The Fruit Hunters Page 25

  Members of the public aren’t allowed past the security gate. Fortunately, I’ve set up an interview with management. After getting clearance from a uniformed official, I enter the colossal factory complex. I drive over some cases of exploded plums rotting on the pavement and park my car. Regulars recommend wearing boots because of all the fruits squishing underfoot. Waste is high because produce won’t sell unless it’s flawless. At Hunt’s Point, there’s so much garbage it needs to be bulldozed away throughout the day.

  The enormous parking lot is filled with hundreds of eighteen-wheelers spewing clouds of smog. At Hunt’s Point, idling annually generates 32 tons of nitrogen oxides, 31 tons of carbon monoxide and 9.6 tons of soot particles and other volatile compounds that coat the lungs of anyone within breathing distance of the market. Little wonder the South Bronx has one of the highest asthma rates in the United States. Efforts are being made to reduce emissions, but the pollution-enforcement car looks abandoned. It’s parked off to the side, badly dented.

  I’m greeted at the entrance by Hunt’s Point’s executive director, Myra Gordon. Compact and wiry, Gordon has a tough New York accent that doesn’t appear to have mellowed with age. “There are other markets akin to this one,” she says, briskly walking me through the debris-strewn market, “but oh so much smaller.” Hunt’s Point generates revenues of over 1.5 billion dollars a year, but it’s hard to say exactly how much fruit gets sold here annually. “My calculator doesn’t go out that far,” says Gordon. “Millions and millions of tons.” As Gordon points out managers of different wholesaling departments, I catch glimpses of fruit pallets piled up to the ceiling in temperature-controlled rooms. Groggy foremen shout orders at laborers. Forklifts race around, nipping at my heels. Buyers yell prices and inspect crates of produce.

  This main floor is where the sales action happens. The wholesalers’ offices are on the second floor, which has the longest corridor I’ve ever seen. A third of a mile long, the end is so far away I feel like I’m walking into the optical illusion created by two mirrors facing each other. The corridor is narrow; reaching out, I easily run my hand along both walls at the same time. Behind each of the hundreds of doors on either side are people, facts, figures—endless information on the logistics of getting these fruits to market.

  Moving into a conference room occupied by several cats, Gordon explains how most of the selling takes place in the middle of the night, so that stores can have fresh fruits ready by the time the rest of the world wakes up. Incoming merchandise can arrive at any time, so the terminal market has to stay open. “It’s brutal in here,” said Gordon. “You can earn a nice living—but it’s blood money. The hours are horrendous. It’s very tiring. The profits are nickels and dimes, so you need to be able to stay on top of your business. You have to be singularly oriented. It’s very tough at all ends of the spectrum, from the owners down to the guys loading and unloading at the docks.”

  Over a hundred thousand trucks deliver goods to Hunt’s Point annually. In the past, rail was the preferred method of shipping, but trains are no longer dependable. Boxcars get waylaid in Chicago shipyards and it takes days to get them back on track, by which point the merchandise has gone off. It takes trains ten to twenty days to get fruits from California to New York. Trucks do it in four.

  Even so, it takes weeks for fruits to get to us. After a day of harvesting, precooling and packaging, fruits spend another day in the cooling facility waiting to get shipped out. After being trucked across the country, they sit for an average three days at the wholesaler or in big stores’ regional warehouses. Only then does it go on sale to the public. Fruit is usually sold after spending several days on display in the supermarket. It then languishes, on the brink, for a week or more in home refrigerators.

  One hundred years ago, Montreal was the North American center for Mediterranean fruits. Cargo ships arrived bearing seventy thousand crates per load. Buyers from Boston, New York and Chicago procured their oranges and lemons at Canadian auctions. The transitions of Montreal’s terminal market reflect the changing patterns of produce sales in the twentieth century. In the 1960s, the central market moved from the port to unused land outside the city near major highway arteries and railway tracks. Today, the market is a mere husk. Most of the railway tracks have been paved over and it’s now a huge mall full of big box stores like Best Buy, Winners and Costco. Only a few produce wholesalers remain. The market’s land has boomed in value, forcing wholesalers to split off and open their own warehouses scattered throughout the city. It’s for this reason that there are only a dozen terminal markets left in North America where wholesalers are clustered together.

  There has also been a rise in air shipping. High-end fruit with a short shelf life is flown in on large metal containers called LDs—loading devices—that fit into wide-bodied cargo planes. The finest peaches, plums and nectarines sold in New York are packed into LD2s by airfreight consolidators in California or Chile. They’re picked up by gourmet wholesalers in New York, such as Baldor’s, who get them to upmarket stores where they’re on sale the following morning at $7.99 a pound. “Soft, juicy fruit can’t survive the cold chain,” one New York grocer told me. “If you want quality, it has to be flown in first class.”

  New York’s produce sales began with hawkers and peddlers in Washington Square in the late-eighteenth century. By the late 1960s, the market clogged up the area now occupied by the World Trade Center. Well into the twentieth century, wholesale fruits were sold to the highest bidder. Catalogs were printed and lot numbers assigned to piles of fruit. The auctions were discontinued when growers ended up parting with their crops for a pittance one too many times. An eighteenth-century method in London was to auction fruits “by the candle.” Bidding commenced when a pin was inserted into a candlestick near the flaming wick; the winning bid would be the one that came before the wax melted and the pin fell out.

  Wholesalers used to specialize in individual fruits, so they’d understand the nuances of their product. As in other industries, produce has seen its share of mergers and acquisitions in recent times. The D’Arrigo Brothers, the biggest wholesalers at Hunt’s Point, also ship, distribute and are among the largest privately owned growers in the world. Vertical integration and industry-wide consolidating have resulted in a decreased understanding of what it takes to handle fruit properly.

  In Europe, farmers associations are countering this trend by marketing fruits based on their regionality. Fruits from specific regions of France are labeled as Appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC). Such designations of origin generate premium prices. Grapes from Moissac and Limousin, peaches from Montreuil, and mirabelle plums from Lorraine are all grown according to ancient methods and are being celebrated for their quality. France’s success with geographical indications is spawning a Europe-wide demand for obscure or forgotten varietals with incomparable flavor. “Shelf life used to be everything, but now flavor is being emphasized,” says Philippe Stisi, the communication officer for Rungis, the wholesale market on the outskirts of Paris. “We’re finding ways to give more pleasure to the consumer.”

  When I visited Rungis, a vendor told me a joke about a Chinese scientist who invented an apple that tasted like pineapple on one side and like a mango on the other. A rich man, after biting both halves said, “Not bad, but I’ll reward you handsomely if you bring me one that tastes like foufounette (that means, he said, “la sexe féminine”). Months pass, and then the Chinese man returns with a new apple. “Bite this,” he says, excitedly, to the wealthy man. The bourgeois takes a bite—and instantly spits it out. “This tastes like shit,” he curses. “Yes,” says the Chinese scientist excitedly, “now bite the other side!”

  That same day, I met a jolly old salesman named Guicheteau hawking crates of apples for fifteen euro. Despite his hard-sell tactics, I declined to purchase them, explaining that I was a journalist, not a retailer. “Ah.” He shrugged. “In that case, let me show you something special.” From under his table, he took out an appl
e that had been imprinted with an elaborate, embroidered scene of an upright man lifting a woman onto his phallus. It was like something out of the Illustrated Kama Sutra. Seeing that I was taking notes about it, he started playfully calling me names: “Oh, la vache! P’tit cochon! Salaud! Gourmand!” (Cow! Piglet! Bastard! Glutton!)

  IN AMERICA, fruits are stickered with names, bar codes and places of origin, or branded by lasers that tattoo the information into their peel. These so-called “laser-coded information delivery systems with advanced security clearance” are cleaned, sorted, sized, graded and boxed in packinghouses. Then they’re verified by inspectors as conveyer belts move the crates out to the loading dock or to warehouses where they rest in a state of suspended animation before being loaded onto trucks, boats, planes or trains.

  Biochemical growth inhibitors and hormone-based retardants have greatly extended the average fruit’s life span. Apples can spend close to a year sitting in oxygen-and carbon-dioxide-controlled cold-storage facilities. With an atmosphere similar to Neptune’s, these warehouses are the sort of gelid death chambers befitting Walt Disney’s head. Soon enough, the fruits are shivering, covered in beads of perspiration and suffering from postcryonic shock. Then we bombard them with ethylene gas, which disrupts their slumber and stuns them into a galvanized ripening process. Bananas release ethylene naturally, which is why other fruits ripen when placed nearby. Supermarket tomatoes taste like cardboard because they’re picked green and gassed with ethylene for redness. Many oranges are actually green when ripe, but ethylene disrupts the outer layer of chlorophyll, beckoning the orange color beneath. Alongside getting gassed, many oranges we eat are covered with synthetic dyes.

  Dyed oranges used to be individually labeled with purple ink, but such warnings have been dispensed with in North America. Shipping boxes are sometimes labeled, but consumers rarely get to peruse the fine print on orange crates. Citrus Red No. 2 is still used on orange skins in the United States and Canada, despite being banned in Britain, Australia and Norway. The World Health Organization periodically issues warnings, and studies dating back to 1973 have shown it causes internal organ damage and cancer in mice and rats. Cooking with peel, making marmalade, zesting oranges, putting a slice in a drink, even sinking your teeth into an orange may be a flirt with toxicity. In order to establish whether your citrus has been dyed, peel off the rind and look at the white stringy fluff still attached to the fruit—is it orangeish? That’s dye that has seeped through the peel into the fruit.

  To give our fruits that high sheen and longer shelf life, they are covered with waxes. According to wax producers and exporters Cerexagri, Brogdex and Moore & Munger, there is wax on most of our produce. Some wax comes from shellac (the resinous secretions of small insects) or carnuba (from the leaf of a Brazilian palm tree). But many other fruits are waxed with polyethylene or paraffin wax, by-products of petroleum refinement. We’re actually eating oil detritus, what Norman Mailer calls “the excrement of oil.” The plastic bags we carry fruit home in are also made from polyethylene. Fossil fuels are used to power tractors and mechanized farming devices, to manufacture the petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides that help fruit grow and to transport fruits from warehouses to supermarkets.

  Accordingly, our produce departments look like new-car lots full of enormous, perfect fruits gleaming with wax. The spectrum of colors is heightened by megawatts of directional lighting accentuating the beads of mist dripping from the temperature-controlled display cases. Unfortunately, many of these cars are lemons.

  “A goodly apple rotten at the heart, O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!” as Shakespeare put it in The Merchant of Venice. The vainglorious blimps in chain stores look like they’re one size too big—plums the size of peaches, peaches the size of grapefruit, mangoes the size of cantaloupes. In Hungary, botoxed North American fruits are described as “unlistenable,” like jazz.

  In the past, people were skeptical of fruits that looked too perfect: they had “too much of a painted look to be good to eat,” wrote one nineteenth-century connoisseur. He was right: around that time, grocers would improve the color of fruits by adding gum arabic, or they’d cover up imperfections with India ink. Calcined magnesia or sulfer dusted onto plums was used to create an aura of unspoiled blooms.

  Although the hazards of our supermarket are more insidious today, the words of eighteenth-century Dutch merchant Pieter van der Voort still resonate: he described a bad peach as a “painted whore, because it is nicely and attractively colored, remains hard as an apple, has no taste and yet gives one the eye by hanging around.”

  “You can’t sell a blemished apple in the supermarket, but you can sell a tasteless one, provided it is shiny, smooth, even, uniform and bright,” says British author and environmentalist Elspeth Huxley. What most of us don’t realize is that you can also return bad fruits. I don’t recommend doing this at a farmer’s market or with a small independent store. But if I’m at a chain store and I get rooked by some beautiful looking peaches that end up tasting like galoshes, I’ll return them. I invariably get my money back, and it sends a signal to the produce manager.

  When more than one person asks for a certain variety, the retailer reacts and tries to stock that variety—if it is commercially available. Every five requests are seen as representing the desires of a hundred customers. Demand for quality fruits can help reverse the trend of fruit homoge-nization

  Unfortunately, most us don’t know fruit varieties very well, which is the way the industry likes it. Fruits are often sold without being identified by variety: they’re just strawberries, not Monarchs, Seascapes or Albions. The strawberries we buy in North America and Europe—firm, red, cold-resistant varieties like Camarosa, Elsanta, Diamante, Ventana—are as reliable as they are flavorless. Little do we realize that there were 1,362 varieties of strawberry described in the 1926 compendium The Small Fruits of New York.

  There has been a conscious decision by the produce industry to wean shoppers away from varieties. If consumers start learning about all the varieties of fruits, they’ll start demanding quality. The recent explosion in new apple varieties has led to an increased understanding of seasonality—and decreased overall apple sales. As Todd Snyder of C&O Nursery explained to me: “You don’t increase a fruit’s consumption by adding new varieties. When people thought there were only red and yellow apples, they didn’t know they were missing out on other varieties. As Galas, Fujis and Jonagolds became available, people all of a sudden became more picky about what they eat.”

  Supermarkets don’t want consumers to focus on varieties because it interferes with their ability to sell low-grade fruits all year long. Even at the height of the season, most supermarkets only stock the same subpar apples, oranges and strawberries. The food industry term for this blurred seasonality is “permanent global summertime.” It means that everything is always available—and always mediocre.

  Only a tiny fraction of fruit biodiversity is for sale: 90 percent of the foods we eat derive from only thirty plant species. Manifold reasons account for this bottleneck: most fruits aren’t dependable. They don’t ship well. They aren’t precision calibrated. They don’t produce anywhere near the volume required by national chains. They may not even produce any fruits some years. They are soft and juicy—they can’t be stacked because they’d bruise each other. Certain heirloom fruits are like water balloons. Coe’s Golden Drop is a forgotten plum variety that is too juicy to actually be bitten into. You nibble a little hole into it and then suck out its perfumed honey.

  Tastewise, some fruits have fared better commercially than others. Satisfactory lemons, oranges, apples, bananas and grapes can certainly be purchased at the local Piggly Wiggly. Others, like strawberries, peaches and figs, can’t. It’s almost impossible to find an apricot that doesn’t taste like coins. Even in Iran, where apricots are called Eggs of the Sun, their bestselling commercial variety is the United States–bred Katy. Fruits need to withstand the rigors of shipping all over the world
. Superb varieties such as the white-fleshed Shalah and the red-fleshed Tomcham are only edible a few days after picking. They putrefy fast, they don’t look pretty, they have weird ripening demands—but they taste delicious. In short, they’re the opposite of shelf-stable fruits.

  For the wealthy, the situation is improving; white Angelcots are being sold in high-end New York and California fruit stores at astronomical prices. But for the most part, a good apricot remains an elusive quarry. “In some Persian palace whose quiet garden hears only the tinkle of a fountain it would seem to find its right setting, fitly waiting on a golden dish for some languid Sharazade,” wrote Edward A. Bunyard.

  IN THE FIRST HALF of the twentieth century, more oranges were eaten than any other fresh fruit. Since concentration was invented, we drink far more than we eat. “The frozen people,” as makers of concentrate were known, played a decisive role in lessening the appeal of fresh fruit. They made it easier to whip together some frozen OJ than to squeeze our own. The reason concentrate is always so reassuringly familiar is that it’s boiled down, divided into basic components, reconfigured, artificially flavored, and, finally, frozen into cardboard containers. Now we’re too busy for that, so we drink Tropicana, thinking it’s as good as freshly squeezed.

  With urbanization and industrialization, we’ve become detached from our food sources and have forgotten how things are actually grown. Nonetheless, short of pulling a St. Anthony and moving into a tree trunk, we’ll continue to get our food by shopping, rather than foraging or growing our own.