrorism !

The Strawberry used to be a summer treat many home gardeners carefully nurtured for family enjoyment.   Today, they are in fruit and vegetable shops all year round and they constitute a huge segment of our agricultural industry.  Growing strawberries is very labour intensive.  They are not suitable for machine harvesting and each individual fruit is picked by hand, with regard to size and eye appeal.  Strawberries are a fruit we buy for their exquisite  taste and this has become an industry giant in our agricultural sector.

The strawberry market in Australia is under attack from an act of urban terrorism.  Someone has been lacing individual strawberries in punnet packs with sewing needles.  This attack seems to be concentrated in southern Queensland and is perpetrated on sales from both Woolworths and Coles.  As a result, stock from the farms named as affected have been withdrawn from sale and police are investigating.

The publicity surrounding this outrage is a cause for alarm.   People are warned to be careful of strawberries they may have in their fridge or freezer because swallowing a sewing needle can be life threatening.  Unfortunately, it seems to have triggered copycat incidents in the southern states and all customers are being warned that they need to adopt a safety regime to ensure that strawberries are needle free.

Each fruit should receive two cuts to divide the fruit length into four quarters, and then a single cut to halve that length.  In this way, should a needle be present the size reductions will clearly reveal its presence.

Initially, this attack seemed concentrated on two strawberry farms in southern Queensland but it has since widened.  The number of incidents is not large, but because of the danger the fruit from those farms is virtually unsaleable.  The financial loss will be enormous and a lot of people will suffer a job loss.  The scare will probably last a long time and the industry fears that sales of strawberries will probably take a very long time to fully recover.

There is intense conjecture about the cause and exactly where this sabotage is occurring. Because the industry is a big employer of labour there was speculation that this could be the work of a disgruntled ex-employee, but the attacks seem ongoing.  The inserting of needles could occur anywhere from the picking stage to where this fruit was on display in merchants stores.   It could occur in mere seconds and it is customary for buyers to pick up punnets and closely examine the fruit before making a buying decision.

Unfortunately, the publicity seems sure to encourage dissidents to adopt this new form of urban terrorism.  A packet of a dozen sewing needles costs just a few cents and in the hands of a terrorist it can cause mayhem to industry and harm individual people if needles were to be inserted into a variety of fruits.  It has immediate application to fruits usually consumed without prior preparation - and bananas come to mind.

It is also possible that these attacks are commercially based. The sales loss can cripple an agricultural company financially and make it prone to a share price loss that makes acquisition cheaper.  No doubt the investigators will be closely examining all these aspects but essentially urban terrorism has entered a new chapter and our food supply is now on the firing line !