Yesterday E & I spent a couple of hours picking wild strawberries. Unfortunately there weren’t very many to be found so we only managed to pick about 500 grams; half of what we picked last year in about the same time. They’re pretty small, it probably takes between 15 and 25 of them to equal 1 domestic farm grown water filled strawberry but they have so much more taste, almost too much for jam, which nevertheless is what E made with them.
The fact is that you can catch some mean fox related parasites with close to the ground wild berries and so years ago the state began informing that it was best not to eat wild strawberries. Last year in July however we where enjoying a little stroll through the woods and there were so many that we couldn’t not pick them, so we did on the assumption that it was probably ok if you cooked them… I mentioned this to a friend who of course ask “where we sure that cooking them was protection enough?” this of course made me wonder the same out loud at home so E spent some time on the phone trying to get hold of someone who would know for sure. Four phone calls and a day later, the doctor who is responsible for all cantonal medical decisions proceeded to look up and read out to her various fact from his books. After all that she asked: what about my jam? and he answered “well, if you’re not going to eat them, send them to me!”.
And added that although they where obliged to tell people not to eat wild strawberries, he couldn’t remember any cases of fox related disease in our area for the last 10 years…