British strawberries are at their two-week best right now. Spare a thought for the hands that picked them.

For about a fortnight, now, the British strawberry is the best fruit in the country and among the cheapest things in the shop. Not the pale, hard, flown-in kind that sulks in the bowl all winter — the local June berry, picked properly ripe because it hasn't far to travel, sweet enough to eat warm from the punnet at the kitchen counter. Buy them this week and next. By late July the season tips over and they are never quite this good again.

There is almost nothing you need to do to them, which is the point. Tonight's gift is barely a recipe at all. But before the gift, a question, because it is the one this paper keeps circling back to.

Someone picked those strawberries by hand. Almost certainly not a British someone: the great majority of the people who harvest our soft fruit come from abroad on short-term seasonal visas, as they have since the free movement that used to supply them ended. Labour is roughly half the cost of growing a strawberry, and the work is hard, hot, fast and finger-bruising — the kind of job that, for a generation, Britain has relied on other people travelling thousands of miles to do, and then argued about at home.

It is also, increasingly, the kind of job we are trying to hand to a machine. A few miles from this paper's desk, the Cambridge firm Dogtooth has built robots with soft grippers that move down the rows picking ripe berries in the field, judging by sight which are ready — one answer to a labour shortage growers have warned about for years. Whether that is a relief or a loss depends entirely on where you are standing. To the grower it is a margin saved. To the worker it is a season's wages gone. To the rest of us it is the future-of-work question arriving, quietly, in the fruit aisle: once the picking is automated, what becomes of the people, and of the odd dignity of feeding a country by hand?

None of which should put you off the strawberries. It might, though, make you taste them properly. This is hand-picked, seasonal, here-and-now food, and all three of those things are getting rarer. The table is where we notice what our food really costs, and not only in money.

At your table — macerated strawberries, the laziest pudding there is. Hull and halve a punnet of ripe strawberries (quarter them if they are big). Scatter over a tablespoon or two of sugar — caster, or a soft brown for a deeper note — and, if you have it, a teaspoon of good balsamic vinegar and a single twist of black pepper. That last pair sounds wrong and is the whole trick: the vinegar and pepper lift the sweetness and make the berries taste more of themselves. Stir, then leave at room temperature for twenty to thirty minutes, until they slump and give up a glossy syrup. Eat them as they are, or spooned over yoghurt, ice cream, or a torn-up leftover meringue. No cooking, no skill, ten minutes of patience. The season does the work; you just keep out of its way.