Berry good times ahead: As Switzerland's U-pick season gets underway, now is the time to dream of strawberry fields forever. And then roll up your sleeves. (Food).

I never really understood berry lust until I took my daughter on a U-pick excursion for the first time, She was three years old and had never tasted vine-ripened raspberries before, While the rest. of us dutifully filled our cardboard baskets, she stuffed berry after berry into her mouth, oblivious to thorns and bumblebees. At the end of the afternoon her face, hands and shirt were stained with the pinkish-reddish dye peculiar to raspberries, and her eyes were glazed over with bliss.

She didn't know she was breaking with a long-established honor system for berry picking. During berry season farms all over Switzerland open their fields to U-pick clients (the signs say "selbst pflucken" or "auto cueillette"). Berry farmers with large operations maintain watch from a stand, but smaller cultivators may simply leave baskets on the table, a sign with the price per basket and a cash box.

For anyone who knows the Swiss it comes as little surprise that the system has always worked perfectly (the transgressions of the occasional small child notwithstanding). But over the past two decades farmers-- especially those with unattended stands--have been experiencing more and more theft. 'It's a sign of the times, I suppose," says Walter Ludi, a berry cultivator in Dudingen, Fribourg and president of his region's berry-growers' association. Still, farmers like Ludi have no plans to put an end to the U-pick tradition, "The vast majority of people are honest and don't try to cheat," he says.

The U-pick season starts at the end of May, as the first local strawberries redden in the sunny fields of the Valais, and stretches through the raspberry and blueberry days of July and August. It's a time to indulge in berries with all the abandon of a three-year-old. But berries are more than a delicacy--they happen also to be nutritionally as valuable as any vegetable.

In the mid 1990s, scientists at Tufts University in Boston embarked on a research project based on the hunch that berries contained high levels of natural chemicals that protect against disease. They started testing the fruit for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (otherwise known as ORAC). This assay is a measure of a food's ability to blunt the effect of oxygen free radicals--tissue-damaging particles known to promote heart disease, cancer, and the aging process in general. Showing antioxidant activity in a test tube isn't enough to prove a food can improve health, however; so the scientists experimented on living humans. They fed a group of volunteers a meal of ripe strawberries--about half a pound's worth (they had no problems convincing test subjects to take their medicine). Then they tested the berry eaters' blood to see whether eating the berries had increased their blood's antioxidant capacity. It did, substantially.

Berries' ORAC power is directly proportional to the depth of their color. That's because most of the antioxidants they contain are present in anthocyanins, natural compounds that lend berries their red and blue hues. In laboratory tests, blueberries have the most intense antioxidant activity of any berry. Blackberries are up in the same range, and raspberries are not far behind. Strawberries are just a bit lower.

Berries' other assets include healthy doses of vitamin C, folic acid, carotenoids, vitamin A, natural antibacterial agents, and fiber. Wild blueberries, a deep indigo blue inside and out, win hands down for nutritional clout. Ditto for wild blackberries, with their inky exterior and juice. But the berries you pick up at the supermarket pack a powerful punch as well, according to the Tufts researchers.

Traditionalists ever, the Swiss mostly eat berries for dessert--plain or whipped into charlottes, tarts, or puddings. A growing cadre of more adventurous Swiss chefs are trying them out as main-course staples--as evidenced by a recently released cookbook, Erdbeer-Traume (Edition Fona), in which Armin Yogbaum and Jerome Bischler propose recipes for strawberry-based salads, meat dishes, and even pasta dishes. But at the very start of the season, the first serving of berries should be sun-warmed, just picked, and unadulterated.

RELATED ARTICLE: Recipe

STRAWBERRY AND BELGIAN ENDIVE SALAD

500 g endives
500 g strawberries
200 g crumbled
  Roquefurt cheese
3 tablespoons
  roasted pine nuts

DRESSING

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons Port wine
Sea salt to taste
Freshly ground pepper
4 tablespoons safflower oil

1. Arrange a shell of endives leaves in a bowl or on a plate. Cut the remaining leaves lengthwise and then into 1-cm wedges. Set aside.

2. Wash the strawberries, remove the stems, and cut them in half.

3. Toss the cut endives, pine nuts, strawberries, and Roquefort and arrange them in the endive shell, Drizzle the dressing over the salad, and serve.

Recipe translated and adapted from Erdbeer-Traume by Armin Yzogbawn and Jerome Bischler, available in German or French at bookstores or directly from EDITION FONA GmbH, Brattligau 2, CH-5600 Lenzburg 2, Tel. 062 / 892 44 33; E-Mail: [e-mail]