Comment by clarionbell
18 hours ago
People underestimate how difficult it is to seek buyers for the amount of produce we are talking about here.
Farmers are specialists at growing things, not at moving them across great distances, marketing them to dozens small buyers and or starting up packing plants from scratch. They don't have enough trucks, people or packaging machines to move them around.
Maybe, they can take some portion for local use. But the rest will spoil, and rest of the land will be effectively unused, and a burden. The best option is to cut that as much as possible, and plant something else that actually sells.
Of course, people who never approached agriculture will be appalled at this, and call it great injustice.
A situation like this bring out many comments that reveal a very low understanding of basic economics (and a low rate of reading the article).
Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches. The company that purchased their assets is continuing to buy 24,000 tons of peaches, but the previous unsustainable business was buying a lot more. It's the excess fields that need to be repurposed to growing something that the market will absorb.
The reason the trees are being destroyed is so they can grow something else on the land. Something that comes with a sustainable business model for the current market demands. Yes, the trees are technically going to waste, but if we had forced the peaches to be grown and canned (as many comments are suggesting) then that would be a different kind of waste as they'd sit in warehouses while the land, resources, and labor were used to produce something people weren't buying instead of being used to produce foods they were buying.
In the article you can even see that the farm lobby was so powerful that they got the USDA to pay for the tree removal. The comments talking about farmers not being organized enough or powerful enough must be unaware of how powerful the farm lobby is and how much money they're able to secure from the government every year.
> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches.
Things are often more complicated than that. Del Monte was founded a long time ago and fruit trees take a long time to grow. As a result, as the originator of those trees, you're at a disadvantage because you have to pay for many years of maintenance and interest on capital before the trees bear fruit, and are then sitting on a load of debt from the unproductive years that you can't service if the market price is low after the trees are producing.
But bankruptcy (or new ownership) clears the old debt, and then you're left with a productive asset that might not have been worth the cost to create at current prices, but could easily be worth the cost to continue using now that growing the trees is a sunk cost, which requires a much lower market price to be sustainable.
> In the article you can even see that the farm lobby was so powerful that they got the USDA to pay for the tree removal.
That sounds a lot like a cartel acting through regulatory capture to limit supply.
Like if destroying the trees to grow something else was more profitable than continuing to sell the produce then why does it require a government subsidy?
> Like if destroying the trees to grow something else was more profitable than continuing to sell the produce then why does it require a government subsidy?
Because why pay for something when you can get someone else to pay for it?
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> if we had forced the peaches to be grown and canned (as many comments are suggesting) then that would be a different kind of waste as they'd sit in warehouses while the land, resources, and labor were used to produce something people weren't buying instead of being used to produce foods they were buying.
Worse, the price would have to be lowered to bring up sales, which could put the other peach farmers into bankruptcy as well.
If you try to force production and sale hard enough, the sale price can even go negative.
If your warehouse is full of peaches nobody wants, you might be forced to sell them for negative dollars to take them away. It's either that, or you pay to have the waste management company dispose of them. So the price effectively goes negative from trying too hard to force something to happen.
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>Worse, the price would have to be lowered to bring up sales, which could put the other peach farmers into bankruptcy as well.
We run into something similar every year here in India. One recent example [1] This year it is the Middle East crisis. Last year it was probably a glut because there was shortage the year previously.
[1] https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/video-offered-rs-4-per-kg-ma...
Oh no. Lower costs for consumers? Oh the humanity!
The big thing I fear about this sort of destruction is that it takes a very long time for tree bearing fruit to start turning a profit. That means someone that wants to plant new trees needs to do so with the notion that they won't get any sort of return on investment for a decade.
My fear is that institutional farming does not have the long term fortitude to ever start growing a tree bearing crop. Once these trees are destroyed, they are gone for good regardless how the demand shifts.
A downturn of 2 or 3 years or crazy political maneuvers which kill off exports puts access to these fruit in jeopardy. And once they are out of the diet, it's very hard to get them reintroduced. That's a big part of the reason why the US has such a limited fruit diet in the first place (the other being that many fruits are very hard to ship).
It's so weird for you to be fearful of something when you don't know how farming works. Every year farmers cut down a bunch of trees and plant new ones in response to costs and market demand. So what. This is routine and seldom makes the news.
Canned fruit, like what these farmers were producing, has been losing popularity for years. You can't force consumers to like it.
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If you don’t trust farmers to make the decision, who do you think should be making it?
> That means someone that wants to plant new trees needs to do so with the notion that they won't get any sort of return on investment for a decade
Peach trees take 2-3 years to bear fruit specially with grafting.
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TFA mentions 20-year contracts between Del Monte and farmers. That seems to have worked so well that we have too many peach trees. Like, to me the present situation itself should assuage your fears. Are you thinking another processor/distributor won’t come along in the future with long-term contracts? Where will they get their peaches?
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I don’t know about peaches but ‘round my way the cider apple farmers spank the living daylights out of their high density dwarf trees. They get grubbed up and replanted in under a decade. Fruit trees have a naturally short lifetime but mega yield modern species are something else — the arboreal equivalent of a 40 day broiler.
Ironically, there’s a century year old perry tree at the top of the valley.
> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches
They appear to have gone out of business because of massive debt from a leveraged buyout, combined with other issues.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-private-equity-overcooke...
That doesn't change the fact that there isn't enough demand for canned peaches. If there were enough demand for peaches the farmers would sell the peaches, rather than destroy the peach trees.
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Somebody really good at the economy needs to explain to me how a PE firm buys a company using the company it’s buying as collateral for that financing, and then somehow, that acquired company is the entity that debt is attached to.
Imagine if us poors could buy a Hummer EV financed against itself and then the truck had to self-drive for uber to pay its own payment, under penalty of being put in a crusher. Oh and you get paid by the thing for the privilege of being bought.
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> The comments talking about farmers not being organized enough or powerful enough must be unaware of how powerful the farm lobby is and how much money they're able to secure from the government every year.
Most people don't realize how powerful farmers are in the US. We (rightly!) complain about Wall Street and bank bailouts when they happen, but I'd wager that we've given significantly more money to farmers over time, through bailouts (like this one) and regular subsidies.
Maybe that's a good use of tax dollars, maybe not. It feels bad, but I'm not an economist.
(And before anyone says that farmers are much more sympathetic characters than bankers, remember that "farmers" in the US overwhelmingly means gigantic corporate farming conglomerates; the individual family with a few hundreds or thousands of acres of land and hearts of gold is sadly increasingly uncommon.)
I would much rather there be a surplus of food production (driven by subsidies or whatever) even if it causes inefficiencies given that the alternative is significantly worse.
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Farmers provide food, banks scalp the interest between you and the government. They aren't the same at all. Farmers, even if they are megacorps are indispensable. Banks on the other hand serve basically no function in the modern era of financial activity.
Farmers switching from peaches to elsewise due to a lack of buyers represents a bailout?
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> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches.
Maybe if grocery store peaches weren't a fibrous, tasteless representation of a real fresh peach, they'd still be in business.
Del Monte sells mostly canned peaches and those plastic snack packs so they’re picked a lot riper than fresh peaches at the grocery store.
The peaches have similar problem with fungal diseases like bananas. The best tastiest varieties can't be mass grown anymore.
I find good stone fruit to be very fragile, and hence the economics probably don't support their sale outside of the stone fruit's season and an acceptable radius to where they grow. Peaches/nectarines/plums are easily one of the worst returns on investment when I buy fruit, and this is within a days' drive to California and PNW.
> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches
How did this happen? It takes a long time before a peach tree seedling gets to the point where it can bear a significant amount of fruit. I'm going to guess about 10 years. Given that kind of delay, how did they get into a situation where there was this much over-production?
delays between increasing capacity to produce and bringing production to market naturally lead to cycles of over and under production. https://thesystemsthinker.com/balancing-loops-with-delays/
The new crop will be grapes of wrath
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
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Great point, hoping whatever replaces them uses less water. Ag pulls ~40% of California's water and it feels like 3 out of every 4 years is a drought
Is wood that useless that they need to be paid to remove it ?
There might be not enough demand to match the capacity they contracted and invested to can, but surely there is some demand. You'd think someone would buy out some of the contracts and the canning capacity at a discount and continue some sort of operation.
> A situation like this bring out many comments that reveal a very low understanding of basic economics (and a low rate of reading the article).
And a very low understanding of basic biology. A bunch of rotten fruit is _exceptionally valuable_ in many parts of the world. There's a million things you can do with it, alcohol, fertilizer...
edit: me right now I'm in a position where I could really use truckloads of rotten, inedible peaches if I could get them for free. Trying to figure out the most economic way to get a rather barren place some soil.
If rotten fruit was exceptionally valuable, then people would be paying exceptional amounts of money for it instead of wondering where they can get truckloads of it for free.
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> A bunch of rotten fruit is _exceptionally valuable_
> right now I'm in a position where I could really use truckloads of rotten, inedible peaches if I could get them for free.
These two statements contradict each other. If you are pushing to get something for free (and seems like you wouldn't pay for them, or wouldn't pay much for them, instead opting to do without), then they are absolutely not exceptionally valuable from the sell side.
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Someone needs to put them in tanks for long time and make something very valuable like this:
https://en.excaliburshop.com/catalog/item/8951/fleret-merunk...
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One time, I was driving on a highway, and every now and then I'd see a tomato on the side of the road. At first it was one every couple minutes, but as I passed more vehicles the rate increased. 10 per minute. 30 per minute. Then, hundreds. Every mile, I passed more tomatoes than my household would eat in a year (and it's probably a household that eats an above average amount of tomatoes).
This went on for about an hour, but finally, I made my way up to the truck that was carrying the tomatoes. They were pouring out of the open top. Other vehicles kept their distance in the right lane so as not to be pelted with tomatoes. But the thing was is that the truck was still full. And the road was isolated, so it must have been driving along like this for several hours. All those tomatoes we passed on the road - decades worth for a single family - just an irrelevant minor leak. It wasn't even a leak, someone just filled the truck a tiny, probably imperceptibly small bit too much.
If one truck carries that much food, and then there's however many other tomato trucks each day, then that's a lot.
In the first half of this comment I thought you were setting us up for a old-Google-style interview question. I felt oddly disappointed to not find a Fermi problem at the end.
Better idea:
1. Find a random large, barren public land nearby
2. Dump all fruit there.
3. Wait 15 years
4. New enchanted forest available for public use [1]
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/costa-rica-let-jui...
Farming history seems to be boom and bust and the golden ages of farming seem to be not quite what they were and surprisingly short.
A local university professor did a study on homesteading in my state and determined that even then the land offered to immigrants was actually to small to regularly turn a profit, to some extent that seems to continue to this day at times.
As someone close to agriculture this is the only true response in this thread and anyone understand fruit business knows this.
I agree that the tree destruction is a perfectly rationale reaction - but it is still an injustice. This quantity of waste is not free and not fully priced into the cost to produce the fruit.
I think the emotional misalignment most people will feel at this announcement is a signal that there's a large missed externality that allowed margins on this produce to get too thin.
A big part of the problem here is that Del Monte was the victim of several leveraged buyouts that had executives walking away with millions while the company was saddled with debt.
Exactly. That is what is missing in this discussion. If you want to cut down the trees, fine, but those people who profited should pay for it.
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They will be replaced with something else, don't feel bad for the trees, they had a good run.
Did they? How long have they been around?
It’s an injustice to destroy orchards of commercially planted fruit trees that were bathed in pesticides for their entire life? I’m not seeing the injustice here, something else will be planted in place of the peach trees. It’s productive agricultural land.
I don't know what you mean by 'injustice' - it seems to be a proxy for 'I don't like it when trees die'. Is there more?
Actually, for me, I primarily dislike needless waste. A bunch of resources were dedicated to growing this orchard which will all go to naught. It's better to destroy the orchard than sink even more effort into it if it'll be wasted in the end but the lack of forethought and planning is concerning.
It's a bit awkwardly worded but unjust isn't the word I'd specifically choose, it was inherited from the OP so maybe their view of what "injustice" meant was different and I just hijacked it. Dunno. I interpreted is as an unjust allocation of resources that could have been put to more productive uses.
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By that logic, all "injustice" is "I don't like it when X happens" - there is nothing more.
What is unjust about cutting down an orchard producing a product people aren't buying?
This isn't pristine old growth forest, it has no great ecology.
My opinion is that it's mainly unjust to have invested so much in growing it to destroy it. Mistakes happen and this is the right decision for now given the situation but it is wasteful.
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We recently had two cases in Germany of farmers giving away hundreds of tons of potatoes, as they'd have been destroyed otherwise. In one case they were paid for, but the store didn't want them anymore, in the other case it was overproduction and not worth transporting at the price they'd fetch.
> Of course, people who never approached agriculture will be appalled at this, and call it great injustice.
Uneducated rice farmers in Bangladesh would understand the problem better than the people complaining about this.
Peaches are from the great country of China. Very popular and important in culture. Export may be the best solution. However, cultivar matters, and it may be too late in this case.
You are implying a centralized semi monopoly is the only way. If we had farmers to buyers direct distribution it would be much more resilient to this kind of problems.
You have not made any attempt as an argument. That’s a pure assertion without even an attempt at a causal chain. Being resilient to non-problems is a cost with no benefit.
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> Maybe, they can take some portion for local use. But the rest will spoil, and rest of the land will be effectively unused, and a burden. The best option is to cut that as much as possible, and plant something else that actually sells.
A negative of the subsidy is that the farmland is not going to hit the market at a much lower rate. That raises the bar for entry into farming or at least keeps the bar at some level higher than the market would have had it.
Reminds me of stories about McDonalds introducing new menu items. The logistics of introducing things at all their locations is a major concern. Maybe they could have introduced a new peach desert or something, but like you said supply isn't the only thing - you need to move them around and process them too.
And they usually don't introduce something everywhere at once. They do trial markets, or short-term runs. If something proves very popular (e.g. chicken nuggets) it eventually rolls out everywhere.
You guys just didn't discover the beauty of fermentation and distillation, one can process rather large quantities and all you need is bunch of vats. Private smaller distilleries I believe work as a service in US too (as in you bring your stuff in and they process it professionally so no methanol inside).
Its quite popular in some parts of central Europe (say Czech republic) and resulting drink, in say 45% content of alcohol its fruity sweet and smooth and has absolutely nothing to do with cheap flavored chemical crap from potato/sugar beet one can buy in shops.
Seems like an opportunity to form a coop. I guess I’m being naive though. I just don’t know how
Then why do they use so much land in the first place?
That's the problem with depending on monopoly for coordination.
Maybe if we didn't let one corporation control so much of the distribution chain, we would avoid both the decision to overproduce and the stagnation of overproduced goods.
Of course, the real problem is that we have accepted the notion that food must profit someone, even when we have too much of it.
Although you have a point regarding this specific situation; the real, bigger issue is this industrial scale, low quality, high quantity food production system.
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I mean you are destroying an entire forest that grows food, of course people are incensed, they are funding the destruction with money paid from taxes. Food is already bananas expensive. And it feels so terribly inefficient to just rip and replace.
I fully understand that there is processing and logistics problems. This is not a misunderstanding of economics - its a wild misallocation of resources, and massive destruction of crop.
Have a banner year of peach sales in California for super cheap... market corrects for its past mistakes.
This idea sounds like continued misallocation
I mean, we already have one company going bankrupt in part because they are unable to sell enough of their production to cover costs. Your plan would just cause more peach producers to go bankrupt.
>Have a banner year of peach sales in California for super cheap... market corrects for its past mistakes.
Bankrupt everyone who grows peaches then?
There are actual costs in growing, harvesting, and delivering produce to market you know.
the difficulty of bringing produce to market is reflected in the cost structure. 90% of a food dollar goes towards all the efforts required to get food to the customer (transportation, packaging, warehousing, marketing, retail, etc).
this is why I think the solution is to have people grow their own fruits in their own backyards and front yards. customers will save a huge amount of money and it's better for the environment too.
You're assuming that the customer growing their own fruit could do it at lower overall cost. Logistics are fairly inexpensive all things considered, if they really represent 90% of the total cost of fruit it says a lot for how low agribusiness has driven down the cost of the other 10%.
I think for some types of produce, a home garden is an easy win when it comes to cost. Sure there are things that are very difficult (labor intensive, water intensive, etc.) to grow, so avoid those. But tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, beans, potatoes, peas, and beans are pretty easy to grow, and seed stock can be purchased cheaply. I haven't done this as an adult because I am so excessively lazy (but it's on my to-do list for this year, finally), but we had a vegetable garden when we were kids, and between my mom, my sister, and I, it was very manageable, and we ended up growing more than we could use, and gave some away to neighbors.
As an owner of an apple tree: that's great for about two months, but I don't have commercial quantities of cold storage.
We used to have a lemon tree. When it was producing, 80% of it went to waste. When it wasn't producing, we had to buy.
It was still worth it, though. It required very little maintenance (pruning once a year, replace the batteries on the auto-irrigation system a couple times a year), so it was basically free.
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No one is stopping customers from growing their own food. What's stopping is the lack of expertise knowledge and time commitments it takes to harvest.
Not really. I buy bare-root tree from home depot, throw it into the ground, and get fruit in a few years. No fertilizer, no anything, just give it water and sun. It's not rocket science.
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Local deer everywhere agree: this is the solution
I’m actually appalled when farms are unable to sell their crop they destroy them instead of just idk give it away or something.
This relates to what the first poster said though, at these quantities “just give it away” is incredibly expensive. Trucks, workers, cleaning, fuel, etc.
Just give it away still requires someone to pay for it
> and call it great injustice.
The great injustice is very much me paying however much per pound of peaches when the supply is so great that they should be much cheaper.
However, if these are the trees that grow rock hard peaches that never soften as they ripen with no flavor, then bulldoze them all and say good riddance. Hell, might as well take of and nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
> The great injustice is very much me paying however much per pound of peaches when the supply is so great that they should be much cheaper.
But its not, because the supply and competing demands for motor fuel and all the other things that are required between the orchard are involved, not just the supply of peaches at the orchard.
You want BC Okanagan peaches. I've found them to be dramatically better than anything that's come out of the states for some reason. Granted, most of those would probably be coming from the western half of the country
I'll trade you for some Palisade peaches. Looking at year average temperatures the climates seem pretty similar, so I bet they are bomb!
There's a floor on what they can charge, though: the cost of maintaining the land, the cost of labor to harvest, the cost to process the peaches and package them, the cost to ship them to the store, and the store's cost to hold them in inventory before you buy them.
A business cannot stay in operation if the only way to sell the product is to sell it below cost[0]. Having all this excess production is exactly why Del Monte failed as a company. There's no point in building a business to provide people with below-cost food; it's not sustainable and is ultimately wasteful.
Find a way to get the peaches from the trees to people's homes cheaper? Great, do that, and maybe you can sell more at a lower price.
Or produce fewer until you can sell at a price above cost without much waste. We don't wring our hands at factory owners when they don't manufacture a huge surplus of toys that no one wants to buy. We shouldn't be upset when farmers decide to stop growing as much of a certain crop because they can't sell it all. I get the visceral reaction against killing trees. But that's an emotional response that has nothing to do with the reality of the situation. I would much rather that land be used for a more productive crop that people actually want to buy, at prices that reflect what it costs to produce.
[0] Cue VC-funded startup jokes.
>However, if these are the trees that grow rock hard peaches that never soften as they ripen with no flavor, t
That's not even how trees work. If they wanted, those same trees could grow plums within 2 years, or almonds, or pretty much any stonefruit except cherries (which tend to be incompatible).
Yes, trees are magical, but there are better peaches to grow of these are the ones being grown
Then please explain to me how trees work.
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When I moved to the US from southern Europe I was so horrified by the lack of taste of any fruit I tried, particularly the peaches and plums. I moved back to Europe and not a small factor was the lack of good produce and food in general. Its just mind boggling how Americans dont revolt against this, stop buying shit produce and suppliers will notice.
That's so odd to me. You can buy cheap, cost-optimized fruit in the US. You can also buy amazing produce that would blow your mind. My wife and I look forward to our annual road trip to Monterey partly because of the fruit stands we pass along the way where we'll get cherries so dark they're nearly black, and strawberries the size of my fist (no, really, I have pictures) that are sweet as sugar and incredibly delicious.
The existence of Subway doesn't mean you can't get phenomenal deli sandwiches. It does mean you probably need to look around a little more and don't settle for the first sandwich place you see.
Edit: This is my wife holding one of those strawberries. We took that picture from the sheer absurdity of it. The pack of berries hardly survived the rest of the drive. We'd eaten almost all of them by the time we arrived at the B&B. https://share.icloud.com/photos/0ebgyxOMT9LpyjhfKuLQWD0kw
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This is a funny statement in that California has probably the best agricultural produce on the planet. If you were in say Texas or Georgia - you could be forgiven for your statement.
Bay area produce is unparalleled - Tomatoes, peaches, figs, strawberries, etc.
More organic growers if thats what you care about - high quality growers. There is also massive commercial growers doing high volume low cost but you do need to know where to look.
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I've stopped buying peaches from the supermarkets. They just are not worth it. To get peaches with actual flavor, I have to get them from special vendors that know they have better peaches and charge accordingly.
The suppliers don't notice when the numbers that stop are rounding errors. The vast majority of people don't have any experience with anything other than supermarket produce and don't know there's a choice. Growing up as a kid, I didn't know there were so many varieties of apples. Our store only carried red delicious, golden, and granny smith. It wasn't until I moved out of the sticks and saw more varieties. Some people never move, so they only know what they know and never experience new
Same with Maui Gold pineapples. I can't eat the Dole crap you get everywhere else. The ones at the markets in Maui are a completely different fruit, they're like candy. Whenever I go I eat them until my tongue burns from the citric acid.
This is what happens when you optimize your food supply for profit instead of being edible; varieties are selected for yield, longevity and shipping rather than flavor or nutrients. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
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My understanding is that it's all bred to be easier and faster to grow. Flavour isn't first in the value equation.
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You are comparing fruit in a prime stone fruit-growing region to the US.
The US is big and fruit needs to be refrigerated to be transported. Refrigeration kills aromatics.
I assume you would have a similar experience buying plums in Germany. Similarly, if you bought stone fruit in California where it is grown, it would taste good.
> stop buying shit produce and suppliers will notice
Unless you are willing to pay $30/peach for them to be flown next day on a jet, peaches in New York are not going to taste as good as they do off the tree.
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> Its just mind boggling how Americans dont revolt against this, stop buying shit produce and suppliers will notice.m
There’s a large swath of America that has a deeply ingrained mentality of “food is for fuel, not enjoyment.” It’s a Protestant idea that entered the culture and became ingrained to the point where nobody remembers the origins but are still influenced by it.
I was in Iowa a few years ago, and the food is awful. I don’t think the food in Iowa used to be great “100 years ago before modern factory farming,” etc. I suspect it’s always been awful, and people just don’t care about it very much as long as they get the calories they need.
And I don’t think it’s just “U.S. consumerism blah blah” either. The Anglo food in Canada and the UK sucks too. They just don’t care.
> Its just mind boggling how Americans dont revolt against this, stop buying shit produce and suppliers will notice.
How would most Americans know there's a difference? A large plurality will never leave the country in their lifetime, and many won't even leave the area where they grew up in.
Even for those who travel to some extent, eating as a tourist will rarely give you the experience of going to a grocery store, buying fresh produce, and eating it.
And even if a tourist ends up with some really amazing produce in another country, they'll likely chalk it up to a lucky, isolated incident, and not think much of it. Or it's just the "everything is better when you're on vacation" phenomenon. They'll go back home and be back to eating what they're used to.
To be fair, though, there is plenty of wonderful, flavorful produce in the US. There are a few problems, though:
1. Some areas in the US truly are underserved and have bad produce. And by "areas" that can even mean small pockets here and there, where you may only have to drive an extra 20 minutes to get good produce, but it doesn't even occur to you to try, because you assume it will be the same.
2. In the US we seem to believe that we should be able to get every single kind of produce year-round, regardless of what's in season. So you might see something on the shelves all year, but it's only actually really good for a month or three. The experience during the rest of the year will tend to dominate your opinion.
3. You're more likely to get better quality at a more expensive, boutique-like grocer, or at a farmer's market. Most Americans just don't shop at places like those when there's a cheaper, large chain grocery store available. Farmer's markets can be especially difficult when they're only open a day or two per week, and busy people/families need more flexibility.
For reference, I live in northern California, and there's plenty of fantastic produce here. Yes, when I go to something like Safeway (part of a huge grocery chain), I don't expect anything terribly amazing. It's fine, but nothing special. But I have a small local grocery a couple blocks away from me that usually has great produce (though sometimes it can be hit-or-miss with some items), and they also make an effort to stock many items based on growing season. I've been to various places in Europe many times, and have even been to grocery stores and bought produce so we could cook dinners in an Airbnb. I've generally had a good experience with the produce there, but I wouldn't say it's notably better than where I live in the US.
Exactly. I can see a lot of US apple juice bottles that contain a liquid resembling piss.
It's disgusting.
Real apple juice is dark brown and tastes nothing like the golden liquid mentioned above.
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It's hard to vote with your dollar when market economics are such that only a handful of (massive) firms sell almost all of thing you're protesting. What leverage does one have in the age of oligopolistic enshittification?
It's difficult for them because farmers are raised anti-union individualists that are at the mercy of middle-men. If they would cooperate, unionize even, they would be far more powerful than they are now.
US farmers are up there in terms of how much business protection exists for them. I do think there were policy issues and recent political extremism has diverted a lot of their political will from the matters that are critical to them - but this sort of an issue is larger than just collectivizing. Agriculture is a global market that is uncoordinateable (at least without massive effort) and so if local protections are to be offered the costs will need to be artificially introduced through domestic price increases that the larger American market finds extremely unpalatable.
This is a failing where a lack of coordinated collectivized action was one contributing factor but there is actually a large collectivized will here - but I think the bigger issue is that it's having difficulty aligning itself in the current political environment.
I'm sorry, but this is completely wrong. California canning peach farmers are organized and crop prices are set by industry-wide bargaining with processors every year. Additionally, now that Del Monte is out of the business, the only remaining operating canneries are owned by a grower cooperative. It didn't save the industry. In fact, it may have led to the irrational planting of these trees that now need to be pulled. Source: my father was a peach farmer and chairman of the board of the California Canning Peach Association for many years. But he saw this coming and got out of the business.
I’m an agronomist and while I don’t directly deal with that level of things, what you wrote sounds roughly like what goes on for the hazelnut industry here in Oregon.
https://www.hazelnutbargaining.com/
He saw demand falling or what? What did he swap to?
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Farmers generally own or lease their land. How and why would the owner or leaseholder of the land unionize? Who would they be negotiating with collectively? On the other hand, many farmers are parts of pools that pool their crops and sell them all into commodities markets.
I don’t think you have a clue what you’re talking about. And it’s a shame; unions actually deserve better representation than you just provided.
In a less profit driven world, we might stockpile these in cans and then later throw them away once they spoil, taking over the canning facilities and paying for the wages via taxes on things not needed for survival. We don't maximize food security though, we prefer profit, up to and including choosing not to feed people.
That's how we got mountain bunkers filled with cheese over the course of decades.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvLMH0wb_0k
And how we ended up feeding roughly a third of US-grown corn to cars.
Of course if they did then what's about to happen with the peach trees, you'd end up killing the dairy cows, which I'm guessing the people in this thread would have a problem with.
Farmers are literally subsidized to over-produce for food security.
Which of course is not enough due to other expenses:
https://www.fb.org/market-intel/farm-bankruptcies-continued-...
https://www.adamsandreese.com/the-ledger/rising-farm-distres...
And those farms get bought up and folded into for-profit operations. You simply can't fix this in the current system.
> for food security
They overproduce for votes. Countries without farmer blocks swinging elections stockpile non-perishables for food security.
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Uh yeah, this was Del Monte’s business model.
The issue is that the company that owns the canning plants (Del Monte) went bankrupt. There is no canning capacity available to do this.
How did you possibly miss the point by this far? It’s like trying to drive to Los Angeles and ending up on Pluto.
The government would step in and take over operations. This is why we don't need profit-driven companies responsible for food supply. By all means let Del Monte's managers try their hand in some other industry if they couldn't make it work (or not, because they couldn't make it work).
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