The Perfect Fruit

by Chip Brantley

  Don looked around the table and continued his spiel without notes. “We sell a product that tells a story. Without confidence, none of us is willing to talk about anything. I can’t go to Boston and talk about the Red Sox, right? Those guys know what they’re talking about and I don’t. So too often we don’t say anything if we don’t feel confident about it. That’s just human nature. One time, I was on the East Coast and I went up to a kid who was stacking potatoes and onions. His name was Billy. I said, ‘Billy, how often do you talk to the customers?’ Billy looked up and said, ‘All she represents to me is an interruption between my potatoes and my onions. Not only that, she’s just going to ask me a question I can’t answer.’ ” Don paused. “That’s a problem.” More nods around the table.

  Over the next hour, Don gave a concise and often rousing presentation on the California stone fruit industry. He had several slides on the nuts and bolts of interspecifics. When he came to a slide with the words “Genus: Prunus” and a picture of peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots, and cherries, Don smiled and said, “I think of these as all dogs. Different types of dogs, but they’re all dogs. Well, you can’t breed a dog with a cat. You can put them in the same room with all the candlelight and white wine in the world, but it’s not going to work: you can’t get a cat-dog. But you can cross the fruits in Prunus, because even though they’re different, they’re all dogs.” More nods. All dogs.

  The second day of Flavor Tech started on one of Family Tree’s ranches in Goshen, down near Visalia. When I arrived, David Jackson was showing the produce managers his Flavor Queens, which he kept as the pollinator for a newer, yellow pluot called Sweet Treat. With his shadow on the field, David seemed totally in his element—a solid block of enthusiasm.

  We hopped into trucks and drove down a dirt road to a plot of Dapple Dandies. (The chain where the produce managers worked got most, if not all, of their Dapple Dandies from Kings-burg Orchards; the day before, one of them had said that the fruit his customers most often asked for by name was the Dinosaur Egg. David had forced a smile.) David pulled a piece of fruit off the tree. “It’s kind of been the history of this variety that we pick one, two, three, sometimes even four weeks later than a lot of companies pick this variety. But even though we have the most planted, our ware house is sold out and cleaned before theirs are. It’s one principle that we live by and it’s going to work for all of us: If you give the housewife a good product, it’ll move and keep moving. If you give her a bad product, she’ll pick it up once and then three weeks later she’ll start thinking about buying it again.” This was the data that John Lundeen had compiled. “A sixteen-Brix Dapple Dandy is a good Dapple Dandy. It’s an older Zaiger variety, and it’s the backbone variety that started us into pluots. We’re just now generations beyond it. The next generation is eigh teen Brix and up. The stuff I’m going to show you later today, we’re bringing in from Israel, France, Australia as well as taking from the plant breeders here in California. This stuff is bricking at twenty-two, twenty-three. I even have some twenty-nine Brix stuff. It’ll render you unconscious if you don’t have water with you.”

  We were standing on the edge of eighty acres of Dapple Dandy. At one time, David had forty acres of Flavor King and forty acres of Dapple Dandy, alternating every two rows for pollination. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tasted Flavor King, but they named it right. Until just recently, I considered it the best pluot or plum that I’d ever tasted. It’s one of the sweetest, juiciest plums I’ve ever had, but it cracks on the bottom. So unfortunately, you can’t grow it commercially. I tried for a long time but I couldn’t stay with it. So we pulled all but two rows and made the rest Dapple Dandy.”

  We caravaned back to the main road, where David’s son Rick was waiting for us on a tractor that was hitched to a trailer lined with a few benches. We climbed up onto the benches, and while Rick drove, David narrated. At one point deep in the orchard, we stopped to watch a guy on a tractor top two rows of Flavor Fall. The brace of the topper sat on a trailer behind the tractor. It was shaped like an inverted “L” and it held a spinning circular blade that sheared the tops of the trees into flattops. Topping trees after the fruit had been picked allowed more light to get down into the branches, which was thought to help renew the trees after the growing season. Some people did it. Some people didn’t.

  As we pulled over to watch the topper, we noticed a group of men talking in a tight circle in front of a small house. The Jacksons liked to provide houses on the ranch for some of the higher-ups in the field. During the season, they were out in the trees around the clock, and so it helped to be sleeping close enough to the fruit to hear it fall. They also had a better chance of seeing their families once in a while. It was jarring, though, to see a house plopped down in the middle of thousands of acres of fruit trees. “This is somebody’s home?” one of the produce managers asked. “Yeah, Gustavo lives here. He’s a three-star.”

  I’d overheard this but I wasn’t sure if I’d heard correctly.

  “Did you say three-star?”

  “They probably saw J. R. pulling up and had a meeting to get it together.” In the field, it turned out, the Jacksons used a military-style system of rank. The field managers were three-stars. The “Hondas” were the guys on ATVs who coordinated with the work crews out in the field and reported back to the three-stars. J. R. Martinez, who ran farming operations for the entire ranch, was the equivalent of a four-star, though Family Tree didn’t extend the military rank system beyond the lieutenants. As J. R. approached us David asked him what the meeting was about.

  “Well, we were just telling them that there was a lot of the season left and we needed to be taking better care of the fruit. A lot of people were driving too fast, and there was a lot of fruit getting spilled out in the field.”

  Eventually, we pulled back around to the lot off Highway 99 where we’d left our cars, next to a barnish-looking structure that was in the middle of construction. “This is our top-secret R&D facility,” David said, “and it’s right off the busiest highway in California.” When completed, the building would be a combination lab and tasting room. It was surrounded by ten acres of experimental test blocks. This is where Family Tree tested new Zaiger and Bradford varieties, as well as the foreign trees that were coming out of quarantine. We walked inside the unfinished building, where a couple of guys were working on the walls above us with drills and nail guns.

  Rick found an empty box and tossed it to the center of the room. David brought out a dozen paper bags with numbers scribbled in marker across the side. “We’ve been talking a lot about Brix,” he said. “It’s really more than that. It’s about the sugar-to-acid ratio. A lemon can have sixteen Brix, but you can’t taste the sugar because there’s too much acid. Okay? So it’s the sugar-acid ratio that’s important. That affects flavor.” He mentioned an emulsifier he’d seen in Germany that could give a quick read on a fruit’s sugar-acid ratio. He was thinking about investing in one, so that he could come closer to guaranteeing a good piece of fruit. “I want to be able to stamp on the box—boom!—‘Guaranteed good eating experience!’ ”

  The produce managers and I had formed a loose huddle around him. By this point, each of us was, I think, making a mental note to send him a résumé. He leaned down and peeked into one of the paper bags, and then picked it up and passed it around.

  “Here’s a little piece of fruit. This is a Zaiger variety. It’s new. It isn’t out yet. Just take a bite. You don’t have to eat the whole thing. It’s got a little tropical flavor to it.”

  It was a small, reddish-purple pluot. Everybody took a bite. I heard several of the guys say, “Oh!” They exchanged looks. Poor bastards, I thought. Just wait.

  “Does it eat alright?” David said, serious, then breaking out into a smile. “Yeah! So there you go. That’s probably in the twenties. Maybe twenty-one. You were eating sixteens out there. This is ramped up a little bit.”

  “What’s that one called?” someone asked.

&n
bsp; “It’s not called anything yet. It’s just got an identification number from the breeder. So we’ll taste something like this and if we think it has real potential, next year we’ll get six trees of it. It’ll go here in the experimental farm and our guy will research and develop it out to see if it’s something we can invest in.”

  “How long do you usually test a variety before putting in lots of trees?” I asked.

  By way of answering, David picked up another bag, which held ten or so pieces of a small, squat nectarine from Glen Bradford. “I ate this one the other day and I ordered ten acres on the spot. So, I guess I tested it for about . . .”—he took a bite—“that long! And in those ten acres I’ll have a lot of wood, so if they do well, I can expand pretty quick.”

  We went through some apricots, a couple more nectarines, a peach or two. Then David picked up a small box a few feet away. “Okay, this is one I’ve been saving for you. This is what I consider to be the best plum in the world. It’s from Israel. Unfortunately, it’s about six weeks old. I’ve had it in my refrigerator, not in cold storage. I knew you were coming and I wanted to save you one each. The firmer ones are probably the best, but even on those, the skin wasn’t as tart when they were ready to eat.”

  He held the box and we each took a plum. They were the size of racquetballs. The skin was dark purple, delicate, and wrinkly, like a prune. Bitten, it revealed bright red, almost purplish flesh. The smell jumped up and mugged you. The taste was not a gentle, velvety sweet. It was fierce, spicy. You wouldn’t want to saddle a child with it. It was an adult dose. One of the produce managers said only, “That—!” and then didn’t finish the sentence. The guy next to me looked over and shook his head, and I recognized the look, because I’d felt myself give it so many times. It said, After this, what? I noticed that there was a piece of paper in the box and it had the number of the variety written on it. I wanted to know what this was—did it have a name?—but David noticed, and before I could copy down the number, he reached down, snatched up the paper, and put it in his pocket. He smiled at me and it was a tight, not entirely friendly smile.

  “This is well past its time, but you can see what’s there. When that thing is ready, you won’t believe it. We’ve got a whole line of this coming. The same guy who did the red wine test and said that red wine is good for your heart and all that? Well, he tested this red juice and he said that they have four times the antioxidants that pomegranates have. So if we could have a line of these on your shelf that tastes like this all season long, and we can put a sign that says, ‘Four times the antioxidants as pomegranate juice?’ Put a price tag on that baby and let’s sell it. See all those young trees out there?” He pointed beyond us. “Those are all that plum right there. From all those sticks on those small trees, we can go to a lot of acreage really fast.”

  Someone mentioned the size of the fruit and whether or not that might be a marketing challenge. David explained that since Israel exported most of its fruit to Europe (where small sells), Israeli growers didn’t do much thinning to increase fruit size. Because there was so little water in Israel, their irrigation methods could also affect fruit size. “We’re hoping that the size is a cultural thing and not gene tic.” (I thought of Burbank’s bringing over the twelve seedlings from Japan and speculating that they would “respond to the stimulus of new surroundings.”) “Because if the size is a gene tic thing, then all of a sudden we’ve got to come together and say, ‘Okay, we’ve got the best-tasting fruit in the world, but how are we going to sell this? Because Americans want it big.’ ”

  David, who was returning to Israel the next week to order more fruit, continued flipping through the catalogue. He pointed out some apricots he had in the works: a black apricot, a striped “tiger” apricot, and a line they were calling aromacots, one of which had the smell of ginger bred into it. “This is all going on in the desert there in Israel. When I was there last was when they were sending the bombs over from Lebanon. Bombs hit two doors down. You know, we’re out there picking and there’s bombs going on in the hills, and the breeder said, ‘I guess I should get these pickers out of here, but I really need to get that fruit off.’ So that’s what’s coming from Israel now. This fall, we’re getting thirty of them out of quarantine. And then we’re getting thirty more the next year. And I’ll probably order another thirty this year.”

  He showed us other catalogues, from Spain, from France, from Chile. As we passed and flipped through them, David became solemn. “The most important thing I do as a farmer is right here. Yes, we have to do all the cultural things right. The fruit has to be packed right. It has to be shipped right. But the most important thing I do is choose varieties. If I choose a variety that bricks fourteen and another guy chooses a variety that bricks twenty-one, then I can be the best farmer in the world and he can screw up every which way but loose. He’ll still come out with a better product than me. So this research farm where we’re standing represents what’s most important to me.”

  He looked at us all—the half-time gut check—and smiled. “And just think! Next time you come here, there will be a long table over there and everything we’ve grown from the first of the season until where we’re at now will be out on a plate, cut up for you to taste. And if you taste one and say, ‘Egah! I like that one! I’ve got to have that one in the store,’ then I’ll say, ‘Well you name it, man! How many acres you want?’ ” He laughed that high-pitched laugh, and it sounded crazy and brilliant.

  5

  MIKE JACKSON HAD his uncle Dave’s laugh; I’d heard it over the telephone. In all the time I’d spent in the Valley, though, the closest I’d come to visiting Kingsburg Orchards and meeting him was driving along the outskirts of Jackson-owned land on Highway 43, where their trees were surrounded by tall razor-wire fence covered with a flowering vine. Over time, I’d tried to set up appointments with Mike and his father, George. Something always seemed to come up. But when Mike mentioned on a phone call that they still had the original Dapple Dandy test block that Wayne Adams had grafted in back in the 1980s, I vowed to get over there before leaving California.

  I had come to think of Dapple Dandy (marketed by Kings-burg Orchards as Dinosaur Egg) as the first real action in the war on “big, red, and hard.” If Flavor King was the Boston tea party of California stone fruit, then Dapple Dandy was the shot heard ’round the world. In my mind, those first trees had a talismanic quality to them. They were the bridge between the dark days of the recent past, when growers neglected to taste fruit because flavor was so low on the list of priorities, and the red-fleshed future, which was full of flavor.

  On the day I was going to see Mike, it was blazing out; at 1:30 P.M., the car was a box of heat, my early morning coffee still warm in the cup holder. I’d been eating plums all morning and was now running late, so I didn’t have time to pick up lunch. I found some peanuts in the passenger seat and washed those down with the coffee as I took a left onto Davis Avenue, both sides of which were lined with Jackson-owned fruit. The only other thing besides trees on this stretch of Davis was the massive Kingsburg Orchards compound; I took a right into the entrance and then continued down an unmarked road past a large Jackson-owned packing shed. Fruit that was too small, too gnarled, too blemished to pack was cascading down from the rear wall’s cull chute. More fruit came out of that chute in thirty seconds than I would eat all year. Driving slowly along the narrow orchard road, I passed the occasional turnoff that gave me a glimpse down the rows of trees, extending as far as the eye could see. A third of a mile down the road, I came to another packing shed and then to the small, detached house that is the sales office for Kingsburg Orchards.

  The receptionist told me that Mike would be a few minutes as he was just finishing a sales meeting. When I turned to sit down and wait, I saw Dale Janzen, the Industry Relations Director for the CTFA. I’d met him the previous March at the educational symposium in downtown Fresno. I reintroduced myself to Dale, who spent a good part of his week going around getting face time
with growers, keeping track of what was going on, hearing people out, trying to get a sense of what was happening on the ground.

  There was nothing else to talk about except the rotten market and the many variables that could be causing it. As we were going through them, the sales meeting let out and a stream of men filed down the hall toward us and went out the front door. Mike stopped in the door, looked back and forth between us, smiled, and said, “Who’s first?”

  Mike shook hands with Dale and then introduced himself to me.

  “We were just talking about what’s going on,” Dale said, shaking his head. “Everybody thought it was a made-to-order year, but it’s been real tough.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard from guys I haven’t talked to in twenty-five years asking me what I think we need to do about the market,” Mike said.

  “From what I can gather, the spot market’s really, really bad right now. The program sales guys seem to be doing okay, but I can count them on one hand.”

  “Yeah, and they’re lying,” Mike said, smiling. He was one of those program sales guys.

  I had only an hour or so with Mike, so after he and Dale quickly handled their business, I followed him back to a modern conference room where we sat down at a large table. A lot of packing shed/sales companies have a kind of “industrial parts supplier” vibe. Unmodernized, cubicle-ish, burnt coffee, brown ties. Kingsburg Orchards, though, felt more like an architect’s office—not sleek exactly, but by agriculture sales office standards, pretty high-end.

  Mike was philosophical about the market problems the industry was facing. What ever other hard-to-define ills were afflicting California stone fruit in the long term, the short-term rise in costs was clearly hurting growers from all ends. “You’ve got to keep gas in your car and it costs a fortune to fill up at the pump. It makes me sick to fill up the tank. Plus, you’ve got to pay your mortgage, your power. Fifty percent of Americans, if not more, are getting squeezed financially. If you’re squeezed financially, you go to the store and you buy the basics. What you eat is where you can pick and choose to save some money.”