The Perfect Fruit Page 10
What happens when you get a really great plum? According to Lundeen’s research, you tell all your friends about it. “Word of mouth just takes off,” he said. “This one woman in Colorado said, ‘My mother called from Florida to tell me to get into the store because the plums were really good.’ So it’s wildfire, okay? When they get a good piece of fruit, people tell their friends and you’re promoting consumption.” And when you buy a bland, tasteless plum? You wait two to three weeks to buy another one. Why two to three weeks? Because you associate that plum with the plums it came in with—if it’s bad, they must all be bad—and two to three weeks is how long you assume it will take for that batch to work its way out of the store. And who do you blame for the bad plum? According to Lundeen, you don’t blame the plum industry (probably because you don’t know that there is one) and you don’t blame the store. Mostly, you just blame yourself. You don’t know how to pick a good one. You’re uninformed. You’re just wasting money. And you don’t want to make the same mistake again, so you wait a few weeks.
Apparently, this scenario had been happening way too often for way too long. The result, as Ballantine’s Rick Milton and John Kaprielian had shown me on their wall charts, was that over the course of twenty years the volume of California peaches, plums, and nectarines had dropped twenty-five percent.
In 1984, Americans ate on average one and a half pounds of plums per person. By 2004, we were down to a pound of plums each per year. (Fresh apple consumption, on the other hand, was nearly eighteen and a half pounds per person in 2004.) Lundeen was touching on this indirectly when he suggested that the industry’s priority should be on figuring out how to inspire more repeat sales. Unlike almonds, the issue wasn’t necessarily getting more people to eat plums, he said. It was getting people who already ate plums to eat them more often. To help the industry figure out who was already buying plums, Lundeen and his group had worked on identifying a target audience.
“One group we called Generation Starbucks. We said, ‘Let’s look at these younger consumers and see if they’re a fertile group to sell peaches, plums, and nectarines to.’ ” Short answer: no. They were too busy, their lives too hectic.
But a second group was more promising. They called this group the Summer Passionates. “These are people who think that summer is the most special time of the year,” said Lundeen. “It’s the time they do what they totally love in life. They exercise more. They walk, hike, mountain bike. They spend time with their families. Summer Passionates are people who just love the activities associated with summer.” If you’re thinking, Well, damn, that must be about half the population, then you’re not too far off. “We found that there are about one hundred and eleven million Summer Passionates out there. And guess what? They’re buying a lot of fruit. You know, they’re filling up picnic baskets and when you fill up your picnic basket, you’re filling it up with fruit.” It got even better. “We looked at another target group we called Super Moms and Dads. Guess what? Of the seventy-two million Super Moms and Dads, forty-six million of them are also Summer Passionates. So it’s also about these parents who are trying to teach their children about nutrition. That’s the same parent who’s going to take the kids to do summer activities.”
There were a lot of smiles in the room after Lundeen’s presentation, and the good cheer lasted into mid-spring. Most everything was going well for stone fruit growers in California. The strong bloom and warm weather meant fruit quality was probably going to be excellent. On top of that, the bee shortage might lighten the set a little bit, which could help keep the overall volume of fruit down and maybe keep the market up. The CTFA had solid marketing in place for 2007—watch out, Summer Passionates!—and over the course of the season, the organization had decided to highlight plums, to make 2007 the year of the plum.
In mid-March, Rod started thinning his trees. The act of thinning was what made the coming season begin to feel real to Rod. Each grower had a different take on when the season really “started.” For David Jackson, it was when the chill hours had been met and the trees started showing blossoms. For others, it wouldn’t really start until they’d picked the first piece of fruit. For Rod, though, thinning was when you had to take a deep breath and jump. In early April, he sent me a report: “Rapid growth in stuff now, visible day to day . . . Some folks ride bulls, hang glide, race motorcycles, and chase tornados. I just farm fruit and it’s about all the drama I can handle!”
Though the set on plums and pluots did indeed look to be a little light as of mid-spring, the weather was cooperating with growers. Plenty of sun and not much rain meant lots of sugar was being developed in the fruit. If all went well from here, growers could be looking at an overall crop whose volume was down but which ate well across the board—a recipe for a profitable season.
4
LUTHER BURBANK WENT to California for many reasons, but he went mostly because he was young and it was California. Burbank was born in 1849 in central Massachusetts. His family’s home in Lancaster was twenty miles due west of Concord and within the intellectual shadow cast by Thoreau and Emerson, so Burbank was exposed early on not only to the natural world around him and the ersatz natural world that was farming, but also to the ideas about the natural world that were shaping that time. When he was nineteen, Burbank read Darwin’s newly published Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication and his fate was sealed. He bought seventeen acres of land near his family’s home and began growing vegetables for the competitive Boston market. He paid constant attention to which of his plants grew the fastest and healthiest. As he harvested his vegetables, noted Peter Dreyer, Burbank’s most recent biographer, he tagged those plants that “bore more or bigger produce than ordinary, or fruit that was of superior quality, or ripened earlier or later than average.” These superior plants were the ones he selected to take seeds from to grow the next year. Then, he did the same thing with the following season’s crop, in each cycle improving his stock. As he continued to select out the best and most interesting specimens, he began crossing different plants, and his life as a breeder was under way.
Burbank’s first big success (probably the greatest of all his successes) was the Burbank potato. The mid-century potato blight had nearly wiped out the plant as a viable crop in Europe and North America, where potato cultivation was then essentially starting from scratch with varieties brought in from Central and South America. The potato had been grown in these southern climes for thousands of years, but the varieties had not improved much; they tended to be small, ugly, and relatively quick to go bad. What was needed, Burbank decided, was “a large, white, fine-grained potato,” and so he set out to produce one.
Things didn’t start well. He crossed varieties and selected out the best, but none of them was much of an improvement. He considered abandoning his work on the potato, but then, one day, he got lucky and discovered an almost unheard-of seed pod attached to an Early Rose potato, a descendant of the first Central American potatoes brought to the United States in 1851. Burbank planted the twenty-three seeds he got out of the pod and selected two of the resulting potatoes. They were, he later wrote, “as different from the Early Rose as modern beef cattle from the old Texas Longhorns.” Burbank began selling his potatoes at market when he was twenty-four years old. The one he called the “Burbank potato” was an immediate hit, and a couple of years later, he sold all his potatoes to a Massachusetts seedsman for $150 and the right to keep ten potatoes for his own use. Later, someone discovered a gene tic mutation of the Burbank that had russet skin. It was called the Russet Burbank, and it quickly grew to become the most popular potato in the United States.
In 1875, Burbank took a bundle of clothes, some books, and his ten potatoes, and he set out for California. Immediately upon his arrival ( just a few years later than Rod Milton’s great grandfather Julius), Burbank encountered the area’s fruit, which was, because of the better climate and longer growing season, much larger and more plentiful than in Massachusetts. In a letter to
his family, Burbank wrote: “I wish you could see California fruit. I bought a pear in San Francisco, when I thought I was hungry, for five cents. It was so large that I could only eat two thirds of it. I threw the rest away.”
Burbank’s moving to California when he did was one of those fortuitous historical collisions of a person, time, and place that are hard in retrospect to imagine having been otherwise. He bought some acreage in Santa Rosa and began growing various plants and fruits with the idea of setting up a nursery. Of all the plants he worked with, Burbank was most fascinated by plums; he would later estimate that, with the possible exception of the spineless cactus, he had spent more time working on plums than on anything else.
At the time, most of the plums growing in California were the same Eu rope an and domesticated American varieties that Burbank would have found at home. A few of these were still hanging around from the former Spanish missions, but most of these Eu rope an plums had been shipped from nurseries back east, so that the nursery business out west was an extension of what it had been in Massachusetts, even though the terrain and climate of California were very different. In the second half of the nineteenth century, though, Asian immigration was changing the landscape of California. Japan was undergoing the Meiji Restoration that would open up the country after centuries of isolation. One effect of the political changes in Japan was that fruits and vegetables cultivated there could be exported more easily to the United States. In 1870, a man named Hough imported some cuttings of a variety called Botankin. Several years later, a Berkeley nurseryman named John Kelsey sold the first fresh fruit from an American-planted Japanese plum tree. The fruit was probably from Botankin budwood, but a distributor renamed the plums in honor of Kelsey. Meanwhile, an Oaklander named Chabot ordered another Japanese plum—maybe the same Botankin—which he immediately renamed the Chabot.
In Burbank’s first nursery cata logue, he lists a handful of Japanese plums, among them the Botan, the Botankio, the Botankio No. 2, and the Chabot. In a later catalogue, he added the Abundance, which was the name he’d given to an open-pollinated selection he’d made from one of the trees he’d bought from either Kelsey or Chabot.
Having seen some interesting results from these Japanese plums that Hough and Chabot had imported, Burbank decided to find some of his own. This decision was inspired partly by the changes he’d noticed in himself since moving to California. He had been a wispy man, but the climate and quality of life out west had unshackled Burbank and invigorated his health. This made him curious to know if California could have the same kind of effect on imported plants. Would a plum tree that had done just okay in Japan really come alive in warmer, sunnier California?
In How Plants Are Trained to Work for Man, the eight-volume memoirs he wrote later in his life, Burbank recalled “the precise stimulus” that had led him to look “toward Japan as the probable source of a new race of plums.” In a chapter he titled “How the Plum Followed the Potato,” Burbank wrote that he’d been poking around the Mercantile Library in San Francisco, when he’d found the journals of an American who’d sailed around the islands of Japan. In the travelogue was a description of a delicious red-fleshed plum the sailor called “the blood plum of Satsuma.” Burbank was intrigued by the idea of introducing red flesh into his gene pool. He wanted the blood plum. To get it, he contacted Isaac Bunting, whose family’s nursery business had begun in 1820, in Colchester, England. The young Bunting had moved to Japan to hunt for exotic lilies, which the family later popularized in England. Based in Yokohama, Isaac of Japan (as he was called to distinguish him from his grandfather, also named Isaac) agreed to travel south to Satsuma for Burbank. Once there, he was able to track down the blood plum as well as a handful of other red-fleshed plums. In November 1884, Burbank received his first shipment of trees. They were all dead. Undeterred, he contacted Bunting again and asked him to send another batch. This second shipment arrived in December 1885, and as Burbank later reported, “the tiny trees were found in good condition.”
There were twelve varieties of plums in the shipment. Of these, Burbank selected two to release as varieties. He named one the Satsuma, and in keeping with a time-honored tradition, he called the other one the Burbank. Both quickly became pop-u lar, especially the Burbank, which shipped well enough to hold up from California to the markets back east, and was adaptable enough to be grown in Eu rope and South Africa. The real value of the Satsuma and Burbank, though, along with some of the other Japanese plums Bunting had sent, would come as parents in the breeding operation that Burbank was getting under way.
Burbank became one of the first breeders to cross Asian plums with native American ones. To describe his work with plums, Burbank invoked a term that was starting to get a lot of play among social scientists as more and more people immigrated to the United States:
The various plums . . . of the world should be brought together and, as it were, put into one melting pot in which a vast number of hereditary tendencies could be combined and recombined . . . Out of the melange would arise new varieties better fitted to meet the old requirements or adapted to meet altogether new requirements . . . My next and all subsequent introductions were from new races produced by crossing and hybridization, combining the heredities of widely varying species and selecting the best from among millions of seedlings. [Author’s emphasis]
That kind of language—melting pot, melange, new races—betrayed Burbank’s having bought into Darwin early on and then not having kept up with the debate over evolution. When the teenaged Burbank read Darwin’s Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, the evolutionist was still putting forward the idea of pangenesis as the force behind heredity. Pangenesis was an ancient idea that there were particles of inheritance—pangenes—that were shed off the body like dander. These particles were picked up by other bodies and passed through the bloodstream into the reproductive system. The belief explained the influence of environment over inheritance; plants could “pick up” traits through the air, like a common cold, and then pass them down into a new race.
Burbank ran his nursery like a big pangenetic melting pot; his followers portrayed him as a kind of high pagan priest who sang to his plants and believed that they fared best when they were doted upon in a nurturing environment. “The secret of improved plant breeding,” he once wrote, “apart from scientific knowledge, is love.” Burbank became known as the “wizard of Santa Rosa,” favoring the intuitive approach over the analytical, the mystical over the strictly scientific. This was reflected in his grand (and very American) plan to take plums from all over the world and blend together their best qualities in an “attempt to produce an ideal plum.” He attributed to plums the presumed characteristics of the people who cultivated them. Chinese plums “bore the imprint of the conservatism of the Chinese race.” Japanese plums displayed a residual “insularity” from the centuries Japan had spent closed off from the world. European plums exhibited “diversity,” Persian plums “nomadism,” and American plums “hardiness and variability.” Burbank’s plan was to take the best varieties available from these “five widely varying geographical territories” and put them on his property in Santa Rosa, where their good qualities “were to be assembled, combined, sifted and selected” to produce that ideal plum.
Though some of his ideas now sound so obviously misguided, he was able to develop an incredible number of lasting plant and fruit varieties, more than eight hundred in all, including spineless cacti, thornless blackberries, giant cherries, and Elephant Garlic. He also released the first “plumcots,” which were half-plum and half-apricot. Today, he’s best known for the Shasta daisy, the eponymous potato, and the Santa Rosa plum.
He introduced the red-fleshed Santa Rosa in 1907 and it was the closest he was to come to an “ideal plum.” The exact parentage of the Santa Rosa is unknown, but it’s thought to have been a hybrid of three separate species: Prunus americana, Prunus salicina, and Prunus simonii, otherwise known as the apricot plum. The simonii had black sk
in, red flesh, and a firm texture. It probably originated in northern China, but no one was really sure where it belonged taxonomically. Some considered it an apricot, while others called it a variation of the Japanese plum. Still others thought of it as a natural plum-apricot hybrid, a bridge between the two fruits. What ever it was, it was definitely in the mix of the Santa Rosa, which quickly became the most popular plum in the world. It was still the most widely grown plum in America as late as 1975.
By the time Burbank introduced the Santa Rosa, Gregor Mendel’s laws concerning the inheritance of traits were being rediscovered and absorbed into the scientific community. An Austrian monk, Mendel was interested in the variation of plants, and he spent almost a decade studying peas in the gardens of the monastery where he lived. The result was a paper called “Experiments with Plant Hybridization,” in which he laid out some general laws about how characteristics are passed down from parents to children. The paper was published in 1866, but no one paid attention to it until it resurfaced forty years later and became the backbone of modern genetics.
Practically speaking, Burbank mostly ignored the implications of the new hereditary science; his belief in “blending” characteristics was too ingrained in him. Also, his eccentricity extended to his record-keeping, so even if he had realized the implications of Mendel’s work on plant breeding, Burbank wouldn’t have been able to retrace in detail how certain characteristics had been passed down from one generation of fruit to the next. And in any case, what good would it have done him to rethink the process on which he’d based his entire career? As he later advised a biographer: “Read Darwin first, and gain a full comprehension of the meaning of Natural Selection. Then read the modern Mendelists in detail. But then—go back again to Darwin.”