The Perfect Fruit

by Chip Brantley

  Like his uncle David, Mike was adamant about the importance of flavor, especially given the economic situation. In good years, when everything was selling, it was easy to get complacent and not look as hard at what was working and what wasn’t. But a tough season like this one, he said, helped bring clarity to the industry. When the buyers were choosy, growers could plainly see where they could stand to make some improvements. And if the days of growing stone fruit that tasted like cardboard were waning, there was still, Mike said, a lot of room for improvement. There were still a lot of peaches, plums, and nectarines out there that tasted just okay, that didn’t lead to what he called a “ ‘wow’ eating experience.”

  “If somebody’s going to pay two ninety-nine a pound or more for something, you can’t have them saying, ‘Oh, pthhtt!’ and throwing the fruit away,” he said. Stone fruit was competing with everything else in the store for the consumer’s food dollars. As the market research had shown, stone fruit growers needed to attract repeat sales, to increase demand so that retailers would buy more fruit. The only way to do that, Mike said, was to grow and sell fruit that would render the person eating it near-speechless. “ ‘Oh! Oh! That’s the best thing I’ve ever had!’ That’s what we want to hear. And to get it, you have to chase flavor.”

  Not only did you have to chase flavor, you had to market it well, too. Like Family Tree and its Flavor Safari line, Kingsburg Orchards had set up a couple of its own high-Brix, high-flavor lines. The most established was the Dinosaur Egg brand, which they had expanded over the years from just a single variety in late July and early August to a whole line of mottled fruit that ran from mid-May into October. In fact, the Dapple Dandy pluot, which was the original Dinosaur Egg, was now being phased out of the line completely in favor of larger, sweeter varieties that matured around the same time and that were controlled exclusively by the Jacksons.

  The exclusivity made all the difference. Just look at what had happened to Dapple Dandy. While it was still in its infancy and there wasn’t much of it out there, Dapple Dandy made the Jacksons a lot of money. As it took off, more and more growers wanted it, and since the people at the Dave Wilson Nursery made their money by selling trees, the more trees they sold, the better they did. But for a fruit grower, the number of trees out there mattered. A scarce variety fetched a higher price from buyers. If there was a glut of that variety and it was all coming off the tree at the same time, then buyers could more easily work the box price down. Plus, Mike said, when a lot of people planted a variety, you got a wide range of quality, diminishing the brand.

  “With Dapple Dandy, people want to be first to market to get a higher price. So they want to pick ten days early. The problem with Dapple Dandy is that it’s fair at best unless you’re patient with it and you wait to pick it at full maturity. But a lot of people start picking them too early and so the power of the variety gets diluted. So as we go after new varieties, the more control we can have—over the volume, over the standard it’s picked at—the better.”

  That is why exclusives were important, and after slowly building out the Dinosaur Egg line, the Jacksons were intrigued when Glen Bradford approached them with his entire inventory of black-skinned, red-fleshed plums. The Jacksons had combined those plums with some similar Zaiger varieties and branded the line with the name Sugar Tree. “We’re in complete control of them,” Mike said. “I don’t have to worry about somebody picking in front of me, because I’m the only one with those varieties. And if it’s not sweet, then we won’t put that sticker on it. That’s eigh teen to twenty-two Brix sugar, so the experience is always good. What you’ll see this year, as the price gets cheaper, is that some guys try to put more in the box. Well, you cannot put more! You’ve got to put less! You’ve got to bring your standards higher and higher and higher, because there’s so much else to choose from. There’s cheap fruit everywhere out there—cheap melons, cheap grapes, cheap everything. To compete with that, you have to put your best foot forward. It’s the same with guys who are shipping pluots. The guys who pick their Dapple Dandies green send their first load out and then they wait and wait and wait, wondering when the next call’s coming. Well, it’s not going to come unless you put good stuff forward. I think we’re in a paradigm shift all across the industry. People are realizing that everything’s got to eat well.”

  Mike had been looking at his watch for a while now, eager to get moving. I reminded him that I was hoping to see Wayne Adams’s Dapple Dandies. He slapped the table and hopped up. If we got going, he said, we could also skip around the orchard and sample a few of the exclusive red-fleshed varieties that were going into the Sugar Tree line.

  In his truck, we headed back toward the main road. We took a quick right onto one of the dirt turnoffs and headed into the thick of the orchard. He drove for a while and then coasted over to the left side of the road and leaned his head out the window to look at the trees. “Nope, too far,” he said to himself, then reversed the truck for five seconds and stopped next to a row of trees that looked to me exactly like the row of trees we’d stopped in front of just moments before. “Here we go,” Mike said, climbing out of the truck and tramping down the overgrown space between the rows.

  “It’s kind of a mess in here, because we’re not really using this right now.” He stopped in front of a harried-looking tree and gestured down the row. Here they were, the oldest Dapple Dandies in the Valley. He pulled a branch down so that he could reach a piece of fruit off the top of the tree. He tossed it to me. “A lot of guys are picking this right now, but it’s too early.” I bit into it. Sweet. A little crunchy. Mike was looking at a piece of fruit lower on the tree and close to the trunk. “See, it’s not just when you pick the fruit. There are a lot of growing practices you can use to influence flavor. Sunlight makes sugar, so all the fruit at the top of the tree will get sweet. But to get fruit sweeter in the middle and bottom of the tree, you have to do things to get light in there. You have to capture the maximum amount of light.” When I asked him about the newer varieties with which he planned to replace Dapple Dandy, he looked around and started walking back toward the dirt road. I dropped the fruit and followed. We crossed the road and walked over downed limbs and ducked under long ones drooping with fruit. Mike stopped and reached into a tree. The fruit looked like a bigger, darker Dapple Dandy. “We’ve got an exclusive on this one,” he said as he handed it to me. It popped juicy and exposed a sweet and complex pinkish flesh. I kept eating it as we walked toward a half-acre test block the Jacksons had planted in 2002. They had planned to pull the test block out but then ended up leaving it in because it was near the sales office and they could get guests over to it easily for a quick sample (I’m happy to report). It had started them thinking about a project they were working on now. In one central plot, they were going to graft in one tree of every variety that made up the Dinosaur Egg and Sugar Tree lines. They were putting the plot right next to the sales office, so that they’d have all their premium stuff in one spot. It wouldn’t be ready for a couple of years, but when it was finished they would block it off and call it the Garden of Eden.

  Mike started walking really fast through the test block. His voice quickened. At least, his voice seemed to quicken. It could have just sounded that way to my own unstable senses. Mike stopped at a tree. He pulled down a dark plum. It was dark purple, almost black. He brushed off the bloom with his sleeve. “Here, try this.” I took it and ate. The flesh was the reddest red I’ve seen. It was the red of Snow White’s lips, which was the red of her mother’s blood. (Carried away here.) It was fairy tale–red fruit. It was a fairy-tale plum. “Don’t eat the whole thing,” Mike said. It sounded like a fairy-tale caution. I was about to say that out loud, but he was, fortunately, already off and up ahead. Who says that anyway?

  “Okay,” he shouted back at me, “come here. You’ve got to try this one.” A black one with sugar spots. Brushed it off with his sleeve. Handed it to me. Watched as I took a bite. A tractor rumbled in the distance. “Man,�
� I said by way of appreciation. “Yeah,” he said, and then he was off “Okay, wait. Over here.” I had a half-eaten plum in each hand. “Be careful,” he said over his shoulder, laughing.

  Eating plums out in the orchards of California, it was always easy for me to forget that the fruit was someone’s business, that growers’ livelihoods depended on it. The summer of 2007 would turn out to be a brutal season for many of them, comparable in its ugliness to 2004. The spot market was especially weak through August, when many growers harvested most of their fruit. By late summer, there were rumors that several large growers were planning to either consolidate or get out of agriculture altogether. The patriarch of one stone fruit mainstay was looking into development rights for his three-hundred-acre ranch, and another was so disgusted with the way the season had gone that he pulled more than five hundred acres of stone fruit and vowed never to grow another peach, plum, or nectarine in his life.

  Rod Milton “ended up with black ink, but it wasn’t pretty.” He’d picked a lot less fruit in 2007 than he had in 2006. Looking ahead, he was pessimistic. The plum volume was as low as it had been in years, and still the supply seemed to be way too high. In August, he’d stopped at the Wal-Mart in Sanger to check things out. “Plums were at sixty-nine cents a pound. And it was real good fruit. A little small, but good fruit. And it was great pricing for the fruit. So I sat there and watched, and I saw this guy walk right past the plums and fill up a bag with Washington Red Delicious apples at a dollar sixty-nine a pound. Red Delicious apples! I’d sit there and eat my foot before I’d eat a Red Delicious apple! You can do everything right in the field but it’ll drive you crazy to see somebody pass by your fruit for something a dollar more per pound. I should have just stayed in the car and not ruined my week.” When the dust cleared on the season, Rod considered pulling both his Flavor Kings and his forty-year-old Friars, but he left both alone. After the next summer, though, which was in many ways even worse than 2007, he finally decided to get rid of the Friars. Instead of putting in new plums, he kept that land empty. With the stone fruit market so bleak, he couldn’t justify putting anything new in. The Flavor Kings? They’re still there. He still has some hope for those.

  The guys with program sales fared a little better through the end of the summer. They had lined up buyers for enough fruit to offset the lower demand from retailers. Both Jackson outposts—Family Tree Farms and Kingsburg Orchards—were focused on program sales, so they reported better-than-average years. David Jackson finished building his “top secret R&D facility” and was looking forward to populating it with the fruits he’d collected during his international walkabout, some of which were coming out of federal quarantine in the fall. With Family Tree leading the push, “plumcot” would eventually get the same color-based PLU codes that “plum” had. That would allow them to abandon the unwieldy word “pluot” and focus on marketing plumcots instead.

  That was good news, too, for Kingsburg Orchards and its Sugar Tree line of Bradford-bred hybrid plums, a pile of which I was collecting in the makeshift basket I’d formed by turning up the front of my T-shirt. I trailed behind Mike as we made our way back to the truck in the sun.

  The next morning, I was leaving California, flying out early from Oakland. After leaving Kingsburg Orchards, I would stop off at my hotel and pick up the boxes of fruit I had collected from the Zaigers, Bradfords, Miltons, and Jacksons. Driving north on 99, I would pass by the exits for Parlier and Reedley, Fresno and Merced, and the monster housing developments in between. For a while, as night fell, I would run alongside a freight train strung with empty cars through which I could make out the occasional lights of the Valley’s western side. I would pass the hidden exit in Le Grand, where Glen Bradford and I had sat waiting for Mike Watts and his wife. Just outside of downtown Modesto, I would cut west and pass a motorcycle dealership, a barbershop, a bodega, a Mexican restaurant, an ice cream wholesaler. I would pass through blocks of modest homes and then a modest canal off the Tuolumne River. I would pass the school, the church, the Gallos, and the unassuming left turn at Grimes Avenue (and Bob’s Taxidermy, too). Half an hour later, I would get on the interstate at the northwestern tip of the San Joaquin and make my way west toward Oakland. I would fall asleep at the wheel a couple of times and finally pull over to take a short nap. I would make it to a motel next to the airport and sleep unsoundly for a few hours, then awake to consolidate my stuff. A quick inventory would show that I had at least two hundred pieces of fruit and as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t take it all. I’d eat a few pieces for breakfast, then empty all of it onto the bed and pick out the firmest pieces of the varieties I knew for sure I wanted to take with me—the Flavor Kings, the Grand Rosas, some O’Henry peaches. I would put those pieces on the bottom of one box. Then, I would stack several layers of fruit on top of that layer and fill the gaps with smaller varieties, like some Jerusalem apricots Rod Milton had given me. I’d fill the second box with as much fruit as I could fit into it. That would leave a grocery sack full, which I would give to the guy at the front desk of the motel. Only when I returned the rental car would I realize how much I still had; there was no way I could lug my duffel bag, computer bag, camera bag, and two boxes of very fragile fruit for the trip home. I would take the second box of fruit to the woman doing returns. She would look at me suspiciously and then open the box and gasp. “I love plums,” she would say, “but I never buy them at the store!” (That may be hard to believe, but it’s true.) With the remaining box of fruit in the overhead compartment, I would fly a circuitous route from Oakland to Islip, on Long Island, and then catch a dead-of-night train into Brookyn. From the Bergen Street subway stop, I would walk the eight blocks or so to our friend Kristin’s apartment, put down my box of fruit, crawl into the bed next to Elizabeth (who was eight months pregnant), and, thirty-odd hours after leaving the Valley, go to sleep.

  But that was all still a long way off. In the orchard, Mike had found a few more of the Sugar Tree varieties. My fingers were flecked with blue fuzz from having wiped the juice onto the legs of my jeans. My stomach growled, and I could feel the heat in my cheeks. We were headed back to the sales office when Mike remembered one more plum that he wanted me to try. It was a black-skinned variety called Midnight Jewel, and it would go into the Sugar Tree line. “You shouldn’t leave without trying it,” he said, turning the truck around. We drove a couple of blocks, turned back around, and then stopped. Mike hopped out and looked down the row. “Nope.” We drove a little farther without finding the right plot, and then we found ourselves at the end of the lane, in front of the sales office.

  “Okay, well, I need to get moving,” Mike said apologetically. “I mean, the thing is, you could eat fruit all day long.”

  I dawdled. “So Midnight Jewel? I’ll keep an eye out for it.”

  “Yeah, and you know, the good thing is that there will probably be a few varieties next year that are even better than what you’ve had this year.”

  There was always going to be something new to try. I knew this to be true. Still, a part of me wanted to make one more pass to find Midnight Jewel, even if it meant, as it surely did, that it would only lead to another plum, which would lead to another and then another, and who knows where it would end?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Heather Dewar, Ann Finkbeiner, Sally McGrane, Andy Moody, and Val Wang for helping to get this thing started. Many other people at JHU contributed in ways big and small. In that cousinly way of his, David Kirkwood tried to get me to just say it. Brys Stephens was gracious when I needed pluots to come before Cookthink. Kristin Hohenadel has always set high standards. Sandy and Harrison Starr fed me, housed me, clothed me, and invited me to my first (and only) burial at sea. Leigh and Todd Richardson gave me a comfortable bed and good enchiladas. Elise, Alice, and Tom Bauer, pluot growers themselves, rejuvenated me with fettucine and red wine. Barbara Kafka gave me a great title. At Westfield Farm, Cella Langer, Amy Rick, Kim Wheeler, and Debby and Bob Stetson motivated me, an
d a good chunk of this book was written in the mornings before joining them to make cheese.

  In researching this book, I’ve relied heavily on articles, papers, reports, and books by Paul Collins, Joan Didion, Peter Dreyer, John Gregory Dunne, Geoff Dyer, Bill Grimes (and everyone at the California Rare Fruit Growers), Victor Davis Hanson, U. P. Hedrick, Jules Janick, William Kahrl, Jim Krause, Craig Ledbetter, John McPhee, David Mas Masumoto, James N. Moore, William Okie, Russ Parsons, David Ramming, Marc Reisner, Kevin Starr, and D. J. Waldie. Anyone who writes about Californian fruit must also acknowledge the work (and passion) of David Karp.

  Scores of hospitable people in the San Joaquin Valley came to my aid, including Glen Bradford, Wayne Brandt, Carlos Crisosto, Dan Gerawan, Ray Gerawan, Gary Giese, Don Goforth, David Jackson, Mike Jackson, Dale Janzen, Herb Kaprielian, Bill Morris, Dovey Plain, Blair Richardson, Steve Strong, Corina Tamez, Russ Tavlan, Dean Thonesen, Robert Woolley, Betty and Floyd Zaiger, Gary Zaiger, and Grant Zaiger. I’m especially indebted to Leith Gardner and Rod Milton, both of whom showed incredible patience as I asked the same questions over and over and over. I hope none of these people regrets helping me.

  I owe a ton to Molly Barton. It was to justify her early interest that I kept working on pluots. She also introduced me to PJ Mark at McCormick & Williams. From the moment he’s been on the scene, this project has been blissfully free of drama. Tamara Staples took beautiful fruit and made it even more so. I’m grateful to Colin Dickerman for making space for the book at Bloomsbury and to Nick Trautwein for taking it on as his own and leaving it in much better shape than when he found it. Big thanks also to Amy King, Janet McDonald, Rachel Mannheimer, and Jenny Miyasaki for their contributions to the book.