I am the son of a fruit farmer. As such, I know what it’s like to enjoy fresh, completely ripe fruit right off the vine or tree. One of my favorite things about my childhood was that each year from some time in August, and lasting as late as Thanksgiving week, I could walk a few dozen steps from the sanctuary of the family home into the vineyard and shortly thereafter return with my fill of luscious Thompson Seedless grapes. This was true even after the main harvest (that part of the crop going to market in 23-lb. lug boxes as table grapes) had depleted the bounty, and even remained true after the “clean up” harvest when the crews would make their attempt to scour the rows of any remaining fruit while filling the gondolas with the tonnage destined to be hauled to the local winery to be turned into bulk juice for wine. Those crews would always miss at least one small bunch every other vine or so, and there were thousands of vines on our acreage I could search among in order to find what I needed to satisfy my craving.
I was part of the harvest crews each summer beginning at age eight through the summer I was sixteen. (My job was not to pick the grapes, but to do tractor work, hauling the empty boxes to sections soon-to-be picked, bringing water urns and/or soda pop to the pickers, and hauling the full boxes to a shady spot by the house where we’d stack said boxes on my family’s bobtail truck to take to our fruit broker’s cold storage facility in town.
For the rest of my teens and into my early twenties — the latter phase consisting of summers spent back home earning the money to pay for my college expenses — I no longer worked in the fields, but in “the shed” as we called it, handling not grapes but instead peaches, plums, and nectarines. Smeds Packing Company was a co-op owned by my dad and other family members. Until eighteen, the shed was located at my parents’ place half a minute’s walk from my house, and then a large, brand-new shed was built (by me and the other men of the family) less than a mile away. I was at first just a “box boy,” meaning I kept up the supply of empty boxes the packers needed, and stacked the full boxes onto pallets. (That’s me in the white tee shirt in the photo above, during that very phase of my existence.) I soon advanced to forklift driver (and truck driver), then to foreman, and finally — at age twenty-three — to manager.
The shed was not enclosed and the weather almost always in the upper nineties and low hundreds. That is to say, the working conditions were miserable. The work itself was typically menial and often both sweaty and filthy (peach fuzz being the worst example of the latter category). In order to endure all that, I had to keep in mind the bits of grace the milieu had to offer. For example, it meant a great deal to me that I was part of a family enterprise. Also, I did not take it for granted that I was no longer out in the sun. There was a roof! There was shade! And of course, there was satisfaction to be had knowing the purpose of the work was something obviously and genuinely of value. We were providing people with food. I would not have felt the same pride if I’d been, for example, selling insurance or working as a valet at a country club.
The new shed under construction in the spring of 1974.
You would think the peaches, plums, and nectarines themselves would have made me glad to be part of it all. And yes, that was true, but only to a degree. I say “to a degree” because I hated what sort of fruit we were putting in those boxes.
When it comes to fruit, the practicalities of agricultural practices work against the best eating experience one could have. Take the peaches. If left on the tree, and picked when ripe, oh, lord, is a peach a glorious thing. If you’ve never had the pleasure of eating that sort of peach, and I would bet you have not, you have truly missed out. But the peaches that came through our packing shed? They were not ripe. They couldn’t be. Any peaches that went into the rinsing and sizing equipment and then into the boxes in a ripe state would be mush by the time the supermarkets received them at their loading docks. At Smeds Packing, as at every other packing shed in the country, we had to take the fruit off the trees when it was firm and could handle the sometimes-rough aspects of transport from the farm to the bins of retail grocery produce sections.
Peaches don’t “get ripe” sitting on a kitchen counter. That’s illusion. Once off the tree, the fruit loses its source of additional natural sugar. What happens, though, is that the cell membranes begin to break down — I call this process “rotting” — and whatever degree of sugar is already in the flesh is freed from the tissues and is suspended in the liquefied content. This process makes the peach seem juicy and the sweetness is more accessible than when the fruit was first purchased, but the end result is a pale imitation of the juiciness and sweetness the peach would have had if allowed to ripen on the tree.
We threw away any ripe-ish fruit that made it as far as the shed. We called those peaches “culls” because we culled them out before they could make it either into the sizing equipment or the packed boxes. We would dump the culls on the dirt roads of the farms where they would decay and congeal and dry into a sort of poor man’s asphalt, keeping down the rampant dust that would otherwise get kicked up. The irony is, the bin of culls was where I and the other workers might grab a few peaches to take home. It was the only part of the official harvest worth eating. To get the truly good stuff? That happened by going out into the orchard weeks after the formal picking, and finding the small portion of the crop that had been too green to pick during the ”real” harvest, but had since arrived at the sort of virtuous destiny any peach should come to know. If I had time, I’d go on about how modern varieties of fruit have been bred to be firm and cosmetically beautiful on produce shelves, and how so often the horticulturalists do so at the coast of flavor and/or sweetness. But I don’t have time right now, and frankly, it’s depressing. Instead I will recommend you obtain a copy of the bestseller Epitaph for a Peach by David “Mas” Masumoto, a classmate, friend, and colleague of my brother. He makes the case well. All I will add at this time is, if you know a farmer and are lucky enough to sample “the real thing” when it comes to fully-ripened fruit, you’ll know why, when I left the farm and could no longer get my quota of Thompson Seedless grapes straight from the source at the proper time, I refused to purchase any at retail, because what was on offer there in the stores just wasn’t worth eating.
