When I was a child, my family lived in a mid-Victorian village house with a large McIntosh apple tree in the yard. That tree completely spoiled me for store-bought fruit; not only was I convinced that apples could be freely available to all, I was also accustomed to grabbing perfectly ripe specimens off the tree at will. The only hazard was the cloud of wasps that formed every year in mid-August and remained on station until mid-October, depending on the date of the first killing frost.

The difference in aroma, flavour and texture between the McIntosh apple fresh off the tree and the typical McIntosh apple out of a plastic bag at Loblaw's is so great that the supermarket version feels like blasphemy.

Likewise the field strawberry versus the California item in its plastic box.

My grandfather spent a goodly proportion of his last years in a veterans' hospital surrounded by acres of parkland. My brothers and I were too young to be allowed in -- the threshold age was 12 -- so, in summer, we were left to hell around the grounds while the parents were checking up on Himself. When we discovered that wild strawberries grew across a stretch of lawn shaded by cedar trees, we actually stopped complaining.