Contraband That Grows On Trees
A thin young man in Ralph Lauren denims beckoned with a nod of his head toward the back stairs. I followed him up to an empty office. He closed the door behind us and told me to have a seat. I sat. He moved behind a conference table and pushed a box toward me.
On the white carton, printed in crayon and with what appeared to be a child’s hand, were these words: “Happy Fruit.” Pretty clever, I thought. He fingered the lid and looked me over again. We had not met before. Maybe he was having second thoughts. In his field, the feds are everywhere.
“I have to warn you,” he said. “What’s in this box here is an illegal substance. I don’t know how you feel about being in the room with it.”
I assured him I understood the risk. I had not driven this deep into the San Joaquin Valley on a hot July day to turn back now. He opened the box. Stacked neatly inside were 80 firm, red peaches. But not just any peaches. These peaches were illicit peaches, contraband, a shade too small to be sold legally through standard channels. Dum de dum dum.
*
His name is Dan Gerawan. He is the 30-year-old son of an up-from-the-bootstraps tree farmer on the valley’s lush east side. Young Gerawan runs the packing side of the family business, one of the largest stone fruit operations in the land. We all have our demons, and for Gerawan it’s a hellbent desire to sell undersized but edible peaches, rather than plowing them underground.
“I began working in packinghouses when I was 11,” he said, “and I saw from the start how wrong a lot of this stuff was.” By “this stuff” Gerawan refers to a provision of a federal marketing order that allows California grower committees, through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to set minimum size requirements for peaches.
Such marketing orders date back to the Great Depression, when they were instituted to help struggling farmers. About 40 remain in effect--providing producers of various crops with collective authority needed to control quality, promote their product, and fight for retail shelf space. That’s the charitable view. The less charitable view is that they run counter to free enterprise principles, letting farmers inflate prices through supply control. Supply control is a fancy term for plowing edible fruit underground.
Under the peach marketing order, Gerawan has only a few legal options for disposing of small fruit, which constitute anywhere from 5 to 10% of his family’s crop. He can sell them at roadside stands. He can donate them to charity. Or he can feed them to cattle or plow them under. What he cannot do is market them, which is precisely what he intends to do.
*
Last year, he made a splash by arranging for small peaches to be sold in mom-and-pop stores in South Los Angeles. The feds protested and Gerawan backed down. This year he has a different scheme: Under a newly created Happy Fruit label, the smaller peaches will be sold through grocers--but with all profits designated for the Pediatric AIDS Foundation of San Francisco.
He is not sure this is legal, but he suspects it is not, and he is secretive about just which stores will carry Happy Fruit. He is not sure what USDA officials will do about it, but he hopes they won’t arrest him. He also is not sure what the people at the Pediatric AIDS Foundation think about participating in a peach war; he didn’t bother to ask. His assumption, though, is that his adversaries will be reluctant to go after someone raising money for children with AIDS.
His critics call him cynical, publicity hungry and maybe greedy, suggesting that his larger motive is to drive out smaller growers who would fail without a marketing order. Gerawan insists it’s all quite simple. “The bottom line,” he said, pointing to the box, “is that this is high-quality fruit and I want to sell it.”
But not to me. When I asked if I could buy the box, he hemmed and hawed. “You don’t know who to trust,” one of his associates said, half-laughing. Just in case I was an undercover agent, I suppose, they insisted on giving me the box. Nothing illegal there. And I didn’t care. I was curious how the forbidden fruit would taste. The first peach I ate right away, while still in Gerawan’s parking lot. It wasn’t bad. No. 2 was better, sweet and firm. No. 3 was sublime. Halfway home I was wondering where I might score another box.
