The Perfect Fruit Page 6
Rod is lean and tidy. He wears large glasses and a dark mustache and, more often than not, a full-brimmed hat. By the time he came on the scene in the 1950s, the family was growing fruit for the fresh market. It was common then for someone to have forty acres covered with just a few varieties—maybe some Thompson grapes, some Santa Rosa plums, and some Sun Crest peaches. The Miltons were more diversified than most; they had a rough dozen varieties of stone fruit and some Thomp-sons. They started picking on June 1 and were often finished by the third week in July.
Like many family operations then, the Miltons did their own packing. At six every morning, the men on the family’s small crew started picking into large buckets. When a bucket was filled, it was carried to a mobile packing rig that had a corrugated roof on it for shade. The rig had three packing stalls on each side with gravity-controlled conveyors. Rod’s mom was the head of the three-woman packing crew. She packed six different sizes of plums; to determine the fruit size, she had a series of steel rings she could hold in her hand for comparison. It was a ten-hour day, and when you got finished with it, you knew that you had worked.
“You still had some Okies in those days, people who’d come out from the Dust Bowl,” Rod said one afternoon when I visited him. We were sitting in the Miltons’ airy living room, in stocking feet, surrounded by books. “I remember the Prince family, Jack and Luella Prince. Jack seemed like he was twelve feet tall. He could outpick everybody. He picked with two buckets instead of one and probably picked twice as much as everyone else. And he picked only for Luella. Nobody would argue with that, because she could outpack everyone. My dad would watch her and say, ‘Now, there’s a professional.’ She would sit there packing with a cigarette dangling in her mouth. The ashes would get longer and longer and longer, and you would watch it and watch it, and you’d think that the ash was surely going to fall, but then at the last minute she would flick it. It was amazing.”
When Rod was a child, the Miltons grew the kinds of stone fruit we now like to lament no longer having. Blazing Gold and 49er peaches. Early Babcocks. Dixon clings. Early Elbertas. Nubiana plums. Casselman plums. “That was a superb plum. All those old plums just had incredible flavor—El Dorado, Laroda, Burmosa, Santa Rosa. But man, with something like the Santa Rosa, there’s no forgiveness with the pick date. You absolutely have to be ready. It can ripen overnight. You know, you go out and look at it one afternoon and think you’re three days away, and then the next morning you look at them and you say, ‘Oh my god! I’ve got to get all these off right now!’ Santa Rosa is a lot like an apricot that way. It’s brutal. It can be ready to pick at eight A.M. and then be dead by noon.”
That finickiness goes a long way in explaining why California growers were beginning in Rod’s early years in the business to move away from the old classic plums. They were too small, too dull, too fragile. As supermarkets grew and distribution channels became sophisticated enough to spread California’s stone fruit all over the country, the stores’ buyers wanted fruit that was bigger, redder, harder. So out went the Santa Rosas and in came the Angelenos, the Blackambers and Friars—workhorse plums that were forgiving on the pick. If you don’t get to Friars on Tuesday, you can wait until Thursday. You may lose something in flavor, though. Friars, Milton says, “are not bad plums. But they’re not Santa Rosas either.”
In part because of its general farmer friendliness, Rod still grew Friars, even though there were newer varieties that tasted better. One patch of his Friars he helped his dad plant in 1965; they were the oldest trees Rod had in his orchard, and though he was ready to pull them out and replace them, he was keeping them around as long as he could afford to. “For my dad,” he said. “For nostalgic reasons.”
Nostalgia is a common condition among stone fruit growers in the San Joaquin. Rod’s stories reminded me of the stories my dad has told me over the years about the summers he hitchhiked out west to work on a combine, harvesting wheat, oats, and barley. The crew would start the season down in Burkbur-nett, Texas, and then work its way through south-central Oklahoma, western Kansas, and finally into eastern Colorado. So that the combines would keep running, the crew ate lunch one at a time, and if it was your day to go last on the lunch shift, the thought of the spread waiting for you would start to break your will by about noon. One of the summer’s last jobs was cutting Moravian barley on Coors land; the field manager would bring you out a cold can of beer at the end of each day, and you sat there in the fields, drinking, watching the big, red sun dip behind the Rockies.
I also thought of my friend Harrison, who grew up on a ranch east of Marysville in the 1930s, and who, when I told him about all the new housing developments going up in the San Joaquin, recited from memory part of the preface from J. M. Synge’s 1907 play The Playboy of the Western World:
In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who works among people who have shut their lips on poetry. In Ireland, for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.
My favorite of Harrison’s stories was the one he told about the title match between Joe Louis and James “The Cinderella Man” Braddock in June 1937. Harrison listened to the match on the radio in the main ranch house, which had only recently been wired for electricity. When the ranch hands returned from the round-up later that night, Harrison stood on the porch of the bunk house and recited the call of the fight, word for operatic word, until Braddock was beaten down enough and the referee stopped the fight in the eighth.
Never mind that those aren’t my memories; there’s no room for your real past in nostalgia, and given the choice between, on the one hand, a twelve-foot-tall Jack Prince carrying his two buckets of plums to Luella, who was always almost but not quite dropping ashes onto the ripe Santa Rosas she was eyeballing for size and, on the other hand, trucks dropping off pallets at the bay of a spotless commercial packing shed where Friars were being sorted by infrared optical sizers and then guided down a chute for a woman in a hairnet to pack, I wanted Luella and Jack, the buckets, the cigarette ashes, the Santa Rosas, the metal rings you could hold in your hand. Who wouldn’t? (On one trip to the Valley, I was sitting in the office of another grower who was probably born around the time Rod was planting those Friars. His family’s business had started small but had grown over the years into a massive farming operation. By all accounts, he was a wealthy man, still relatively young, with a family, top of his game. We were talking about the modernization of the stone fruit industry and as he described it, he became increasingly frustrated by what he was hearing himself say. Finally he stood and walked over to a metal filing cabinet. “You know what? I’ll tell you what I want. I want to have fun again.” He handed me a framed photograph. In the picture, he and his brother were children. They were working on a modest packing line. Their parents were there in the picture, too. Everybody was smiling. “That’s what I want. That was fun.”)
Not that Rod was living in the past. He couldn’t afford to. He had a reputation as a sober realist when it came to growing stone fruit, someone who had successfully navigated the transition from growing fruit as a way of life to growing fruit as a business. His 103-acre orchard, which was a blend of the sturdy and the sublime, reflected this. His goal was to have around twenty-seven varieties spread out over the season, sometimes more but rarely fewer than twenty-five. Two-thirds of the varieties he grew were plums and pluots, and while he did grow some workhorses like Friar, he also had some lesser-known varieties, such as the Grand Rosa plum. As a small grower, he had very little room for flops but he also couldn’t afford to ignore potential hits just because they were a bigger risk. Though he rarely made it up to Modesto anymore for the Wednesday fruit tours, he always had an eye on the ne
w fruit that was coming out and he was willing to gamble on unproven, newer varieties that he loved. He was one of the first growers to test an early Zaiger hybrid called Flavorosa, and he had lots of newer Zaiger varieties as well. Having little room to plant a proper test orchard, though, Rod resorted to grafting several varieties onto single trees. For this reason, he liked to say that he was growing “two hundred trees of one scaffold.” It wasn’t for the novelty: Rod believed that the new pluot varieties were quickly changing the marketplace for plums. Growers could now reasonably expect to offer a plum that was large, firm, and highly colored enough to please a chain store’s fruit buyer but that had some of the great flavor that had disappeared with El Dorado, Cassel-man, and those memorable plums of an earlier generation. While plenty of growers had gone out of business for taking too many risks, many more had been ruined by being too complacent and ignoring the reemergence of flavor.
Rod did confess that there was one variety he grew at a total loss. When he saw it for the first time, he knew that there were problems with it. But when he tasted it, he said to himself, “I’ve got to have it. I’ve just got to have it.” Rod had thirty trees of the variety and though he never packed and sold it, he just couldn’t bring himself to pull it out—it was that good. Against his better judgment, Rod kept convincing himself that somewhere someone—an ice-cream company, a jam maker, one of those fruit strip outfits—would finally figure out what to do with a fruit as divine as Flavor King.
5
ON THOSE MORNINGS when I woke up in the San Joaquin, it was my habit to lie in the motel bed, listen to the trucks on the highway, and wonder how the air outside would smell. Some mornings, it was synthetic and sweet, like bubble-gum-scented air freshener. Some mornings, it was skunky and loose. Other mornings, the Valley’s feedlots lent an animalic undertone to the air. Even though the ocean was hours away, it wasn’t uncommon to be hit by one of countless marine smells, an entire spectrum of which could wash over the Valley: the fishy underside of a wharf, the floating puddle of harbor scum, the bucket full of bad oysters. There were mornings that reeked of diesel fuel and others that reeked of citrus. Once in a while, both came at me equally and the result was a smoky Cash-meran, like a sweaty pub full of pipe and ale. Occasionally, I was blessed with a light breeze that blew across almond blossoms and left a delicate, floral sillage in its wake. More often, the Valley just smelled like shit.
The morning after I met Rod Milton, the air had an apple-cider-like quality to it. The fog had burned off to reveal the snowcaps of the Sierras, and a deep purple sky set the backdrop for a fleet of battleship clouds above. I drove a dozen or so miles east to Reedley, a town near the Sierran foothills that has traditionally been the heart of the Valley’s stone fruit belt. Most of the growers, packers, shippers, salesmen, and marketers who make up the California stone fruit industry live within one hour of Reedley. This proximity to each other has a tendency to make fruit people tight-lipped about the industry. Often, I’d introduce myself to a grower and, after chatting for a few minutes, he’d say, “Well, listen. I’m happy to give you my impressions, but I wouldn’t ever want my name used.” Or, “If you want to run some ideas by me, I’d be happy to tell you if you’re on the right track.” Or, more to the point, “We like to keep to ourselves.” Sometimes, I felt like I was in Los Alamos. When I brought up this closeness-to-the-vest quality with one big packer, he said, “Imagine if all the big tire companies were right next to each other so that the people at Goodyear went to church with the people from Michelin. We are all each others’ neighbors, but we’re also each others’ main competitors.” The result seemed to be that everybody knew something about everybody, but nobody knew everything about anyone else.
I had tracked down John Kaprielian, the burly mustachioed guy Elizabeth and I had met at Zaiger Gene tics on her birthday. Since we’d met John, his family’s fruit business, Kaprielian Brothers, had been sold to the Ballantine Produce Company, one of the industry’s oldest and largest commercial grower-packer-shippers. Ballantine had started in the 1940s as a commercial packing house. Over the years, the company had backed into farming, and now it packed and sold its own fruit as well as fruit from other growers, all of which went out as Ballantine product. As with Fruit Patch, one of the main challenges Ballantine faced was trying to make sure that growers were tending to their trees in the right way and picking the fruit at the right time and size so that each box of fruit Ballantine packed was as much like the last one as possible. As a member of Ballantine’s grower ser vices department, this was part of Kaprielian’s job.
For most of its history, Ballantine was known as a plum house, but now it shipped pluots, yellow and white peaches and nectarines, apricots, grapes, and a handful of other things. In the early 1990s, when Wal-Mart opened its supercenters and began selling produce, Ballantine started shipping the retailer a little stone fruit. It had since become one of the store’s leading suppliers of plums and nectarines. During the off-season winter months, it supplied North American stores with stone fruit and grapes from Chile. Today, though, there was little activity at Ballantine’s main packing shed, a large, low facility in the middle of a giant, fenced-in paved lot just outside of Reedley.
I met Kaprielian in a trailer next to the main building. He was with Rick Milton, Ballantine’s head of grower services and—small world—Rod Milton’s brother. They were preparing for a meeting with all their field managers, whose job this time of year was to listen to and counsel Ballantine growers on the coming season. Though there was no fruit on the tree, everything the growers did during this time of the year was important—when and how they thinned their trees, what and where they sprayed, which of their varieties they kept or pulled out.
“The challenge is to get all the fruit from these different growers locked into a system that it can’t get out of,” said Milton, as we sat down around a conference table. “You have to work with the growers on cultural practices—thinning, pruning—and then on maturity, and you have to be very, very strict on sorting so that you put out a consistent product.”
When I asked how the recently completed 2006 season had gone, Kaprielian said that while it hadn’t been a particularly good year for fruit quality, it had gone okay in terms of sales. That was one of the odd things about the fruit business, he said. Some years, the conditions were just not right to grow great-tasting fruit, which required the cooperation of many things—most notably the sun—that were simply out of the growers’ control. But when the conditions weren’t ideal, it usually meant that there was less fruit available to be packed and sold. When there was less fruit being packed and sold, it meant that those who were packing and selling fruit were making money. Fruit quality was no match for supply and demand.
On the other hand, said Kaprielian, there were some years when the conditions were perfect and the fruit was as good as it could be, but you still lost a lot of money.
“Like 2004,” Milton said. “That year, there was blood in the streets.”
“What happened in 2004?” I asked.
“Too much fruit, too few buyers,” Milton said, matter-of-factly. “We all had a good box of fruit, so all we had to differentiate ourselves was price.” He explained that the box price was usually high right at the beginning of the season, when stores wanted to get the first of the summer fruit and weren’t so concerned with what it cost. The number of orders and the box price at the start of the season—usually the middle of May—set the tone for the next couple of months. In 2004, retail buyers saw that there was a lot of fruit to choose from and negotiated better box prices. Then, said Milton, “we all kept dropping the price on each other. It was a bloodbath. After that, we saw some consolidation on our end and we saw a lot of people get out of the business altogether.”
“So when people sat down and thought about whether—”
“Nobody had time to think about anything! The banks did the thinking for them,” Milton said. “And we’ve lost fifteen percent of our total volume over th
e last few years.” The downward trend in the industry had been apparent for years, they said, but 2004 was when everything came into clear focus. They pointed out a chart on the wall that showed the volume of peaches, plums, and nectarines over time. (Because so many people who grow plums also grow peaches and nectarines, and vice versa, and because those three fruits have the same trade organization, they’re often lumped together. You’ll often hear people talk of the “total packout” for “PPN”—peaches, plums, nectarines.) The total number of boxes of PPN shipped had gone from almost sixty million in 2003 to just over fifty million in 2006. The most precipitous drop of the chart was in plums, already the least grown of the three fruits. Plums were in a free fall, their volume having dropped 20 percent since 2003.
A lot of growers were pulling out stone fruit and moving to crops that were easier to harvest, store, and ship: walnuts, almonds, olives. Others were getting out of agriculture completely and selling the development rights to their land (making way for the new houses and strip malls that hopscotched up and down the Valley—scattered orchards giving way to bulldozed corner lots with “Coming Soon” signs oriented diagonally so that comers from all directions could read the name of the future neighborhoods: Sun Villas, Orchard Pointe, Olive Lane, Rustic Oaks).
But these changes on the grower end weren’t the real causes of the drop in volume. They were the effects of two major changes that had been under way for years on the retail end. The first change had to do with how retailers thought about fruit as part of their pricing strategy.