Putting a needle in a strawberry is a strangely perverse act — to transform a food so imbued with sunny, cheerful goodness into a weapon of pain and destruction is extraordinarily difficult to comprehend.

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Griffith University criminologist Dr Danielle Harris, who became the go-to crime specialist when the strawberry sabotage crisis became front-page news this year, says those of us who are utterly perplexed as to why someone would plant a sharp object in a piece of fruit should give ourselves a pat on the back.

“All that means is that you are almost certainly not someone who would do something like that,” she said.

It began on September 9 when Hoani van Dorp, 21, was admitted to the Sunshine Coast University Hospital with severe abdominal pain after eating a strawberry containing a needle.

By September 11, another needle had been found in a strawberry in Gladstone, 550km north of Brisbane, along with two more in Victoria.

By September 14, Woolworths was removing the ­Berrylicious and Berry Obsession brands from shelves and a NSW woman, Chantal Faugeras, was describing how she had found three needles in strawberries that her 10-year-old daughter had begun to eat.

The offending objects were those fine little silver needles a ­tailor might use on softer material and they fitted neatly in the strawberry, inserted through the green leafy top and reaching deep into the fruit, perfectly camouflaged.

A further 231 reports of strawberry contamination were received, impacting 68 brands across Australia with 49 based in Queensland. Of those, 186 incidents involved needles placed in strawberries.

In Queensland there were 77 incidents of sabotage but 15 of these were hoaxes or false reports, according to ­Detective Superintendent Jon Wacker, from the Drug and Serious Crime Group.

As September 20 arrived, police across three states were chasing a potentially lethal fruit salad.

Under intense pressure to find the strawberry saboteur, officers were ­pursuing those responsible for placing a metal object in a banana in Redlynch, near Cairns, in the state’s far north, a needle in an apple in ­Sydney’s northwest, another in a ­banana in Bankstown, in Sydney’s west, one in a mango on the NSW Central Coast, and one more in a strawberry bought in Adelaide and grown in ­Western Australia.

ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES

The Sunshine Coast appears to have been specifically made, whether by God or through evolution, for growing strawberries.

The fruit was created in a bout of mid-18th century ­genetic engineering when a berry ­native to North America was somehow crossed with one from Chile (possibly accidentally), and the first modern strawberry appeared in a French garden.

Strawberries now thrive in numerous locations around the world but two favoured places are Florida in the US, and the Sunshine Coast.

For more than a century, Queensland strawberry growers have formed the economic ­backbone of a region stretching from the Pine River to just north of Noosa.

The family surnames involved are part of local geography, as in “Roys Road”, which honours a well-known strawberry family including among its various offshoots the former member for Longman, Wyatt Roy.

Andrew Powell, the LNP Member for Glass House, heard his phone ringing minutes after the first incidence of sabotage was reported, and it didn’t stop for weeks.

“Pretty soon I began to realise, with horror, the ramifications for a great Queensland industry,” he recalls. “A lot of my growers were at the tail end of the season and were ­preparing for the next, but it was the reputational damage that worried them most.”

To Powell, strawberry growers represent what former Australian prime minister Robert Menzies once famously referred to as the “forgotten people” — those citizens who obey the law, work hard and make the nation a success with little recognition given to their contribution.

“You mention some of the names involved in the strawberry industry in my part of the world and they have been there for generations,” Powell says.

“They are not just the growers. They are the president of the cricket club, the head of one of the local service clubs, their kids go to the local school, these growers and workers are the backbone of the community.”

For weeks following the first act of sabotage, these ­worthy men and women were utterly distraught. Strawberries are labour-intensive and it can cost upwards of $50,000 to plant a crop.

Growers watched tearfully as hectares of discarded fruit piled up in red-smeared mountains up and down the ­Sunshine Coast. Workers were sent home, holidays ­cancelled, bank loans renegotiated.

ALL OR NOTHING

Out at Applethorpe, just northeast of Stanthorpe, on Queensland’s Granite Belt, one of these magnificent “forgotten people”, strawberry grower Giovanni (John) Boronio, was watching the trainwreck unfold with a mounting panic.

The Sunshine Coast growers might have just been cleaning up after the harvest but on Boronio’s massive farm — Eastern Colour — the opportunity to make money was just beginning as the summer crop ripened in his fields.

Boronio is the son of an Italian immigrant who came out to Australia in 1923 and, like so many young ambitious ­former mainland Italians, Sicilians and Maltese, took on the break-breaking work of cane-cutting in north Queensland to kick off his fortune in the new country.

Boronio’s old man saved enough to buy land around Stanthorpe and, in that cool climate 800m above sea level, carved out a successful life growing fruit and vegetables.

It was only in the 1990s, long after Boronio Junior had taken charge of the farm, that the prospect of making serious money in horticulture occurred to him.

Boronio began growing broccoli, leasing land from a neighbour and spacing out the planting over several months and across several alternating paddocks to ensure a year-round supply, and the profits were handsome.

As his boys, Nathan and Stephen, grew up and displayed both a talent and an enthusiasm for farming life, the family decided to get into strawberries.

They didn’t lack for vision. The Boronios took on their new enterprise in a manner suggesting an “all or nothing” gamble on the future of the fruit.

They looked for inspir­ation, not homeward to Italy, but to the Netherlands, where decades of growing flowers in glass hothouses had helped fuel a rapid evolution in farm technology, creating one of world’s most ­sophisticated agricultural sectors.

Hydroponics, protected cropping and precision farming have transformed the face of Dutch primary industry with the country now home to the globe’s 12 largest agrifood companies.

Dutch expertise came to Applethorpe partly in the shape of Ivan Savakovred, who had learned the ropes in Europe and helped advise the Boronio family how to ­implement the changes needed to transform Eastern ­Colour into the strawberry powerhouse it is today.

Savak­ovred helped install a complex system modelled on the Dutch method of strawberry growing and has stayed on, now apparently part of the extended family.

“We’ve spent millions and millions of dollars on all of this,” Boronio says as he walks around the farm late last month, gesturing at vast, white canopies sheltering strawberry plants over vast tracts of fertile land.

Inside the farmhouse, the family can monitor soil moisture and fertiliser application via computer.

In the packing house next door, scores of labourers work on an assembly line, packing away millions of strawberries annually while out in the field scores more pick and plant by hand at a cost that can exceed $40 an hour for the “gun pickers”.

All that capital, all of that hard work stretching across three generations, was suddenly in the balance as Boronio watched the crisis unfurl. It was simply one of the worst times of his life, Boronio recalls. “There was nothing we could do but just watch it happen.”

IT’S MORE ABOUT THE HOW THAN THE WHY

With the arrest earlier this month of 50-year-old My Ut (Judy) Trinh, police can say little about the ­matter until it is finalised by the courts.

Trinh, a former Queensland strawberry farm employee, has been charged with seven counts of contamination of goods with intent to cause economic loss.

Her charges allegedly relate to a small number of strawberry punnets. Police say the ­investigation is continuing into other reports of tampering and there is a $100,000 reward on offer for information.

Criminologist Danielle Harris, who stresses she can only speak generally about the crime of product tampering and malicious contamination, says such crimes always present particular difficulties for police.

It is the question of “why?” that most readily springs to mind.

Harris readily admits “why?” is the most intriguing aspect of the case, so much so that the question itself is the reason she became a criminologist in the first place.

“I do enjoy going to dinner parties and talking about why somebody did this, or why someone did that. It is kind of fascinating to say, ‘oh, he [or she] must have had a bad ­relationship with his [or her] mother’, or ‘must have been one of those people who drive around with a police scanner in [their] car’, or they were this, or they were that.”

But Harris says “why?” — while endlessly intriguing to more curious souls — is not the primary question police must focus on. Crimes are not categorised by motives, though speculation on motive will play a role in invest­igations and is certainly relevant to any subsequent court proceedings, especially if the defence team thinks motive might mitigate punishment for the crime.

“But from the criminologist’s perspective, the ‘why?’ ­question does not get you very far,” Harris says. “It is ­actually far more ­important for police to answer the ‘how’ question.”

If a razor is found in an apple, all police have to begin their investigation with is a razor and an apple.

The ­equation on how the two merged includes within it a ­massive number of variables, from farm to packing room to transport links to storage to shop shelves.

Harris says one key aspect of the crime of product ­tampering and malicious contamination is that it is not ­“accidental” in any sense of the word.

The people who do it are most probably not drunk, high on drugs, or even ­suffering the after-effects of a relationship breakdown.

Some instances of product tampering can be described as “free will crime” and bear some relationship to what we call “white collar crime”, where the perpetrator has time to plan and execute.

As the strawberry contamination crisis recedes into the state’s rear-view mirror, consumers can be reassured about the integrity of the industry.

If anything, strawberries will be safer, as a portion of the State Government’s $1 million assistance package, delivered in the wake of the crisis, is ­directed to improving traceability and integrity processes in the supply chain.

The Queensland public proved itself extremely supp­ortive of growers during the crisis, buying product direct from the farm, while in Brisbane, small business came up with innovative ways to better utilise strawberries as the “product’s recognition factor” exploded across the country.

By early October, the Newstead Brewing Co had turned unwanted strawberries into 1200 litres of craft strawberry beer, and Brisbane beer drinkers took to it with relish.

Newstead Brewing’s brand and marketing manager, Darren Magin, confirms strawberry beer may well ­become a lucrative commercial product. “It was just an extremely good beer so, definitely, we might look at doing something early next year,” he says.

Harris advises consumers who might still be shaken by the experience that Australian food products are some of the safest in the world. And food sabotage is extremely rare.

“It makes everyone scared because it happens so rarely,” she says. “Sure, it makes the news every time it happens. But that does not mean it is happening more often.”