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May 28, 2015 8:38 AM   Subscribe

Japanese Farmer Finds an Enormous, Mutated Strawberry That Is Now Officially the Heaviest Ever Found [YouTube]
A farmer in Fukuoka, Japan found an enormous (by berry standards) strawberry that tipped the scale at a whopping 250 gramsβ€”that’s a little over half a pound for metric system haters. The mutated beast of a berry now holds the Guinness World Record for the heaviest strawberry in the world. via: [Laughing Squid] [image 1] [image 2] [image 3]
posted by Fizz (41 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
I fucking love that Japan has a giant mutated strawberry mascot because OF COURSE THEY WOULD.
posted by phunniemee at 8:40 AM on May 28, 2015 [11 favorites]


That strawberry let me down. It was the equivalent of a bunch of kids hiding under a trenchcoat, pretending to be one tall monster-sized person.
posted by Windigo at 8:43 AM on May 28, 2015 [29 favorites]


I fucking love that Japan has a giant mutated strawberry mascot because OF COURSE THEY WOULD.

*red phone shaped like strawberry lights up & rings*
*giant strawberry mascot sitting in recliner drinking strawberry daiquiri*
*picks up*
"Strawberry Emergency Hotline...how may I hel...yes......oh....MY.....GOD!!!"
"I'M ON MY WAY! TO THE BERRYMOBILE!!!"
posted by Fizz at 8:43 AM on May 28, 2015 [12 favorites]


What the government doesn't want you to know is that the mutated strawberry plant is carnivorous. That's right, that strawberry grew the big ON HUMAN BLOOD.
posted by mondo dentro at 8:45 AM on May 28, 2015


That strawberry hurts my eyes to look at, as though my brain knows it is a Thing Which Should Not Be Seen.
posted by Kitteh at 8:46 AM on May 28, 2015 [6 favorites]


(by berry standards)

Also, all future posts and discussions on MetaFilter should be defined with these standards in mind.
posted by Fizz at 8:47 AM on May 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


That would be a sutoroberi, owing to the Japanese insistence that consonants and vowels must alternate decently, even in imported words.
posted by Segundus at 8:52 AM on May 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


I was hoping for these folks.
posted by bad grammar at 8:53 AM on May 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


Fukuoka is nowhere near Fukushima, if anybody else was wondering.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 8:53 AM on May 28, 2015 [14 favorites]


Is it really mutated ? It looks more like several blossoms grew/fused together to form a single berry. It's common to see two berries doing that, and I have cherry/grape tomato plants that do it all the time. (so yes to rare, yes to world record, boo to "mutated")
posted by k5.user at 8:54 AM on May 28, 2015 [3 favorites]


Polyploidy.
posted by damo at 9:08 AM on May 28, 2015 [3 favorites]


Now that his daughter ate it, does she gain its powers? Will she become gargantuan and many-lobed

According to Science, yes.

That explains why government agents were dispatched to claim the berry for their super-soldier program.

"Why must to take the strawberry? I grew it in honor of my daughter!" the farmer cried to the government agents, "Can't you just admire it like the rest of the world?"

"WE HAVE COME TO SEIZE HER BERRY, NOT TO PRAISE IT," the agents replied.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:11 AM on May 28, 2015 [49 favorites]


500 yen coins are a smidge larger than an inch in diameter per wikipedia.
posted by BrotherCaine at 9:11 AM on May 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


"WE HAVE COME TO SEIZE HER BERRY, NOT TO PRAISE IT," the agents replied.

😑

The evil that men do lives after them.
posted by zamboni at 9:20 AM on May 28, 2015 [7 favorites]


I can't believe after all these years on Metafilter, it's a Shakespeare pun that will get me bard.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:35 AM on May 28, 2015 [12 favorites]


robocop is bleeding: "That explains why government agents were dispatched to claim the berry for their super-soldier program. "

"It would, perhaps, be possible for you to grow another such strawberry?", asked the man in black while looking the farmer straight in the eye.
posted by boo_radley at 9:42 AM on May 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


government agents were dispatched to claim the berry for their super-soldier program

Not to seed their unholy birthing vats though; it's much more effective as a blunt weapon.
posted by CynicalKnight at 9:43 AM on May 28, 2015


I wish Les Nessman was real just so I could hear his report on this.
posted by jonmc at 9:50 AM on May 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


"Kill... me...."
posted by Trochanter at 9:59 AM on May 28, 2015 [4 favorites]


What surprised me most was that it weighed EXACTLY 250.0 grams.
posted by rikschell at 10:23 AM on May 28, 2015 [5 favorites]


"WE HAVE COME TO SEIZE HER BERRY, NOT TO PRAISE IT," the agents replied.

Dear God, that was a thing of beauty.

Evil, evil beauty.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:29 AM on May 28, 2015 [3 favorites]


As per Guiness, the fusing together of strawberries is a mutation:

Mutations can occur for a variety of reasons, for example, when frost damage affects to the flowers of the strawberry plant. In this case, multiple berries have grown and fused together to form one single large strawberry. A similar natural phenomena can occur in giant sized tomatoes, resulting from a mutated blossom that growers refer to as a mega-bloom.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 10:57 AM on May 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


Look for giant-berry kaiju stories in the days ahead.
posted by Renoroc at 11:19 AM on May 28, 2015


Look for giant-berry kaiju stories in the days ahead.
posted by Fizz at 11:40 AM on May 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


mondo dentro: Feed me, Seymour / ι£ŸγΉγ•γ›γ‚γ€γ‚·γƒΌγƒ’γ‚’
posted by whittaker at 11:41 AM on May 28, 2015


My first job was in a sort-of swanky restaurant attached to the local golf club/slightly-farther-away big resort, and one night we had a Magic night for club members. Magic act, special dishes, fancy decorations, etc. Dessert that night was chocolate pasta topped with alternating white-dark-white chocolate-dipped strawberries that were enormous. Size of my fist enormous, like that record-breaking strawberry was significantly smaller than I was expecting since I'd already seen strawberries so big, six or seven bites enormous. We called them Chernobyl strawberries.
posted by carsonb at 11:43 AM on May 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


It was a bit of a shock when strawberries displaced wine grapes as the largest (legal) cash crop in San Luis Obispo County 3 years ago. (We were so hopeful of becoming the OTHER Napa Valley) That was before The Drought settled in here, so I don't know if the berries are more or less water-hungry than zinfandel, but they're certainly better than the cattle who are #3. Anyway, I am currently snacking on a pound of berries from the on-campus farm at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. They take their School of Agriculture seriously and yummily - by the way, $1.50 a pound, but, hey, low shipping expense - so I'm fairly confident that if they WANTED to, they could engineer a comparable berry - they recently edged out Wisconsin-Madison in an Agricultural Marketing competition. Mmmm, strawberries. πŸ“πŸ“πŸ“πŸ“πŸ“πŸ“πŸ“πŸ“πŸ“ Did I mention that their Dairy Sciences department also makes goooood cheese?

But kudos to robocop is bleeding for the bard-quality pun, a sure winner of the MetaFilter Pun of the Month for May. Berry good job. (I've made 10 attempts to win that prize, but no pun in ten did.)
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:51 AM on May 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


> Fukuoka is nowhere near Fukushima, if anybody else was wondering.

It's on the same planet, which is enough.
posted by jfuller at 11:58 AM on May 28, 2015


It's all fun and games until the cantaloupes find out about this.
posted by Muddler at 12:00 PM on May 28, 2015


On a serious note: considering the drought that is impacting much of the Western United States, does anyone have any good articles on strawberries and water-consumption/environmental impact? Please and thank you. I'd be interested in reading about it.
posted by Fizz at 12:28 PM on May 28, 2015


Opportunity for truly mind-blowing shortcake construction: wasted.
posted by gottabefunky at 12:59 PM on May 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


If they could apply this to raspberries, then we'd have an origin story for Wildberry Princess.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:19 PM on May 28, 2015


The thing about strawberries is, most taste like dirt, but every now and again, you find a good one.
posted by rankfreudlite at 1:50 PM on May 28, 2015


Fizz, according to this graphic, strawberries are not big water consumers.

http://graphics.latimes.com/food-water-footprint/
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 2:34 PM on May 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


The thing about strawberries is, most taste like dirt, but every now and again, you find a good one.

Well you have to wash off the dirt first
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 3:28 PM on May 28, 2015 [5 favorites]


Want to see more weird fruits and veggies? Uli Westphal has you covered.
posted by bismol at 3:33 PM on May 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


Someday, when the daughter grows up, she might encounter the question "Tell us something about you that we probably don't already know about you," and respond with: "I once ate the heaviest strawberry in the world."
posted by aniola at 3:48 PM on May 28, 2015 [4 favorites]


For the Americans out there, the Β₯500 coin is almost exactly the same diameter as the Sacajawea/presidents golden dollar coin.
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:53 PM on May 28, 2015


So, is Snoop Dogg gonna go smoke with this farmer too?
posted by kinnakeet at 7:36 PM on May 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


I grow a secret strawberry that is beyond human understanding* on the allotment. It is almost spherical, pink on the outside and pink to white on the inside, has black seeds and is very soft and extremely aromatic. Once picked they bruise easily and last for about 48 hours. Clearly this is not a crop that is easy to grow commercially, but they are not as sweet or bitter as most other strawberries are, more subtle and easily overpowered by ice cream. I imagine they would go down well in Japan.

* So far nobody has been able to identify them.
posted by asok at 3:59 AM on May 29, 2015 [3 favorites]


I want a runner from your mysterious strawberry plant, asok. Or at least a picture. I have botanist friends who would be very interested.
posted by domo at 8:42 AM on May 29, 2015 [1 favorite]


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