It shows a level of recklessness in the community that we haven’t seen before.

But it also highlights the difficulty in quickly finding a culprit, despite the massive dollars we throw at law enforcement, the unprecedented use of CCTV, and the announcement of lottery-type rewards for information.

How many hands touch a strawberry between the paddock and the plate? Is this sabotage likely to have been done at the start of the process, during packaging, or while on our shelves, waiting for consumer pick up?

Even those two questions, if we could answer quickly, might provide a dose of confidence for those wanting desperately to support an industry, shin-kicked to its knees.

If we know it’s after picking, can’t we redirect our buying efforts and do it direct-from-grower? If it’s in the packaging process, can’t we use the monitoring that now envelops most of our workplaces?

And if it’s more likely to be in the supermarket, why can’t the intrusive CCTV cameras watching our every move at the self-serve checkouts be used to find the felon, or felons?

Dozens of cases have now been reported. Some of those, police say, are almost definitely likely to be copycat acts. But that shouldn’t make a difference.

Whether this crime is the work on one criminal, or more than 25, we should have the capability now to limit the focus of the investigation more quickly than we have - and help some of our strawberry farmers stay afloat.

That needs to be addressed. But if the response to this episode of commercial terrorism has been found to be wanting, so have the motives of those criminals who have decided to hold the rest of us to ransom.

Yesterday I read a criminal profile of what the person or people responsible might be like; a look inside the mind of someone who would strategically place a needle inside a strawberry (or a banana or an apple, as has been the case also).

The original saboteur could be old or young. He or she might be a convicted criminal or someone who has never encountered the inside of a jail cell (for the time being). Any copycat criminals might be aiming to elevate their stature in the media. And so it went on.

My profile, as uneducated as it is, is slightly different. They are the same, whether they thought of the idea, or stole it from the television news.

They are commercial terrorists, happy to see the heart ripped out of our strawberry industry. They are wilful miscreants who are happy to put danger into our children’s lunch boxes, and mental anguish into our elderly shoppers. They are, in the words of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, “grubs’’ and “cowards’’.

Our governments - state and national - are right to provide funds to prop up the industry, and to escalate penalties for those caught.

But that won’t address the frightful recklessness that has been introduced into our communities, with a new nefarious type of criminality. And that’s as tragic as the tonnes and tonnes of strawberries being dumped by decent Australians, just trying to make a living.