The Fruit Hunters Page 18
It’s often up to enterprising growers to create their own markets. Roger and Shirley Meyer grow three dozen varieties of jujubes, a mahogany datelike fruit much loved in Asia, on their Southern California farm. They decided to approach the produce manager of an Asian market and give him free samples. Soon enough they were selling briskly for $3.99 a pound. In fruiting season, they sell hundreds of pounds of jujubes a day.
Another shortcut to surefire profit is to legalize a previously outlawed fruit. Banned throughout most of the twentieth century in New York State, black currants weren’t allowed to be sold, cultivated, transported or grown because of their link to a disease threatening pine trees. The interdiction was lifted in 2003 thanks to the lobbying efforts of a farmer named Greg Quinn, who now bottles a natural juice called Currant C. Whenever a banished fruit writhes out of its shackles, it stands to bring growers a significant “candy bar” (the agricultural term for a windfall). Studies forecast U.S. black-currant sales of 1 billion dollars annually.
In recent years, Californian farmers realized that Asian dragon fruits aren’t allowed into the United States, so they started growing their own. They were all over New York’s Chinatown in 2007. The simultaneous rise of travel to equatorial regions and the blossoming of foodie culture have led to increased interest in novel varieties. Historian Margaret Visser attributes this to a phenomenon called neophilia, the love of the new. Supermarkets, traditionally neophobic, are now starting to stock exotics because of the surging demand.
Just as Hollywood churns out sequels, kiwi growers are finding new ways to capitalize on the fruit’s initial success. With golden kiwis making a splash in recent years, red-and purple-fleshed kiwis, as well as a variety covered with white polka dots, are now being introduced. Tiny hardy kiwis with edible skin, known as peewees or passion popper kiwi-berries, have also started generating solid revenues due in large part to their cotton candy flavor.
Proper promotion is vital, says Frieda Kaplan, a wholesaler who worked with growers to promote the original green kiwis. “For other specialties to develop like kiwi fruit has,” Kaplan says, “growers must know how to manage their crops so that they can achieve a reasonable profit even at lower prices.” She spent eighteen years publicizing kiwis by sending samplers to journalists, giving free taste tests, placing advertisements, working with growers and encouraging restaurants to incorporate them.
Chefs play an important role in promulgating new fruits. Martha Stewart has long been pushing white apricots. Meyer lemons are now well known thanks to their use by Chez Panisse’s pastry chef Lindsey Shere. Alice Waters’s cheerleading of mulberries has resulted in skyrocketing prices at California farmer’s markets. When yuzu, a Japanese citrus, started being touted by celebrity chefs like Jean Georges Vongerichten and Eric Ripert, producers rushed to bring anything yuzu to supermarket shelves.
When chef-artist-scientist Ferran Adrià of El Bulli first tasted an Australian finger lime, the latest buzz fruit, he broke into tears. Each finger-shaped fruit teems with spherical pulp vesicles that are the citrus equivalent of caviar. When the skin is sliced open, these tiny translucent pearls glide out of their vacuum-sealed packaging. The peel’s colors ranges from purple to crimson to alligator-green; the interior comes in shades of pink, yellow and nacre. Tasting them is akin to one’s first sip of champagne; it’s the sheer madness of the unexpected. As the finger lime’s vegetal hype continues growing, commercial growers in California are setting up orchards. In a few years, they should be commercially available.
BEFORE LAUNCHING new varieties, marketers study consumer preferences. Multicolored pie charts reveal what percentages of shoppers like their fruit firm, soft, juicy, tangy, sweet, dry or moist. Hugeness, once thought to be a key goal, has proven undesirable. Bananas are morning fruits, strawberries are mainly evening fruits. Bananas, apples and grapes are fruits people like to eat on the go—others require preparation and are being prepackaged with that in mind.
According to surveys commissioned by the California Tree Fruit Agreement, the most sought-after fruit demographic is a group called “Summer Enthusiasts.” What unifies this sunny cabal, alongside their above-average fruit purchases, is an interest in playing sports and (say the following with a robot voice) having new experiences. Summer Enthusiasts “believe having fun is the point of life, think continuing to learn throughout life is very important, believe enjoying life and doing the things they want to do is important.” Over 111 million Americans—in an estimated 53 percent of households—are Summer Enthusiasts.
Another important fruit buying subset is “Light Lifestylers”—people who are health conscious and like to exercise. Overlapping somewhat with the Summer Enthusiasts are 72 million “Super Moms and Dads”— the type who verify ingredients and nutrition stats prior to buying, and for whom family is everything. By far the most elusive segment of the population is “Generation Starbucks”—youngish people who still believe they are invincible (so health isn’t a purchasing factor). These twenty-and thirtysomethings buy whenever the urge strikes them. Reaching the portion of this group with “positive life attributes” (ie., not the suicidal, bearded nihilists) requires making fruits available everywhere, like their namesake java.
For all of these various menageries, fruits are being pushed as a break-time snack. Branding gurus want to make fruits a part of transitions from one activity to the next: rejuvenating tide-me-over breaks, mid-afternoon pick-me-ups and after-work snacks. To merchandising reps, it doesn’t really matter when these moments happen as long as they become ritualized routines filled with fruit. Once fruits have become ingrained as the go-to transitionary fuel, their multisensory experiential qualities can be leveraged into high-volume snacking. Or something to that effect.
Fruit catchphrases and slogans bandied about in these studies include “little taste adventure,” “delicious handful of goodness” and my favorite: “the snack that quenches.” Like a lingering stereotype, these studies’ undertones are shrouded in a gauzy cloak of believability. After poring over them for several hours, I badly need a transitionary moment. Despite, or perhaps because of, all the viral jargon, I feel an urge to go to my fridge and eat a peach. It certainly appears to be a “guilt-free treat,” rather than an endorsement of big agriculture. Then I bite into it, my teeth sinking into what feels like wet sand. Not quite the Burst of Fun I was hoping for.
The power of branding hasn’t been lost on growers. The “Delicious” apple, a precursor to Red Delicious and Golden Delicious apples, started as a name in a marketing boardroom. Only subsequently was an apple found that fit the bill. The tactic worked: the Red Delicious was the most successful apple of the twentieth century. But its era is over. According to organoleptic experts, as the apple became redder, it also became blander. In the midst of its downfall, one American nursery has used marketing to concoct an entirely new breed of fruit.
IT’S AUTUMN and ripe apples are being picked in Wenatchee, Washington, the Apple Capital of the World. From a distance, the red orbs glowing in their boughs resemble Christmas tree ornaments. But as I pull into Gary Snyder’s orchard, this wholesome image starts to warp. Something smells like grape bubble gum.
“Sorry—it’s me—I’ve been doing Grapple testing,” explains Snyder, the inventor of an apple that tastes like grapes. “The percentage of solution I get on myself can be quite high when I work with the raw product.” Snyder has never revealed how Grapples are made, saying only that it involves dunking Gala or Fuji apples in artificial grape flavor. This chemical solution is so potent, he allows, that one tainted T-shirt in the laundry can spread the aroma to all the other clothes. Wherever Snyder goes, a saccharine cloud follows. “It’s getting to the point where it’s getting tiring for the wife,” he says, the sunlight tinting his glasses an ashy shade of merlot.
Snyder, forty-five, is the marketing director of C&O Nursery, a company owned by his family that sells tree stock to farmers. He has a pudgy face, squinting eyes and a sloping forehead topped wi
th bristly brown hair. He’s wearing sneakers, little ankle socks, khaki shorts and a polo shirt embroidered with the Grapple logo. He wears a gold ring on each hand. With those tinted glasses, he looks like Dr. Strangelove on a casual Friday.
When I ask about his earliest memories of eating apples and grapes, Snyder takes a long pause. When he finally speaks, he says the first apple he ever tasted was a green, underripe Granny Smith in his family’s test plot. And opening up the grape door, he starts telling me about childhood summers when he and his brothers would get lost in their father’s Concord grape patch: “I remember eating them until I was sick.”
I pluck a Gala and wipe off its powdery white residue. It tastes fine, despite that cloying odor. I can’t tell if the smell is wafting off Snyder, or the apple or if it’s coming from somewhere else. He’s trying to assure me that it’s only coming from him, but when he drives off, a whiff of deception trails in his wake. Even after he and his perfumed clothes are gone, the orchard still smells like synthetic grapes.
IN AN EDITORIAL about the fruit, the Ann Arbor Paper pondered the point of eating something whose name means “to come to terms with.” In actuality, Snyder’s fabrication is pronounced gray-pull, not gr-apple. Jeopardy contestants were stumped when the fruit was featured as a Daily Double question in 2004: “From Washington, the Fuji type of one fruit flavored with the Concord type of another yields this, also meaning ‘wrestle.’”
Complicating matters, there is another fruiting plant called the grapple (the pronunciation is, in this case, homonymous). Also known as devil’s claw, the grapple (Harpagophytum procumbens) has evolved the peculiarity of clamping itself to the feet of ostriches, which ensures the dispersal of its seeds. I made the mistake of rhyming Snyder’s creation with “apple” the first time we spoke, and was swiftly upbraided. Later, in what I suspect to have been a retaliation, he called me “Alan”—emphasizing it, pausing and slowly turning to observe my reaction.
Grapples are sold with the tagline, “Looks like an apple. Tastes like a grape.” A four-pack retails for around four or five dollars at Wal-Mart, Safeway, Albertson’s and other chains. More than 36 million Grapples have already been sold. Clearly, a lot of people like them. Most people react with a “Wow,’” says Snyder. “Your mouth is telling your brain something’s wrong.”
Despite its platinum sales, the fruit hasn’t entered the marketplace without resistance. A kiddie taste test organized by the Denver Post deemed it “ucky.” Eating one calls to mind biting into lip gloss. It is not organic, nor is it certified kosher. On a website where users can leave their feedback, the comments are often vitriolic. “I am disgusted,” writes one. “The fact that these people have the audacity to charge $5.00 for Dimetapp-flavored apples is just wrong. The inventor should be shot in the foot.” The litany of complaints continues: “Yuck! I can’t believe these folks are marketing this crud …. Blech!” Someone named Trevor writes: “I ate a grapple last night and i was kinda scared about it. I mean who knows what’s in them because it sure doesn’t say in the ingredients. After i bit it i was confused … just go buy some Fuji apples and it tastes the same and you save money and you don’t run the risk of dying from whatever crazy chemicals are in them.”
The only ingredients listed on the packaging are apples and artificial flavor. Until 2005, “fatty acids” were also included in the labeling. “I wouldn’t have known that there was fatty acid in the Grapple except for the fact that I have a very bad reaction to fatty acids—explosive diarrhea,” writes “Pete” online. “I was on a road trip with my family one minute in the middle of a snowstorm and the next minute I was in the car in the middle of a shit blizzard.”
Snyder dismisses these protestations as mere sour grapes: “If five percent of people complain, I’ve got no problem with that. People who don’t like it probably wake up with a cranky attitude. Fine. You’re not going to make everybody happy. If you don’t wanna eat artificial flavoring, what do you wanna eat? Everything has artificial flavoring today, except a banana or something like that.”
The Grapple’s critics counter that apples, like bananas and other natural things like that, are not improved by the addition of chemical flavors. Fruits, they argue, aren’t meant to be industrialized. But as our foods have become standardized commodities, producers like Snyder are merely giving retailers what they demand: homogeneity. Calibrated for even size, and processed when they attain a sweetness level of fourteen Brix, all Grapples taste identical, whether eaten in Wenatchee or Witchita. “It’s not just a burger, it’s a McDonald’s burger,” says Snyder. “It’s not just an apple, it’s a Grapple.”
Snyder, who invented the Grapple in 2002, believes that creating it has been his divine calling. “Someone had to bring this out,” he says. “I was the one who was chosen to do so.” Although he becomes guarded when asked how he got the idea for the fruit, he claims that the idea for a flavored apple evolved over time. “There was no lightbulb moment,” he says, waving his hands in the air, patting his belly and drawing circles with his fingers. “There were multiple things involved that I can’t get into here for trade reasons. There was no epiphany.”
HISTORICALLY, Washington fruit production can be traced back to a eureka moment. The first apples and grape seeds planted in the area arrived in the vest pocket of Captain Aemilius Simpson in 1826. In the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the young captain attended a farewell banquet in London before undertaking his lengthy voyage to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. The dessert course consisted of fruits. Conversation turned to foods of the New World, and to the fact that no apples or grapes were then growing on the Western frontier.
At that time, Johnny Appleseed was still spreading apple seeds along the Ohio River. Grapes, such as the Scuppernong, were native to the Eastern seaboard, but weren’t yet cultivated in Washington. The range of the Frost grape, another widely dispersed indigenous variety, extended no further west than Montana. To give an idea of the scarcity of fresh fruit on the Pacific coast at that time, apples from Oregon were sold in San Francisco in 1850 for $5.00 apiece. That year, the average monthly wage for an unskilled laborer in California was $4.20. Calculating based on the nominal GDP per capita, $5.00 from 1850 equals $1,911.75 current dollars—not far off from the average monthly wage of an entry-level worker today. (According to a 2001 study, half of all American farm workers earn less than $625 per month.) Granted, 1850 was the height of the Gold Rush, and the wealth twinkling out of the earth permitted astronomical expenditures on luxury items such as apples.
Back in London, a young woman sitting near Captain Simpson was overcome by the symbolism of his imminent voyage to a barren land. In a romantic gesture, she slipped the seeds out of her apples and grapes and placed them in Simpson’s pocket so that he would be able to plant them upon his arrival.
Several months after landing in Fort Vancouver, on the banks of the Columbia River in Washington, Captain Simpson was the guest at another dinner party. Wearing the same suit, he remembered the pips, and presented them to the fort’s leader. The “love-seeds” were planted in the spring of 1827. This intertwining of apples and grapes marked the beginnings of Washington’s remarkably fertile fruit production—an American agricultural success story that has, in recent years, taken an unexpected turn.
YIELDING 12 BILLION fruits each fall, millions upon millions of apple trees sprout from the desert east of the Cascade Mountains in central Washington. Throughout most of the twentieth century, Wenatchee truly was, as its town motto has it, the apple capital of the world. Their Red Delicious beauties were sold around the globe. The United States produced more apples than any other country, with Washington dominating domestic levels. Then, in the early 1990s, Chinese orchards erupted. China now produces 25 million metric tons of apples per year, compared to the United States’s 4.3 metric tons. Other countries have also jumped on the apple wagon, their diminished labor costs cutting into American sales.
The U.S. market collapsed in 1997. In the face o
f reduced exports, cheaper foreign imports, stringent inspectors and tariff wars, numerous Washington apple growers have declared bankruptcy or had their orchards seized in foreclosures. As farmland gets snapped up, consolidation has led to fewer, larger agricorporations controlling the industry, leaving little room for independent farmers. Eking out profits from the constricted pricing margins requires not only high production volume, but a stake in other aspects of distribution. Apple growing today entails vertical integration, with companies simultaneously involved in growing, sorting, packing, storing and shipping.
The Grapple was formed in this crucible. With farmers either giving up or branching into different aspects of production, peripheral industries have had to adapt. Established in 1905 by Snyder’s grandfather’s uncle, C&O Nursery is now the oldest active nursery in Washington, and one of the oldest in North America. Surviving in business for a century requires evolving with the times. As everyone in Washington knows, the only hope for the state’s ailing industry is to find ways of getting people to eat more apples. Annual American per capita apple consumption is 15.1 pounds, about a third of the European average (around 45 pounds), and well under world-leader Turkey’s 70.77 pounds. The Snyder family hopes that their flavoring innovation will help boost sales of regular apples as well. They call this process a “chain-reaction of apples.”
They’re also tapping into another new trend in fruit marketing: non-hybrid hybrids. The Grapple comes on the heels of the Strawmato, a very sweet tomato masquerading as a cross between a strawberry and a tomato. Strawmatoes have no strawberry genes; they are united in name alone, although whether you say straw-mate-o or stra-motto, it just sounds off.
Mango Nectarines, according to their website, contain “a hint of tropical flavor that’s reflected in their name.” Ito Packing Co.’s oblique insinuation that their nectarines actually taste like mangoes has angered some fruit professionals. “They’re capitalizing on naivete,” fumes heirloom stone fruit grower Andy Mariani. “It tastes nothing like a mango, not that a cross between a nectarine and a mango is even possible. It’s just an anomaly from their genetic scrap heap that happens to be entirely blush-free, so it sorta resembles a yellow mango.”