A classmate recently asked me, “What are the reasons why people are importing and getting their fruits and veggies from mass producing farms?” This a reasonable question. When you stop to think about it what we have come to think of as normal is actually very strange. Going to the grocery store and buying produce from around the world during any season has not always been a norm. To answer this question, I would like to pull some quotes from Barbara Kingslover’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
“The odd notion of transporting fragile produce dates back to the earl
y twentieth century when a few entrepreneurs tried shipping lettuce and artichokes, iced down in boxcars, from California eastward over mountains as a midwinter novelty. Some wealthy folks were charmed by the idea of serving out-of-season (and absurdly expensive) produce items to their dinner guests” (48).
“Then fashion and marketing got involved, The interstate highway system became a heavily subsidized national priority, long-haul trucks were equipped with refrigeration, and the cost of gasoline was nominal. The state of California aggressively marketed itself as an off-season food producer, and the American middle-class opened its maw. In just a few decades the out-of-season vegetables moved from novelty status to such an ordinary item, most Americans now don’t know what out-of-season mean” (48).
We love our blueberries in December and Asparagus in August. We live in Virginia and yet we adore grapefruits, lemons, and pomegranates. We have become accustomed to buying anything we want whenever we want. Few stop to think about where your watermelon in March must have grown and how long it had to travel. As for the mass-producing farms, “Supermarkets prefer not to bother with boxes of vegetables if they can buy truckloads” (76).
I heard a commentary on a similar topic to this last summer on NPR. A man was talking about ripe melon and how much better it tastes than an imported melon out of season. We have become accustomed to eating what we want whenever we want. It just shows how lazy our culture is.