It’s easy enough to make people care about polar bears. But it’s a little harder to tug at the heartstrings with an uneaten strawberry.
The PSA above, from the Save the Food campaign by the Ad Council and Natural Resources Defense Council, follows the life of a single strawberry through a whirlwind of harvesting, transportation, packaging, and storage (plus a love interest subplot with one heartthrob lime that catches the berry’s eye). Spoiler alert: The moldy strawberry ends up in a garbage bin.
This story is hardly exceptional — but that might change if we started viewing wasted berries with the compassion we usually reserve for a lonely polar bear stranded on ice.
