Would-Be Staple : Ups, Downs of Life in Raisinland

In one of William Saroyan’s classic, bittersweet stories about his boyhood here, an advertising expert storms through the San Joaquin Valley promoting a strategy to transform a woeful surplus of raisins into an all-out global conquest:

He said after we got America accustomed to eating raisins day in and day out, we would begin to teach Europe and Asia and maybe Australia to eat raisins. China, he said, was swarming with Chinese. He shouted the exact number of Chinese in China, and it was a stupendous figure, and all the farmers in the Civic Auditorium didn’t know whether to applaud or object.

He said that if we could get every living Chinaman to place only one raisin, only one, mind you, in every pot of rice he cooked, why, then, we could dispose of all our raisins at a good price and everybody in our valley would have money in the bank.

A New Glut

Well, the enticing vision came up short, and the story Saroyan wrote half a century ago pretty much holds together today. Once again, the valley is glutted with raisins, and once again a desperate hunt is on for a way out of the mess.

A promotional delegation left for China just last month.

One of the most peculiar struggles in all of American agriculture is that of the raisin people. Year after year, growers and packers in the San Joaquin Valley doggedly produce vast tonnages of raisins--ever hopeful that the modern world will someday come to share their passion for this ancient if homely dried fruit.

This is Raisin Central. Virtually all the raisins consumed in the United States, and a third of those eaten in the world, are produced within 30 miles of Fresno. The region contains 5,000 growers, 20 packing houses and two towns claiming to be raisin capitals. The valley is famous for sprawling corporate farms--for agribusiness--but the raisin growers, by and large, are small-timers. The average vineyard is 37 acres.

Front-Page News

Raisins matter here. Crop prices are front-page news. Politicians court the raisin vote. And in September, classrooms of parochial schoolchildren have been known to offer prayers so that the rains might stay away and not ruin the crop as it sits exposed for a crucial two-week sun bath, a delicate, vulnerable time when juicy green grapes slowly darken and wrinkle into raisins.

Many raisin people are, like Saroyan, descendants of Armenian immigrants and influenced by Old World thinking, and all raisin people tend to see things from a distinctive point of view. Common enemies are Italian wines, all varieties of man-made snacks and microwave ovens--although a greater foe arguably is their own uncanny inclination toward producing more raisins than the world wants to eat. Bran is a big ally.

These days raisin people must awaken each morning to the numbing reality that they have accumulated a surplus of 120,000 tons of raisins, a surplus so great that they practically could go back to bed, sleep for an entire crop year and--without producing a single new raisin--still supply all their customers.

“It sure takes away the incentive for going out and getting on that tractor,” one raisin man acknowledged. Last September, when rains threatened at the start of harvest, some growers prayed for a nice, ruinous drenching--better to collect crop insurance than harvest a crop with no market.

This winter, in the coffee shops where raisin folk convene daily, there was plenty of dark talk about those who surveyed their debt sheet and the dismal prices resulting from oversupply and decided simply to abandon their vineyards, leaving the mortgaged land for their creditors to farm, sell or, for all the departees could care, plant in ivy.

Walking Away

Growers who exercise this option are said to have “just walked away from it,” and this year more and more are just walking away from it. One Raisin Advisory Board official estimated that half the valley’s 5,000 raisin operations face serious financial difficulty, and that half of that number would fail before things got better.

Nonetheless, through bad times and good, raisin people believe they are the caretakers of one of nature’s great gifts. Just get people to taste only one raisin, only one, the growers argue to the advertising experts, and they will scurry back for more.

Growers are forever pushing ideas for promotional masterstrokes.

Put a big pile of raisins at the entrance to Fresno State University during its Spring Fair, one veteran grower suggested at a luncheon gathering in Dinuba last December, “and give ‘em away. Let people walk by and grab some.” Most of the men at this meeting of the local Raisin Bargaining Assn. chapter had ordered steaks, and they slathered on the A-1 sauce. A-1 sauce contains raisins, and raisin people rarely let pass an opportunity to bolster consumption. They also are full of raisin recipes.

“You know,” one raisin man offered, “the first time I had a tossed salad with raisins on it I thought the guy had lost his mind. Roquefort dressing with raisins? But, hey, try it. It’s terrific.”

Supermarket Snooping

Raisin growers make every supermarket outing a covert operation, snooping about the aisles to check raisin prices and see where their product is displayed. They return convinced that raisins would sell briskly if stores placed them in more prominent locations.

“We got a good product,” they say. “It should sell. Something is missing here.”

Some growers suggest dispatching salesmen cross-country in cars laden with raisins to be handed out free along the roadside. Or how about a coast-to-coast Raisin Train? A publicity stunt, it turns out, which actually was attempted in the 1920s. Others believe the best way to get more people eating raisins would be through the mails; send sample boxes into every American home. “It works for the soap companies,” an elderly grower pointed out.

Bombarded with such notions, the advertising experts hired by the raisin industry shudder to themselves and then politely attempt to explain, once again, that the problem is not one of consumer education. Those mythical shoppers who raisin people insist on calling Mrs. Housewife do know about raisins. They just don’t care.

In a consumer survey conducted not long ago, two words cropped up with disturbing regularity when respondents were asked to describe raisins.

One of the words was “wimpy.”

The other was “lonely.”

Hogie Kandarian is a classic raisin man. He and his brother, Haij, both bachelors, farm the same 80-acre vineyard their father started in the 1920s just south of Fresno. Hogie is 78 years old, short and thin, but with strong, weathered hands that tell their own story of a life among the vines.

“There is an old Armenian saying,” Kandarian said one afternoon last winter, stomping about the hardwood floor of his living room in lace-up boots. He paused dramatically, for this was to be his analysis of the industry’s attempts to save itself--efforts which include paying growers to abort crops, commercials set to Motown music, and promotional trips to China and other faraway places.

“A man drowning in the sea,” Kandarian said, reaching out with one of his hands, “will grab at the foam.”

Kandarian’s solution is much simpler. “Leave it alone,” he declared. “Leave it all alone. Survival of the fittest. Some will be forced to dig their vineyard out. Some will neglect it and production will go down. It is the only way you can solve the problem, and you will never solve it.”

Historic Nibble

Noah quite possibly got the whole raisin business started after he washed up on Mt. Ararat, at the center of ancient Armenia. Genesis, Chapter 9, Verse 20: And Noah began to be an husbandman and he planted a vineyard. The Pharoahs were known to nibble raisins. In King David’s time, raisins were suitable currency for tax payments. Hannibal’s troops snacked on raisins as they crossed the Alps on elephants.

The history of the San Joaquin Valley raisin industry is one of man attempting to mitigate nature’s erratic dispensations of blessings and curses, to find balance. The first raisin crop to come out of the valley was a perfect harbinger: In 1873, a heat wave scorched the entire crop of Muscat grapes before they could be picked. The ruined grapes were dried into raisins and sold in San Francisco as exotic “Peruvian delicacies.”

“Our current troubles are only history repeating itself,” Hogie Kandarian said, and while some industry leaders might quibble over some of the finer points, the old “vineyardist,” as he calls himself, is essentially correct.

The first great raisin bust came in the early 1920s. Everyone had been making gobs of money, and outside investors poured in. Oversupply produced drastic plunges in price, which produced widespread bankruptcy. The population of Fresno fell from 50,000 to 20,000.

sh Raisin Rations In the 1940s, raisins went to war. The government encouraged heavy production; raisins were a good food for the troops. Peace brought a second collapse of the market. It was then that the industry obtained a federal marketing order.

Under the marketing order, excess raisins can be placed in a reserve pool and kept off the market. This allows the so-called free tonnage raisins to be sold at prices higher than what a free market would bear. Last year, roughly half the crop was placed in reserve.

“If we don’t have a marketing order in the raisin business,” said one packer, “this thing would be like the Midwest. There would be people shooting the bankers here.”

The marketing order was the accomplishment of an exotic little man named Arphaxad Setrakian, a native of Armenia known to everyone as “Sox.” Setrakian stood about 5 feet tall and through tremendous force of will and political cunning dominated the raisin industry from the 1930s through the 1960s, and he shaped it to his liking.

The raisin business is a puzzle and Setrakian seemingly held in his head the magical equation. He knew the need for balance--between supply and demand, between growers and packers--and he gained the power to obtain it.

Effective Tears

When rhetorical persuasion failed, Setrakian would resort to his most effective weapon. He would cry. “In the old Hotel California,” Fresno Bee columnist Eli Setencich wrote, “afternoon meetings of the Raisin Advisory Board frequently resembled Greek tragedies with Sox in the leading role. During the ‘30s, he was on the radio about as often as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, fighting, pleading, berating and crying to get better returns for his raisin-growing buddies. Later, he would go on television and if the occasion demanded it he cried on TV, too.”

Setrakian’s most famous crying jag occurred in England. The British rejected the 25,000 tons of excess raisins. So Setrakian cried and, having cried, excused himself and called home to announce the sale.

At his retirement dinner in 1972, Setrakian gave one last emotional speech, declaring that “in this valley we have courage. In this valley we stick to it.” They served brandied raisin jubilee for dessert. He died two years later, at the age of 88, just as the raisin industry headed into a wildly profitable and ultimately disastrous period.

Since the turn of the century, the Thompson seedless has replaced the Muscat as the principal variety of grape used for raisins. Thompsons also can be crushed to make a bland wine that blends well with fancier varietals. And with special pruning, they can be sold as table grapes.

Everyone Got In

In the early 1970s, wine consumption zoomed, convincing influential economists that the smartest thing to do in this world was plant a vineyard. Corporations, doctors and lawyers with cash to burn, everyone with even the faintest of rural fantasies or a creative tax accountant got in. Plantings almost doubled.

Most of the new vineyards weren’t Thompsons, but they pushed thousands of tons of Thompsons out of the wineries, leaving the displaced Thompson growers with only one option: Make raisins.

Two big September rains and a killer spring frost damaged three raisin crops in the decade. These natural disasters obscured the dangerous oversupply of vineyards and also inflated raisin prices, encouraging even more industry growth. The amount growers were paid for each ton of raisins leaped from $325 in 1971 to $1,600 in 1978.

Inflation was making everyone a theoretical millionaire. Too many raisin people believed the mathematics, borrowed heavily against the appraised value of their vineyards and expanded--70-acre millionaires on the fast track toward becoming 150-acre bankruptcies.

There are stories now told of raisin growers who built tennis courts in their backyards, the sad joke being that they didn’t know how to play tennis. On a more practical plane, houses that had long gone without repairs were spruced up or replaced altogether.

“Everybody made so much money they didn’t know what to do with it,” said one raisin grower who now makes ends meet selling real estate. “They bought things they had wanted for 20 years. Everybody thinks he is entitled to a nice pickup, a big tractor, a comfortable home.”

The saddest scenario was the most common: Fathers borrowed against their own places to purchase vineyards for sons who had abandoned farm life. The easy financing was dedicated to the proposition that land values could only go up. There are a lot of extended raisin families now living unhappily together under one roof, wondering where the future went.

Kandarian had lived through the 1920s, and he remembered. “I told them at the truck stop where I get coffee, ‘Boys, watch out, it’s going to blow.’ ”

It blew.

As the 1980s came, the Italians, saddled with their own enormous wine surplus, began to export table wines heavily, and they undercut California vintners on price. Demand for Thompsons at the wineries dropped, and so even more grapes were dried into raisins.

In 1983, raisin production nearly doubled to 348,000 tons, while consumption remained constant at about 225,000 tons. Soon the field price dropped from $1,300 a ton to $700. (Oddly, the consumer price stayed fairly constant.) Land values took a nose-dive, and today good vineyards can be bought for $3,000 an acre.

Raisin people pay close attention to a figure they call the “stomach share.” One day a packer cupped his hands together, forming an imaginary stomach, and as he peered down into it he explained what the stomach share talk was all about.

“See, the stomach is only so big. The milk guy, he wants in there. Candy’s fighting for it. You know Pepsi-Cola is fighting for it. Just put your imagination to work. You name it, all these guys are fighting to get in there. It all comes back to the stomach.

“We’re all fighting to get into that same stomach.”

The average American eats 1,500 pounds of food a year, a figure that has remained unchanged for a long time. Last year, raisins accounted for 1.8 pounds of that total--a slight increase in the stomach share from previous years, but more than a pound less than half a century ago. Back then, raisins were one of about 800 food products available. Today, supermarket shelves are stocked with as many as 25,000.

There are two ways to increase the stomach share. Persuade people to eat more raisins, or invent new products that make use of raisin ingredients.

Science of Raisinland

In the 1950s, when the American kitchen went modern, the mad scientists of raisinland fiddled with all sorts of experimental products.

“Canned Raisins, an Ideal Sandwich Filler” was the title of one research paper: “It was discovered that since raisins are very mild in flavor it was necessary to include one or more ingredients of pronounced or even powerful flavor, such as horseradish, garlic or chili powder, in order to obtain a spread that had enough flavor to be pleasing in a sandwich.”

“Cottage Cheese with Raisins” was another. There were papers on canned rice and raisins, and raisin hot cakes. The researchers tried raisin paste, raisin syrup, and raisin soda pop: “Blends of (ginger ale and cola) syrups with raisin syrup were made into bottled and canned raisin ale and cola. . . . These beverages are palatable and suitable for use as mixers in preparing highballs, etc. Their unique health appeal should facilitate their acceptance by the public.”

Ah, but these same scientists were right on the money with one culinary guinea pig they brought into their laboratories to mate with raisins: breakfast cereals.

If bran didn’t taste so bad, the raisin industry might well be dead today. Raisins are now packaged in 18 breakfast cereals, providing a tasty crutch for all those soggy grains that are supposed to be good for you.

Half the Crop

Cereals and other so-called industrial uses now eat up more than half the raisin crop. They also provide a market for raisins not big enough to make the cut as boxed raisins, since the cereal companies and others prefer to boast more about the number of raisins rather than the size of them.

The expansion of this market, along with the increase of raisins in packaged cookies, candies and bread, has helped take the sting out of fact that Mrs. Housewife isn’t baking as much as she used to, and thus doesn’t buy as many fresh raisins--a trend that explains the raisin people’s antipathy toward the microwave oven.

In the past 50 years, raisins have been pitched as everything from a good source of iron to a “sweet meat” for children. In the 1920s, Norman Rockwell drew illustrations for raisin advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post, little darlings dropping raisins into grandpa’s gruel--”The more Sun-Maid raisins, the better the pudding.”

Raisins were long pitched as an extraordinary source of iron. Then, as stainless-steel processing equipment was installed in the packing houses, the iron mysteriously went away.

“The old traditional iron (in raisins) years ago was basically because of black iron processing equipment,” explained Clyde Nef, manager of the California Raisin Advisory Board. “A good share of that iron was rust. But your body doesn’t know the difference; it was in a form that it could use it. Since now we’ve gone to stainless . . . there is no black iron rust in that equipment anymore. So you’d be better off chewing on a rusty nail.”

‘Nature’s Candy’

A subsequent “nature’s candy” pitch also ran into trouble. The Journal of the American Dental Assn. reported that raisins had more potential for causing cavities then chocolate. The raisin people weren’t pleased to learn that the scientists who conducted the research were from Hershey Foods Corp.

Recent raisin industry-sponsored campaigns have taken aim at that wimpy, lonely image. The last raisin television spot was entitled “Senses.” It opened with a beautiful woman slowly pushing a raisin through her puckered lips.

Basically, you either like raisins by now or you don’t. There are only so many new and nice things to be said about a dried grape product of questionable nutritional merit that has been around as long as the Bible.

Robert Phinney, who runs the California Raisin Advisory Board’s $10-million advertising program, was asked one day last winter for an example of an agricultural product not burdened with the raisin’s curse of over-familiarity. He thought for a moment, briefly considered the avocado, and then brightened.

“Kiwis!” he exclaimed. “Tell me, ‘Sell Kiwis,’ Geez. I mean, that’s e-a-s-y, man.”

He cackled with delight at the very notion.

Natural Underdog

One lament of the advertising experts is that raisin growers love their product too much, and often veto advertising that is less than reverent. Raisins are a natural underdog, and with humor and imagination could be promoted as such. “Consumers think raisins are faintly ridiculous, lonely,” said Phinney. “That’s a key. You can’t make raisins too dry and serious.”

It’s easier to get away with an irreverent touch in commercials developed for overseas, where the raisin people won’t see them. In England, for example, California raisins have been promoted on television by a giant singing raisin in a cowboy hat. He plucks at a banjo and with a hootenanny holler rhapsodizes about that “handy, dandy California candy; the California raisin, a raisin worth praisin’.”

The ad people surreptitiously call this character Ronald Raisin.

Ernie Bedrosian is a captain of the raisin industry. He is a vital, volatile man of 52 years, a packer so focused on the difficult task of selling raisins that he has even explored the implications of President Reagan’s so-called “Star Wars” laser weapons and deemed that, from a raisin point of view, they are good.

As Bedrosian tells it, Star Wars would eliminate the need for military bases and missile sites in countries like Italy. Elimination of these bases in turn would eliminate the need to coddle to the Italians. The United States could slap a steep tariff on Italian wine coming into this country, eventually scaring off the importers and creating a bigger market for California vintners.

If California vintners sold more wine, they could crush more Thompsons. Crush more Thompsons and fewer would be dried into raisins. Fewer raisins means the glut would subside, prices would climb and the world of raisins would be a far more profitable, and happier, place.

“And so,” he said, “I’m waiting for Star Wars to come.”

Flood of Armenians

Two waves of slaughter at the hands of the Ottoman Turks forced the Armenians from their ancestral homelands. The first, in the late 1800s, brought a trickle of refugees into the San Joaquin Valley. They were drawn by the similar climate and cheap prices for land that was still considered desert. The second and more fierce bloodletting occurred during World War I, and it brought a flood of Armenians here.

Bedrosian’s father was a 14-year-old in Armenia when the massacres began. The slaughter administered by the Turks wiped out his entire village, but he was kept as a slave boy. Five years later, he hid under the blankets of a traveler and escaped. Destitute, he worked his way to Marseilles, France, where he slept on the streets and sold shoestrings to survive.

He made it to the United States eventually, to California, where he worked as a field hand, saving enough to start his own vineyard.

“I remember this story,” Bedrosian said, “because my father told it to me on the night before he died, in 1945. It stuck in my head like glue.”

The Armenians’ ancient skills in viticulture and willingness to work brought them to dominate the fledgling raisin industry, first as field hands and then as growers and finally as packers.

Start of Sun-Maid

At the same time, Scandinavians settled a large community in Kingsburg, and they, too, had a long association with dried fruit and were influential in starting Sun-Maid, the cooperative that has long been the industry leader.

Raisins require soil fertile enough to allow vineyards to flourish, and yet dry and warm enough in the fall to dry grapes. Ancient Armenia is one of the few places in the world where raisins can be made. After huge water projects were built to pump life into what had been a desert, the San Joaquin Valley became another.

Find Fresno on a globe and, keeping at the same latitude, circle the world. With the exception of China, every time your finger touches land it is at a place where raisins are grown. The same applies at an equal distance south of the Equator, although there the finger comes ashore only in Australia and South Africa.

Close quarters in raisinland make for bickering. Industry gatherings are noteworthy for their invective. Grudges, some two generations old, abound. Growers suspect packers of profiteering in the bad times. Packers accuse growers of business naivete, and of excessive and disruptive gossip. Then, too, packers compete bitterly among each other, and growers engage in endless debate over whether it is better to belong to Sun-Maid or the Raisin Bargaining Assn., the two organizations that represent roughly 80% of all the growers.

Tensions Run High

Old tensions boil over in times like these, and in the coffee-shop booths that constitute the smoke-filled back rooms of the raisin industry, revolutions are being plotted and industry leaders tread with caution.

“As long as things were going well, who gave a damn?” said Nef. “We had very little questioning of what was going on. Packers were making money and growers were making money and all was well. But when the turn came, well, you got to find somebody to blame.”

Making bad matters worse, Sun-Maid is in upheaval following discovery last October that more than $26 million in overpayments had been distributed to member growers. Heads of people who wielded great influence over both Sun-Maid and the entire industry already have rolled, and large numbers of growers have fled the cooperative, escaping before the bill for the overpayments comes due.

It is a true fiasco, and its repercussions are certain to be felt throughout the industry, although there is plenty of gloating going on right now among other packing houses that have gone head-to-head against Sun-Maid’s familiar red boxes.

United Front

Despite all this head-knocking, the industry has a knack for reaching consensus, more or less, and providing a united front when it sends delegations to Washington for help in such matters as Italian wine imports, although unlike growers of more basic foodstuffs, like wheat, raisin people are hard-pressed to make a case that they are helping feed the world.

Bedrosian and his brothers did well. As a grower, Bedrosian helped form the Raisin Bargaining Assn., which gave growers leverage to obtain higher prices from packers. In the late 1960s, wanting to make a larger mark, he and his brothers founded National Packing in Fowler.

Today, the Bedrosians are one of the world’s biggest packers, marketing raisins under the Champion brand. “My wife and kids and I were watching the Olympics in 1968, and we were just going to build this plant, you know,” Bedrosian recalled proudly. “What brand name was there we could use? Sunshine? No, too close to Sun-Maid. Sun-Sweet? No, too close. Bed-Rose? No. Then I was watching the diving competition and all of the sudden the announcer says”--he clicked his fingers-- “Champion! I said, ‘Man, that’s it: Champion Raisins. Natural Energy.’ ”

At industry meetings, Bedrosian is a portrait in concentration, often gripping his temples and gathering his thoughts before he embarks on a campaign for something that will help push along the Champion brand. His drive is remarkable, and perhaps explained by his family’s experience and that of all Armenian immigrants. This town once discriminated against them, in some cases kept them from obtaining good jobs, called them Fresno Indians.

Watch Your Hat

Bedrosian recalled being told as a child to “keep your hat on your head. Once the hat falls, my father says, it takes a lifetime to put it back on your head again. He says, ‘We put it on your head, young man. Through our sweat. We came here with no education, we scratched this dirt--brought you where you are today through hard times.’ And he says, ‘Be careful, be sensible. Don’t let your hat fall.’ ”

Bedrosian said he went on vacation a few years ago to France, to Marseilles.

“And I landed there and I says, ‘My dad came here penniless, and he slept in the streets. And a guy like me, I’m a tourist and I’m gonna stay in the best hotel in this town.’ And that was moving.. . .” Here the man’s voice trembled, tears formed. “That’s one of the movingest experiences of my life. All I remember is all the hardships, for him to come here, to put the bread on the table, and the hat on our head.

“Do you see?”

It’s hard to be a pessimist in this valley during the spring. Vineyards burst alive, and the reddish-brown canes that seemed so desolate only a few months back become obscured by light green leaves and tiny bud clusters. Afternoons are warm, and the countryside quiet, almost calming.

Even the raisin people who see this miracle every year seem touched by it. Those who in the cold, foggy days of winter gloomily predicted total industry collapse now venture, tentatively, that maybe the awful bottom has been hit, maybe they will now get a break and things will turn back up.

They have got a new advertisement in the works. They plan to set it to the old Motown song, “Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and give it a lighter touch than those old mom-feeds-kids-healthy-snacks commercials. They also, of course, are developing a mom-and-kids ad. Just in case.

Raisin Tortillas

The parade of raisin science progresses. The latest raisin board press release trumpeted the introduction of 120 new raisin products, ranging “from yogurt raisins to ice cream, new cookies, new breads, candy bars, rice mixes, cake mixes and English muffins, to more exotic items such as bagels, raisin tortillas, and raisin pasta.”

Sales are up. With prices low, the industry boosted sales to 300,000 tons, an advance its leaders hope can be held even after prices come back closer to where they were before the fall.

The raisin board staff wants to order up a new battery of nutritional tests. So far, all there is left to brag about is natural sugar and higher than average amounts of potassium. “But who knows?” said Nef. “There’s new analytical techniques today that we didn’t have 15 years ago. Let’s see if there is something in there we should try to capitalize on.”

Most significantly, perhaps, production of 100,000 tons of new raisins has been aborted through an industry program that rewards growers for not making any more raisins this year. While seen as a short-term solution to the deeper problem of over-planting, the so-called diversion program will at least keep the surplus from growing and allow some raisin people to fight back the bankers at least one more time.

Loves the Life

Robin Kezirian is one of the young ones, a 30-year-old raisin grower who returned to the vines in Kerman after attending UCLA on a football scholarship. It’s a long way from Westwood to the valley’s West Side, but Kezirian is here for the life, and he loves it.

He drove around one day in an old white pickup, showing off the neighborhood sites--the vines he had bobbed short to join the diversion program, the new 5,000-acre vineyard that one of the oil giants had planted in the 1970s; another vineyard started by an investment-minded lawyer who has since “walked away from it.”

Strapping and handsome, Kezirian’s suggestions for raisin promotion run more toward the modern than those of the older raisin people. He would like to do a raisin rock video, something with body-building in it and a beautiful girl, set perhaps to “Eye of the Tiger” or some other song from the “Rocky” movies.

Kezirian admits that raisins are “nutritionally kind of questionable.” Not much there but sugar. “But kids love them,” he said, brightening. “Kids love raisins. And there’s always people figuring out new ways to use them, new products.

“Who knows? Maybe 800,000 tons of raisins won’t be enough some day.”

We knew (Saroyan concluded) that a great American idea had gone down to death. We hadn’t changed the taste of man. Bread was still preferable to raisins. And we hadn’t taught the Chinese to drop a raisin in their pots of cooking rice. They were satisfied to have the rice without the raisin.

And so we began to eat our raisins ourselves. It was really amazing how we learned to eat raisins. We had talked so much about them that we had forgotten that they could actually be eaten. And we learned to cook raisins. And they were good stewed and they had a fine taste with bread, and all over our valley we were eating raisins for food because we couldn’t sell them. People couldn’t buy raisins because they were a luxury, and we had to eat raisins because they were a luxury.

RAISING RAISINS Each year, About 600,000 tons of raisins--dried grapes--are produced worldwide, about half from the area around Fresno. “Raisin” comes from the Latin “racemus,” meaning bunch or cluster. About 55% of all raisins go to cereals and other “industrial” users and 45% to consumer packages; five years ago these numbers were reversed. The smallest raisins, called minis, are sold to bakeries. The principal nutritional value in raisins is believed to be potassium. THE DECLINING MARKET

Avg. Annual Avg. Annual Avg. Annual Raisin Tons of Raisins Per Capita Years Production Shipped Consumption 1940s 207,000 tons NA 2.23 lbs. 1950s 181,000 tons 165,000 1.67 lbs. 1960s 212,000 tons 179,000 1.50 lbs. 1970s 179,000 tons 177,000 1.31 lbs.

THE RAISIN GLUT

Raisin Tons of Raisins Per Capita Years Production Shipments Consumption 1980 255,000 tons 224,000 1.5 lbs. 1981 224,000 tons 224,000 1.74 lbs. 1982 206,000 tons 213,000 1.81 lbs. 1983 348,000 tons 225,000 1.85 lbs. 1984 299,000 tons 286,000 2.1 lbs. 1985 302,000 tons 6% ahead of ’84 NA after 9 months

THE GRAPE VS. THE RAISIN

Acres of Acres of Wine Raisin Years Grapes* Grapes* 1970 132,000 245,000 1975 225,000 238,000 1980 291,000 241,000 1985 325,000 286,000

*California only. The first Thompson seedless grapes--which replaced Muscats as primary raisin grapes--were introduced in California in 1872. Raisin legend has it that all of the state’s Thompson Seedless plantings are direct descendants of that initial vineyard. Golden raisins, more popular in Europe than here, are mechanically dried and then treated with sulfer dioxide to preserve the color. In 1950, Pope Pius XOO, at the urging of raisin czar A. (Sox) Setrakian, blessed the raisin crop. DRYING THE RAISINS All raisin vines run east to west in rows 10-12 feet apart. During harvest, the gap between rows is plowed to form an incline that slants toward the sun, to give raisins maximum exposure to the sun. The crucial decision is when to pick the grapes; growers shoot for maximum sugar content. After grapes dry for two-to-three weeks on paper trays, they are hauled in wooden boxes to packing houses, where stems and impurities are shaken out and the raisins are separated by size. During drying, raisins lose 85% of their moisture and Vitamin C. The raisins are washed and packaged. Sugar is placed on raisins used for cereals not as a sweetener but as a preservative. The industry average for production is two tons per acre. It takes eight tons of green grapes to make two tons of raisins. Production costs per ton average $600 to 650.