Life didn’t used to be this way. Remember syrupy fruit cups? Froot Loops?
By Hannah Sampson, Federica Cocco and Júlia Ledur, The Washington PostAmerican’s berry-eating has shifted from seasonal treat to year-round habit in a generation. The supply of strawberries per person has more than tripled since 1980, from under two pounds a year to nearly seven, on average.
Kristen Fox remembers when she brought home a Costco haul of fruit meant to last her 3-year-old twins a week.
“I had like 30-something dollars worth of fruit that they just demolished in a day,” said Fox, 39, who works in tech and creates content about raising twins. Three years later, not much has changed. It’s a meme-able refrain among parents of young kids: Why didn’t anyone warn us about the berry budget? The insatiable, bottomless appetite that demands multiple grocery store trips a week?
And the small humans who might refuse to consume anything but sweet, tiny fruits?
“There is one thing I’ve spent the most money on in my life,” Kylie Kelce, host of the podcast “Not Gonna Lie” and mother of four young kids with former NFL player Jason Kelce, said during a 2024 episode. “It is packs of berries. It has to overcome diapers. ” People have offered totally realistic parenting hacks: Plant a berry bush during pregnancy to grow your own supply for the toddler phase.
Perhaps take out a second mortgage. Berry expenses are a shared pain for people raising the next generation to bond over, but the jokes in parent group-chats also signify a shift. Life didn’t used to be this way. Remember syrupy fruit cups?
Froot Loops?
“There were years I existed on Pop-Tarts and Hot Pockets,” said Brooke Tansley, 48, a Nashville mom of two kids with voracious berry appetites. American’s berry-eating has shifted from seasonal treat to year-round habit in a generation. The supply of strawberries per person has more than tripled since 1980, from under two pounds a year to nearly seven, on average.
Blueberries have gone from a supply of less than three ounces per person a year in 1980 to more than two pounds per year today. Other fruits have not followed: per capita supply of apples, bananas and grapefruit has fallen since 2000. That growth has come mostly thanks to imports from abroad. Roughly half of the berries Americans ate in 2021 were imports, up from less than a third in 2006, according to Post estimates based on Agriculture Department data.
Mexico supplies 98 percent of fresh strawberry imports, with Peru and Chile covering most of the rest of the year-round berry trade. The fruit hasn’t got cheaper. In 1980, a pound of strawberries cost about three times the price of a pound of bananas. Today, they cost roughly six times as much.
At current U.S. prices, a pound-size carton a week comes to about $170 a year, before anyone has touched a blueberry. For households where the carton is gone by Tuesday, the bill stacks up faster still. Tansley, the mother of a 4- and 8-year-old, was tracking the high cost of everything, but especially berries, when she created a Berry Spending Calculator.
It allows users to estimate their family’s personal fruit-related spending over the course of a week, month, year and lifetime. The results come with a visual representation of servings - just row after row after row of strawberries.
“It was like joking so we don’t cry,” said Tansley, founder of a storytelling nonprofit and a producer, writer and performer. She said after she or her husband go to the grocery store, they can’t leave the berries unattended.
“If I leave the bags on the table to go to the bathroom, I know $7 is going to get snarfed down,” she said. Tansley said she thinks parents are shocked at their berry spending because money - including the real, steep cost of raising a family - is still so often a taboo subject. The berry-cost burden means some kids just don’t eat as many.
In the most recent national nutrition survey, about 19 percent of children from families earning more than $110,000 annually ate strawberries on a given day, compared with 10 percent of children from families earning less than $41,000. Both figures have risen since 2017 to 2018, and the gap between them has widened.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ran its most recent survey partly by phone rather than in person, a pandemic-era change that on average lowers reported food intake; if anything, the rise in berry eating is larger than the figures suggest. Getting a toddler to eat a balanced meal can seem impossible. But getting one to nosh on blueberries? Piece of cake.
“When they find food that they love, you want them to eat it,” Fox said. “In the grand scheme of things, they’re picky, they’re developing their palate, there’s such worse things that they could ask for. ” Pediatrician Lyndsey Garbi, co-founder and chief medical officer of the telehealth service Blueberry Pediatrics, had good news - related to health, not finances - for parents of berry-eating toddlers.
“I think it’s a positive thing because what a great snack rather than all the other processed foods with really unhealthy and high-sugar ingredients,” she said. “These have sugars but it’s paired with fiber and vitamins. It makes for a much better snack option. ” Her family would know.
The morning Garbi exchanged emails with a Washington Post reporter, her 7-year-old daughter downed an entire package of raspberries before her 4-year-old sister even woke up.
“They’re not huge, but they’re so expensive because we buy organic,” Garbi said. “In New York, it’s like $7, $8 for a tiny one. ”downsides to extensive berry consumption. Some parents report surprising changes to stool colors - though Garbi said a different shade after eating berries is not something that would concern pediatricians.
Berry-heavy diets can cause gastrointestinal issues, such as stomach pain and diarrhea, because of the high fiber and sugar, Garbi said. She added that those symptoms generally resolve with rest and hydration. And she said some berries can be a choking risk for small kids, so they should be eaten under supervision of a caretaker.
“I just came back from Costco, and I spent $22 on mangoes,” said Fox, whose twins are now 6½. “It doesn’t end. ”
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