Curiosity (#7) A Space to Place the Growing Discomfort
An excerpt from Daily Bread, a story of Spiritual Bankruptcy through the eyes of the food system
If you are just joining, note that this is an excerpt of a book-in-progress, titled Daily Bread, about the spiritual bankruptcy in America as seen through the lens of the food system. All passages are available for free in sequential order (mostly), though it is perfectly acceptable to read one without the other, should you wish.
“This was all citrus. Solid. No houses. This was a clay road. The 1983 freeze and then 13 months later, another killer freeze. We lost 300,000 acres of bearing citrus right up here, as far as you could see… Citrus greening? We’ve changed root stock, we’ve changed bud wood, we’ve changed just go down the list. We’ve changed everything and we’ve still got major problems… It’s a part of the history of the citrus industry in the state of Florida that has vanished. All my grandkids, if they hadn’t grown up with me out here working in the groves and listening to me moaning and groaning all the time, their friends they’re like ‘what, an orange tree, there was an orange tree out here?’ Why do people keep doing it? You’re the 3rd generation. You inherited this grove. And you say wait a minute, Dad, you gave me this grove and I'm spending $2500 an acre and I'm only getting $1000 or $1500 on fruit, I'm losing $1000 an acre… You know what, I'm going to sell it. You know what that property is valued at today? $35,000 an acre. So why in god’s green earth would you keep that? And that’s what’s going on up here… We are competing, we being the citrus industry not just being organic, we are competing with California, that grows some of the best seedless varieties you can do. We can’t grow seedless over here… I’ve been shot at and missed and shot at and hit. No, you know, I think it's no different than if you're in corn, or cotton, or soybeans. Just pick any crop. Everybody has the same problems. It doesn't matter what the crop is. The spookiest thing right now to me is all about labor.”
Clermont. The agronomist. He was Pop-pop and there was no Pop-pop without Granny. The nice and big and wonderful family and their big organic juice company. They were going to the high school football game that evening. They had their plastic bottled juice in the refrigerator. You know, they were actually very nice. Lovely people. The kind of family easy to love. The kind of family that I destroy, peeling back the layers. I hate to do it. But what about everyone who doesn’t look like them? Ah, I hate to say these things. There was nothing on the face, no “isms” to speak of. They were a nice family. Granny and Pop-pop. Enjoying immensely the late Autumn of their lives. This isn’t about them. They were very nice. They had the kind of lives even I’ve dreamt of. Big Family and wealth and land and high school football and pretty blonde hair. The blonde hair of the wife becomes the blonde hair of the daughter that teaches the husband who became the father the power of transcendental love that he protects. One of those families that protects the family above all else. They’ll claw themselves out of any corner. One of those families where the women don’t know the secrets the men keep from them. The blood in the citrus. But who knows… It’s all fantastic. Remote from reality. Reality. The patriarch was a knowledgeable and experienced agronomist. He offered more solutions to citrus greening than anyone else I’d met with his dwarf trees and vials of wasps hanging from them and experiments in the fields. And more optimism though I wasn’t as convinced as he seemed to be. His dwarf orange trees were bearing fruit. Case of oranges per tree. Easier to pick. No ladders. The trees were infected with the greening but tolerant. They were still getting on and simultaneously solving the labor problems he was having because he needed half the workers to pick them. We took a short drive to the other side of the hill to his neighbor's hundreds of acres of groves driving through them in his pick-up truck as the Latin men stood on ladders picking the fruit and the agronomist pulled one from the tree and sliced it with a knife from his pocket an squeezed the juice into a brix reader he'd removed from the center console. It measured just above 8 and a sly smile formed on his face and he offered me a taste and asked what I thought of the sweetness. It tasted like any other orange I’d had from the supermarket, so I said so. “He put these boys out to pick as soon as the fruit hit the legal requirement. That’s 8. A good Florida orange will measure 12.” I inquired. “Fear. There’s greening all over these trees. He’s afraid the fruit’s gonna’ drop. So he’s picking his whole grove as early as he can.”
I thought I’d come all that way to understand citrus. The exotic fruit. But what we bought in cases by the hundreds that we juiced and discarded that we gave away for free to anyone who wanted to flavor their free water… the agronomist justified this without intending to. He was right. There was no difference between this fruit and cotton and corn and soy. It was not exotic. This reality began in the field. In the factory they’ll fix the juice from the mediocre oranges with concentrated citrus sugar and citric acid derived from modified corn… I thought I’d return with some other reality. I hoped to be able to justify our citrus use or learn something that we could adopt to get more from it or find a source somewhere in Florida we could support and be proud to work with and tell the story to our customers. I went to collect a story to make ourselves feel better. But there was no story. There is citrus in boxes to order from whatever land it grew and give away for free to people who don’t care that oranges in Florida have become nearly extinct and its farmers had to sell their land and move somewhere else and begin life again. I imagined these farmers were happy to do so. Poor and thankless had been their lot.
Citrus isn’t my story. It has nothing to do with me. I felt bad for the farmers. Strange that such a widespread disease held so little weight in society. No one I’d spoken to in Florida who wasn’t a citrus farmer seemed to have any idea of what I was talking about. I felt I no longer wanted to purchase cases of citrus. I felt our dependence on it was lazy and unthoughtful and harmful. We were ordering shipments of a pale rendition of something that was once wonderful. Now it traveled thousands of miles covered in poisonous chemicals so we could squeeze it and chuck the rest into the garbage pail to rot in landfills. I didn’t see the allure. I didn’t see the magic. And no one was defending this commodity. I saw the magic on the small farm dying in the hands of the small farmer. It should die with them. It’s their story. The fruit we were ordering didn’t have a rightful place next to the Wizard Shaw’s Badger Flame Beets. That was our story. But I had a bar that was serving 1,500 people a week. Few of them were interested in its owner’s notions of sustainability and health and justice. Few of them would be convinced to trade their cocktail of lemon and lime and orange for a base of beets. They weren’t coming to be convinced. They were coming to leave the world hurrying to tell them that everything about them was wrong. Too white and too male and too aggressive. Too sensitive. Too nurturing. Too Black. Not Black enough. Not gay enough. Gender is a construct of man. They came for temporary relief from a world insistent on rearranging their identity and preying on those without a strong one. My business was created to provide comfort. So I searched within myself for a space to place the growing discomfort I’d been discovering. But I had one last stop to make along the citrus path. New Jersey.