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Rendered at 17:46:07 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Easy way to understand, they can announce it’s free come and get it and it wouldn’t have moved. Which clearly shows financially moving these don’t make sense.
Tree maintenance labor, harvest labor, storage before shipping, labor to load the truck, labor to unload the truck, supermarket storage, supermarket shelf-stocking labor, supermarket disposal labor and cost for any stock that spoils.
That's for peaches intended to eat whole. The peaches we're talking about here are intended for canning, so you also have to add the cost of running the processing and canning machinery, the cost of the cans themselves, and the cost of labor to run and coordinate all that.
Also consider that no single supermarket is going to buy out the entire truck, so you're going to be stopping at many supermarkets, and unloading multiple times.
For larger chain supermarkets they may be buying a full truck (or multiple), but then you'll probably be delivering to a distribution center, where the supermarket then has to pay for that storage, plus labor to re-load onto other trucks, ship to the supermarkets themselves, and unload again.
Your analysis is missing nearly everything. Driving the full truck from point A to point B is a tiny part of the process, cost-wise. And I'm sure I've left things out too.
The fruit needs to be picked. Paying people to pick it costs money.
As far as I know, you can’t just load 44 tons of peaches into a grain hopper trailer. It has to be loaded into crates, which are stacked and palletized and loaded into a refrigerated trailer. Possibly this is automated, but I’d bet it’s done by humans.
Food is generally not delivered from a farm directly to a grocery store, (ignore local co-ops buying from local farms for the purpose of this discussion, we have 44 tons of peaches inside our 53 foot trailer) fruit is stored in a refrigerated warehouse and it costs money to store it there whether you own the warehouse or pay someone else to store it in their warehouse.
A grocery chain will have (or rent/rent space in) warehouses where they receive large orders and then distribute them to individual stores, or they buy it from a local distributor that sells to multiple chains. Include unloading from the truck to the warehouse, which is faster than loading the fruit onto pallets, and picking the order in the warehouse to then be loaded onto another truck to be delivered.
Then, someone at the store has to receive the order, and then someone is assigned to stock the fruit on the sales floor, which occupies space inside the store which costs money.
All of your freight costs go up if you ship less than a full trailer (LTL).
You gave the LLM the wrong prompt. You probably asked something like “How much does it cost to ship 1000 kg on a semi-truck in the United States?” when you should’ve asked something like “Name all of the input costs for selling peaches, include all costs starting at harvest and ending at the customer purchasing the produce at the grocery store.”
This is exactly why we have freight brokers.
People seem to think that farmers can't or won't own their own trucks and trailers. Almost everyone I know does.
Weird Al's straight cover. Al should just do an album like that, would be kinda neat.
As it turned out, aluminum poisoning can cause dementia-like symptoms, but you can't get aluminum poisoning from cookware or cans.
I've personally noticed shavings multiple times on the lip (especially with cheaper non KO/PEP products). La Croix cans are notorious for this.
It was an easy, steady cash-positive business until it wasn't. If those farmers thought what is final product and who benefits from it most, they'd grow diversified crops to sell locally, which many California family farms do.
This is out of touch, many of these farmers are 100+ miles from a large population center. They can’t move enough produce at a local store to stay in business.
That's not to say it's an easy problem to solve.
Incorrect. You simply decide that having less than 5 suppliers at any level is unacceptable and you bust companies up, repeatedly until you have those suppliers. That way when one goes bankrupt, you don't wind up with complete supply chain disintegration.
The solution is quite straightforward. However, it requires an electorate that has a couple of brain cells to rub together in order to understand the solution. And 30% of the US is willfully hostile to any real solutions while another 30% is happy to fiddle while everything burns.
This is a very extreme solution, and eliminates many of the benefits from horizontal integration even when the benefits are passed onto customers. Consider:
- insurance companies
- banking
- utilities
It’s also hard to implement. What counts as a supplier? Is Google the sole supplier for search functionality? If 4 suppliers provide 1% of demand, and one supplies 96%, does that comply? If there’s only one company offering some new service (e.g. driverless cars), do they immediately get broken up?
Yes. Always. At all levels. I might provide a limit below which that doesn't happen (like $50 million in revenue), but as soon as you cross that limit, scrutiny should be automatic.
> This is a very extreme solution, and eliminates many of the benefits from horizontal integration even when the benefits are passed onto customers. Consider: - insurance companies - banking
There is no advantage to horizontal integration for consumers in those industries. If anything, the value is negative. The fact that people are quite a bit happier about credit unions than Chase says everything you need to know.
Sure, there are "efficiencies" to be gained by horizontal integration. What we have seen is that the horizontal integration is so strong that the industries are sclerotic in the face of crisis or change (see: toilet paper manufacturers in Covid who couldn't switch gears). It has become repeatedly clear that we need resilience and competition more than we need efficiency.
> utilities
Should be limited to natural monopolies and strongly controlled by the government. We have seen what happens when you create hybrid-type utilities that try to have some existence in the market (rather than being solidly government regulated) and the result is poor (see: PG&E).
IMO this claim is just too strong. I think you'd end up breaking up (or trying to) Lloyds of London, Spacex, Fedex, DHL, Boeing, Panasonic, ASML, Google, Apple, and many other very specialized companies. These businesses would be very expensive if they could only supply 1/5 of the market, to the point that many people would be totally priced out. The world can barely support 1 ASML, imagine if we had to pay for 5 of them. We'd be sent back to the 2000s, and that's _just_ computing.
I see exemplars and no counterexamples.
Boeing turned to garbage when it took on McDonnel-Douglas--we were better off with the separate companies. YouTube not being bought by Google means that you don't have a single giant ad juggernaut and the copyright infringement that goes along with it. Apple being busted up means we have a division that actually focuses on computers in their own right rather than being a vestigial graft to the phone services division. Fedex was enough of a monopoly problem that Amazon bought carriers and, very painfully, set up its own delivery system.
> The world can barely support 1 ASML, imagine if we had to pay for 5 of them.
So, you prefer that we are two Chinese drone strikes from having a chip economy meltdown?
This is the kind of stuff that absolutely needs diversity. And part of the reason the ASML stuff is so expensive is because it doesn't have enough volume. So, for example, if the US had multiple fab lines that could consume the ASML machines, that would reduce the costs for ASML.
Then you probably didn't have YouTube, or if you did it would have twice as many ads, all likely served by Google and tracking integrated with Google.
https://www.patternlanguageindex.com/patterns/city-country-f...
I actually read his whole book. Most of his "patterns" are kind of quaint and twee, the sort of things that seem superficially attractive to people with no real domain knowledge. Highly overrated.
I realize we can't really go backward in time, but I would prefer if the farmers that lived close to where I am sold to people who live local to me. That can happen to some degree (open yard stands), and I like to do that for some of the smaller farms, but it's really a kind of "nice to have" rather than a "The market stocks stuff that was grown a town or two over" type thing. I feel like something probably got lost when that kind of arrangement went away.
There's still one or two local businesses that manage to make it into the local market for me which is neat to see, but that's more so because they are for frozen pastries and stuff, and can prepare a metric ton in advance, and the market can mark it up for being a "local specialty" type thing. I like to buy them when I can afford it. It just sucks that essentially every other thing on a shelf probably wasn't even made in the same time zone or hemisphere.
Rome got its wheat from Egypt and its olive oil from around the Mediterranean.
Ancient egypt sent food up and down the nile to population centers in Cairo and Thebes.
And so on.
More widely, they matter in that farmers markets and roadside stands and such do exist. Why do they exist? Because there are enough people that want to buy from such places.
I mean, it's never going to be the way that food is sold. But those preferences matter enough for niche markets to exist.
This is out of touch. Growing fruit is one of the most difficult tasks in farming.
What if they can't make much money doing so?
This is what happens when the federal government uses a 1940s era plan to manage the economy.
Agriculture is a highly competitive business - even large scale agriculture still has very stiff price competition. There isn't a lot of fat to burn on charitable gestures and what is there isn't on the scale of maintaining such a large unproductive orchard.
It sucks - don't misread my statement. It is deeply unfortunate and we should consider mitigations for the future - but the party to throw blame at here isn't the farmers and neither should they be expected to bear the cost.
A lot of the removed almond tree wood is sold to people like me up in the Sierras where we heat with it in the winter. Almond has significantly more energy per unit of volume that most other species of trees in our area. I don't like the smell of burning almond wood. I bet peach wood smells a lot better, but it would take a lot more space to store the same energy.
(Source: my relatives in the Sac. Valley don’t heat with almond wood anymore.)
Another casualty of what happens during the shift from independent, family-run farms that often sold to grower's cooperatives to much larger, scaled-up operations that focus on wringing every last dollar out of efficiency and standardisation.
Selling it as fuel is maybe some added revenue in the short term but really just doesn't make sense. Now if you were getting a premium (lumber, specialty hardwood, etc), then processing and selling could make sense
The first was related to COVID. Sales of canned goods spiked during COVID. They misinterpreted this as a permanent change and invested accordingly.
Second, they did not find a way to compete with store brands, which are no longer at a quality deficit vs. more expensive name brands like Del Monte.
Finally, they didn't address changes in diet that (as I see it) makes sugary syrupy tree candy not something people want to eat. Carbs are recognized now as seriously unhealthy. Ozempic and related drugs may have also affected this.
Excess consumption of processed and/or "unhealthy" carbs is unhealthy.
Excess consumption of protein is also unhealthy. Same with fiber.
I'm not commenting on anything else, just the fact that "carbs are recognized now as seriously unhealthy" is absolutely untrue.
I don't think they meant that the medical community recognizes carbs as unhealthy. I think they meant the general public.
It's not true that carbs are unhealthy, but I think it is true that people recognize them as unhealthy.
Really? The only issues arising from fiber that I've heard of is constipation, and that's only if diet suddenly changes and large amounts of fiber are introduced to a digestive system unused to it. AFAIK most people don't even get a tenth of what they should in terms of fiber.
The specific peaches referred to in this story are "Cling peaches", which can only be canned, they aren't sold fresh. But modern supply chains mean fresh peaches of other varieties are easily available, which has reduced the demand for canned.
They'll probably replace the trees with almonds, pistachios, and walnuts.
> Del Monte was killed by COVID. Canned food sales spiked and they thought that would last, but it didn't.
Why can’t they reduce to their former size? It seems the California plants had been around long before Covid
If anything would have been profitable spun off, it would have been spun off in the bankruptcy.
"Consumer preferences have shifted away from preservative-laden canned food in favor of healthier alternatives," said Sarah Foss, global head of legal and restructuring at Debtwire, a financial consultancy.
Grocery inflation also caused consumers to seek out cheaper store brands. And President Donald Trump's 50% tariff on imported steel, which went into effect in June, will also push up the prices Del Monte and others must pay for cans.
Del Monte Foods, which is owned by Singapore's Del Monte Pacific, was also hit with a lawsuit last year by a group of lenders that objected to the company's debt restructuring plan. The case was settled in May with a loan that increased Del Monte's interest expenses by $4 million annually, according to a company statement.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/del-monte-files-for-bank...
During the coronavirus pandemic, when more people were eating at home, demand rose to record highs, Del Monte said in the filing, and the company committed to higher production levels. Once demand began to ease, Del Monte was left with too much inventory that it was forced to store, write off and “sell at substantial losses.”
The company also said it had carried a large amount of debt since it was acquired in 2014 by Del Monte Pacific Limited, which borrowed to finance the acquisition. Interest rates continued to increase, and the company’s annual cash interest expense has nearly doubled since 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/business/del-monte-bankru...
If you're up for a 12 minute video, besides re-iterating the points above (particularly underscoring the debt issue), it also points out that the company has changed hands many times in its history.
Were these trees ever profitable? If the true cost of water resources were added?
If the true cost of picking them with US workers were paid?
Any other subsidy?
In my country there is a farm lobby too, but they rather look after the massive agribusiness at the expense of small farms. Is that the case in the US?
I have never seen a californian peach orchard (I have read Grapes of Wrath, if that counts!), are they a similar environmental disaster to the almond monoculture?
Why not just send every American household a few tins of free fruit every month? It might be the closest thing to nutritious food some people get?
Similar with the Spirit bankruptcy, nobody wanted to save the company... they wanted to sell the assets to reduce losses.
US cowboys are also competing against Australian working conditions; universal healthcare, guaranteed minimum wages indexed against living costs, greater environmental protections than the US, etc.
* https://www.mla.com.au/news-and-events/us-tariffs/
* https://www.agriculture.gov.au/biosecurity-trade/export/from...
Napkin math suggest 500 tankers of peach juice, which makes me sad.
Won't they at least sell the fruit to customers through grocery stores, where possible? I can see replacing the crops based on reduced future demand from the canneries, but surely the current fruit is usable.
“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.”
Nor are we destroying food while people go hungry; we produce more food than we eat by a considerable margin. What hunger remains in the world is a distribution problem, not a supply problem.
I can't speak to the fruit business, but let me assure you: people are starving, the cost of living crisis is a political weapon, SNAP is unfunded, and this nutrition is, as in Grapes of Wrath times, succumbing to the market, not to the lack of need.
People are hungry, there's just no $$$ in feeding them.
Shame.
75% of the population is overweight, and the rate is even higher among poor people. We've had to invent new words like "food insecure" because actual starvation is a solved problem.
It's hygroscopic as all hell and I can only buy food grade stuff in 10 kilogram quantities. But I need like half a gram per dozen rolls, so I'd have to make around 50 batches of rolls a day to use it up before it goes off.
My electric bill is going to be hellish.
Efficient usage of sodium hydroxide feels like a compelling use case for consumer grade at-home thorium MSRs - we've got to get the DoE in on this now.
Distribution at scale becomes a problem when you're talking in the region of 600 rolls per day, but I figure some sort of compressed air cannon to shoot bags of them across town when they're still warm might be okay. Although, I'm in the UK, given the history of politically-driven homebrewed artillery enthusiasts, maybe drones would be better.
> consumer grade at-home thorium MSRs
Oho, now you're talking. Run a genny off it too, how are your 3kW solar panels looking *now*, guys? Oh you're only getting a wee bit from your feed-in tariff? Cool, cool, well there you go I guess...
Seems like the opposite of the free market. Large farmers are usually the first people lining up for a government handout, and their representatives are regularly anti-market types.
Sure, there's plenty of puffed-up talk about having one. That's kinda like the talk about Santa bringing toys for good little girls and boys.
(I wonder why my comment has been deleted)
“ 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.” - John Steinbeck; Grapes of Wrath
This reaction is similar to constituents who bristle at the fact that their local library destroys old books, seeing a parallel to book burnings in 1930s Germany.
This is also good for the remaining peach farmers because it keeps peach prices high, and also because massive forests of unattended peach trees leads to pest problems.
California is not in any drought right now and our reservoirs last 10 years in the absolute worst case. Most of our water goes into the ocean.
I have no dog in the race in terms of what trees there are but if you take them down it'll be invasive South American pepper trees or mustard grass. As long as it's used and sequestering carbon it's all gravy.
https://oroville.lakesonline.com/Level/
You can see the water level there for Lake Orville which is the source for the California aqueduct system that feeds part of the Central Valley and the 20 million living in Southern California. Given that non-residential accounts for 92% of all the water use California is never in any danger of not being able to provide water to residential. That would require 20 years without rain and that also assumes we don't build new reservoirs.
California is the size of a country. The North is in an area more like the Pacific Northwest than any desert.
We just lived through a worst case scenario that lasted 3 years and only on the 3rd year of that did we even bother to start water restrictions. For the past two years we've been full to 100% and having to let it go in the spring.
I did a ton of research on this cause I own a property supplied by this system.
https://interestingengineering.com/lists/7-mighty-machines-f...
It’s actually cheaper just to buy new fruit tree stock and you can get better quality (ie flavorful varieties vs mass farmable ones). Source: worked at an ornamental tree farm, done the math in spreadsheets and have planted peach trees in my yard as well - once loaded a trailer wrong and did a 180 in a loaded flatbed with trees, which went all over the interstate.
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.
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.
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?
Because why pay for something when you can get someone else to pay for it?
The government is giving them money -- to do something stupid. There is no apparent non-corrupt reason to do that. It wouldn't be better if the government was also offering ordinary people cash money to destroy productive fruit trees.
Whereas if the government was to help "all of the citizens" then they would all be getting the money and not have to do something stupid in order to get it. But the thing that looks like is either just lowering their taxes to begin with, or doing a UBI if the point of it is redistribution. In neither case is paying anyone to do economically inefficient nonsense a good policy.
Del Monte didn’t grow peaches, they contracted with farmers (long term, 20 year contracts) who grew peaches and then Del Monte canned the peaches. Del Monte was purchased with an LBO that loaded their books with debt.
Del Monte blew up and left farmers holding the bag. Paying the farmers to convert their land to grow something else prevents fire sales of the existing land.
Considering the market that Del Monte made for canned peaches, someone was going to grow peaches for them. The farmers may have mismanaged their risk, but I’m fine with compensating farmers that end up with worthless trees because of a leveraged buyout. If these farmers were forced to sell their land, some giant ag business would end up with the land.
There is no fire sale of land. There is enormous demand for land, especially productive agricultural land which is essentially traded as a fungible commodity.
> The farmers may have mismanaged their risk, but I’m fine with compensating farmers that end up with worthless trees because of a leveraged buyout.
Even then, why are you paying them to destroy productive trees instead of e.g. buying their peaches and donating them to food pantries or stocking the cafeterias at government facilities?
> If these farmers were forced to sell their land, some giant ag business would end up with the land.
That's just cynical speculation. If they sell the land it goes to anyone who wants to buy it. You're also assuming that the ones getting the money aren't already some giant ag business.
Worse, the price would have to be lowered to bring up sales, which could put the other peach farmers into bankruptcy as well.
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.
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...
As for artificially high, when was the last time you heard someone complain about those awful, expensive canned peaches?
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).
Canned fruit, like what these farmers were producing, has been losing popularity for years. You can't force consumers to like it.
As I said, trees take a long time to bear fruit. It's not typical that a farmer will cut down a tree in their orchard in response to market pressure as that tree represents a huge investment.
If that were the case, then why are there so many peach trees currently? Why hasn't the entire orchard been replaced with olive trees?
Do you actually have farming experience?
The first IBM PC I ever used was in the home office of a farmer who was using it for economic forecasting. And I grew up in the middle of a large city (for reference, I had an Atari 800 at home, regularly used Apple ][s at school, my friends were raving about the newly-introduced Commodore 64, and the most impressive tech I had ever seen was a VAX 11/780).
> If that were the case, then why are there so many peach trees currently? Why hasn't the entire orchard been replaced with olive trees?
I agree, that farmers forecast and switch up crops. But I disagree with you that you have a bunch of farmers that have mixed orchards setup because of that forecasting. It's not like wheat or barely where you could switch between the two even mid year if you were crazy enough.
I'd also point out that the first fruiting isn't exactly a bumper crop. It takes several more years after that first fruiting before you get to the point where a tree is fully productive.
You claimed
> Every year farmers cut down a bunch of trees and plant new ones in response to costs and market demand.
What do you mean responding to "costs and market demand"?
You also claimed
> They forecast future trends as best they can and will replace trees (or other crops) when it seems profitable.
Both those statements would imply that you have orchard farmers who are growing and harvesting multiple types of crops. Unless you are trying to say that it's common for a fruit farmer to completely destroy an orchards and replace with with a new crop.
Both, frankly, are ridiculous claims which are quickly dispatched with "Why aren't there more olive trees".
If the reaction to market forces was that fast, the expectation is that last 10 years of raised olive prices would have caused a lot of these farmers to uproot and plant olive trees. It's currently a very lucrative crop and California is certainly amenable to growing olives.
> That's just how farming works: you have to place your bets and then work for years to see if they pay off.
I agree with this statement. Farming is a game of placing bets on the future of the market. But I disagree that orchard farmers are commonly just diving head first into switching crops in any sort of fashion. It takes a severe event, like their primary distributor going bankrupt, to move an orchard farmer towards new crops. That is not common or business as usual.
It is commonplace to decide that a particular plot of land needs to be either maintained or moved to production of another crop. When those production change decisions are made, it is in response to an assessment of the market and the properties of the plot of land. (The assessment may be wrong or short sighted of course.)
I contend this is not "routine and seldom makes the news." and I back that up by claiming that it's uncommon for orchard farmers to change crops.
What part of that doesn't make sense?
New orchards of various crops are planted every day, I don't know why you think this doesn't happen in the modern age.
I'll admit my experience is more with vineyard than orchards, but at least for grape, this isn't true. You only cut down old, unproductive vines, and market demand is not a factor. You never know how much you will produce YoY, so basically you try to only produce what your domain can handle. (The english translation for the following will be rough i realize).
On the "planting" side, you're wrong: a limited stock of "rootstock" (if this is the correct translation of "porte-greffe") is produced each year. As those are specific to a certain type of soil and take time to grow, you don't produce a ton each year. And vines "rootstock" are _a lot_ easier to grow than other trees (you have a mother-vine that you don't prune, you bury its branch in the soil, and over a year it will develop roots). My guess is that for orchards, your rootstock should take 3-4 years, so it isn't that easy.
Has canned fruit actually lost popularity? Or did the grocery stores decide that the shelf space had a higher profit margin pushing something else?
The last couple of times I tried to get canned fruit for a recipe I had to actively hunt for the particular cans of fruit I needed (I needed to hit 3 different grocery stores).
I haven't tracked peaches recently, but I can tell you that canned apricots have been a bit thin on the ground for at least a couple of years.
> The last couple of times I tried to get canned fruit for a recipe I had to actively hunt for the particular cans of fruit I needed (I needed to hit 3 different grocery stores).
> I haven't tracked peaches recently, but I can tell you that canned apricots have been a bit thin on the ground for at least a couple of years.
Groceries stores with canned fruit being harder to find is entirely consistent with it being less popular. Pushing you to go to another store for something is bad, if you're a grocery store. That's a great way to drive off customers. There's a lot of shelf space at my local grocery stores still dedicated to fairly-redundant products or high amounts of extra copies of items, so I don't think they're being pushed out because something else is way more profitable. (My local stores have much larger selections of canned beans than canned peaches, for instance.)
I think it's just generational trends. Generally health-conscious consumers these days are more skeptical of canned vs fresh, and non-health-conscious have more junk food options than ever. It's also gotten easier to source fresh fruit across seasons than thirty or forty years ago, further squeezing canned options.
Compared to Del Monte's heyday in the previous century? Absolutely.
A remarkable amount of fruit is available all year, or most of the year now. I cant imagine eating canned fruit by choice.
I shall try and see if I can get a Peach or an Apple pie. This weekend you know the old-fashioned pie that actually tastes good and is well made.
That’s another thing that’s in short supply along with actually getting any good baked goods unless you can go to a small Bakery somewhere if you can find one they usually cost a more but not that much more than what you could find in the supermarket times have been changing for the worst when comes to baked goods.
Del Monte in recent times was passed between four equity companies. One of those equity companies actually bought them twice. Del Monte was on the pathway to hell.
Hopefully some of those trees can be transplanted within a 50 mile radius of where they are. If I lived up in that area. I would seriously try to see if I could transplant a few.
Yes. Global supply chains have improved, so it's easier to get fresh fruit year round (or closer to it) than it used to be. If they can, people will choose fresh over canned, for obvious reasons.
Not at all obvious. A lot of "fresh" produce in the US was refrigerated for more than a week before it arrived in the supermarket, from varieties that were designed to hold up to transport rather than flavor. Fruit that was canned at the height of the season is often much more flavorful than "fresh" off-season fruit.
The US has a problem with packing fruit in added sugar, which is sad but not inherent to canned fruit.
Do grocery stores make their own decisions about what goes on their shelves? I thought they mostly rented the shelf space to food vendors who were responsible for that.
For example, a while ago I complained on HN that a particular flavor of Triscuits was reliably out of stock whenever Safeway discounted Triscuits, and I was told that the way to address that, were I so minded, is to reach out to Nabisco on Twitter, because they - and not Safeway - make the stocking decisions.
At the very least I can get all of those fresh and not canned, but honestly I'd prefer having canned versions as well because of all of the import uncertainty that ended up affecting things this past winter.
Peach trees take 2-3 years to bear fruit specially with grafting.
That first fruiting you are looking at something like 2 or 3 lbs of fruit. Full grown you are looking at about 20 lbs of fruit yearly.
You can push up maturity by using a dwarf root stock and get to full fruiting in 6 to 8 years.
Just from the poorly cared peach trees that grow around my house it has to be much more than 20 lbs of fruit yearly. That's only like 100 peaches. I've been to a pick your own peaches orchard and it was easy to fill a 5 gallon bucket from a single part of a tree. I know there are a lot of varieties but it has to be a lot more than 20lbs.
That's exactly what I'm thinking. There are few crops where someone might want to lock in a 20 year contract. It's a major gamble for all involved. It's a gamble for the distributor because tastes might shift in 20 years (almost certainly a big part of why Del Monte went bankrupt) and it's a risk for the farmer because it's not clear that another distributor will look at these farms and think "You know what, I can pick up where that company went bankrupt".
> Where will they get their peaches?
Will they get peaches? That's really the question. They might just decide it's too unpopular and the price would have to be too high to support selling peaches.
Del Monte was a big reason why peaches are available. Similar to how Dole is a big reason we have bananas year round. If Dole goes bankrupt, we likely won't see bananas on the shelves. And we know this because there's more than just 1 variety of banana in the world. We have access to only 1 because there's only one distributor of bananas in the US.
We are moving into an era of private equity doing fast turn around profits on everything. The old way of business thinking that you can have a 20 year contract is likely dying. 1 year contracts are going to be much more likely because that's where a lot of the investment is going. And Del Monte is the poster child for why a business would shy away from doing a 20 year contract.
Aren't there 3, at least? Dole, Chiquita, and Del Monte?
I've also bought Fyffes bananas [in the US] in recent times; those probably came from Aldi.
The more diverse ethnic marketplaces surely have other sources. They've got their own ways of doing stuff. :)
Ironically, there’s a century year old perry tree at the top of the valley.
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...
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.
You put 10% down (say $10,000) and the bank lends you $90,000 based on the lien they have on the hummer.
No different than a leveraged buyout - PE firm buys a company with cash down and takes on debt for the rest of the purchase using the assets of the company as collateral.
It makes a lot more sense if you think of it in steps - negotiate buyout agreement with owners, close purchase with cash and take ownership, then as CEO have the company take on debt and use the loan proceeds to close the deal.
Just like if you went to a dealership and negotiated a deal where you purchased the hummer for $10k, they transfer ownership to you, then you go to the bank and get a loan using vehicle as collateral then pay the dealership the loan proceeds to close the deal.
Where I think you’re confused is the “how do they take a loan on an asset they don’t own?”. The answer is they don’t. It’s multiple steps and they own the company they use as collateral.
You find a bank that thinks there it can make money from interest payments or collecting the asset.
it really is that simple. If self driving trucks were a good bet, banks would be happy to loan entrepreneurs money to buy them.
- the asset would be repossessed
- the bank would wreck my credit
And most importantly IMO, to really spotlight it: I am paying that loan. I took out a loan for however much, with a payment schedule to pay it back. That is completely different and much more reasonable than “I borrowed money to buy a thing and now that debt is on that thing.”
And that’s before you even get into their various “fees.”
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.)
It's an extreme case, but that same sort of pattern has happened repeatedly throughout history. Keeping some amount of farming economically sustainable is important. You don't necessarily need direct public subsidies, but you definitely want to avoid long periods where prices are too cheap to make farming of important crops not economically viable.
This isn’t true. See the Thirty Years War. There have been many wars in the past that have led to mass starvation by making the work of agriculture impossible. See also the depopulation of Sichuan during the Ming- Qing transition.
Separately the Ethiopian war was subsidised by western food aid and other aid to the Dengists.
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.
Edit: I thought you had adapted this to what's described in the TFA, but seems like it's an actual excerpt.
Deflation is an opportunity cost to running a business. If you can earn x% from sitting on your money, then any business activity must earn more than x% before you consider the investment. The easiest way to raise the return on investment to match the opportunity cost is to sell at a higher price, but remember, you have deflation, so you can't pass on the cost to the consumers. Supply must shrink until the price is high enough to justify production again.
Reducing the supply of products also shrinks the demand for labor that is used in the production process, leading to more unemployment with sticky prices or reduced income with flexible prices. Reduced income means people have less money to buy products, which means producers see a lack of demand and reduce production even further. The downward spiral feeds itself.
Deflation is bad because it has acute symptoms. Inflation is the least bad option, because it's a manageable slow burn. Of course with acute symptoms you will see more action towards fixing the problem, whereas with a slow burn humans tend to drag it along forever.
But the big difference is that the peach trees are being destroyed because nobody wants the peaches. That's the exact opposite of the quote, in which there are starving people clamoring for the food and the food is being destroyed to raise the price.
Well, nobody important.
US rates of malnutrition: https://worldmetrics.org/malnutrition-in-the-united-states-s...
Increase in deaths from malnutrition: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/12/29/why-are-m...
> To be sure, we wouldn’t yet call it commonplace. But while it accounts for fewer than 1 in 100 deaths, its toll is rising so fast that it’s now in the same league as arterial disease, mental disorders and deaths from assault.
> The source we used, a supplement to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, has been canceled by the Agriculture Department. The upcoming release could be the last.
That doesn't sound encouraging.
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?
Maybe if grocery store peaches weren't a fibrous, tasteless representation of a real fresh peach, they'd still be in business.
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.
> 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.
https://en.excaliburshop.com/catalog/item/8951/fleret-merunk...
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.
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...
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.
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.
Although in this particular situation clearly the consumer surplus wasn't enough to keep consumers buying Del Monte products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus
If we measure consumer surplus as a percentage, how would it compare to business profits as a percentage?
Edit:
Also Nordhaus being a Sveriges Riksbank price laureate tells you how silly and meaningless the Sveriges Riksbank price in economics is. His work on climate change is so bad it's embarassing.
Is "those people who profited should pay for it" a desire to guillotine[1] those "executives walking away with millions".
Who profited? Do we blame the executives? Should we search for culprits of modern capitalist systems? How much is my fault or responsibility?
Sorry for the horrid quote - it was there to illustrate the question about consumer surplus - but it is too close to trolling.
> consuming the company requires mistreating customers (getting rid of consumer surplus)
I don't think you are using surplus meaningfully
Byrne Hobart[0] calls such acquisitions strip-mining of goodwill. Essentially extracting money from intangibles by destroying a brand. He uses brutally vivid metaphors, but with solid economics.
Yeah the Sveriges Riksbank prize seems ignoble.
[0] Byrne Hobart writes The Diff. Worthwhile subscribing to the free tier, although there is a lot of referencing to paid tier content. https://diff.substack.com/
[1] I've just read «A Tale of two cities» which uses the French revolution for English entertainment.
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.
How did you determine this? Do you expect every single venture with forethought and planning to "succeed" (however you define that)?
Is it not prudent to assume that when the farmers made the decision to plant those trees, they did so with the best available information and "forethought" they had?
This isn't pristine old growth forest, it has no great ecology.
I've noted this elsewhere but "injustice" was semantically baked into the OP so I retained that wording but my brain really stretched the term here to align better with "wasteful". I can certainly argue to their equivalence but I think if multiple people have gotten hung up on the term I've committed a semantic misstep.
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.
Uneducated rice farmers in Bangladesh would understand the problem better than the people complaining about this.
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.
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.
Clingstones are best for mechanized processing, which needs the peach to physically hold itself together while the machine does its thing.
Consumers overwhelmingly prefer freestone peaches due to the ease at which they can be quartered and de-stoned by hand without making a total mess.
So on a personal level, my calm was greatly enhanced once I came across the full description of the crop type. There isn’t much use for clingstone outside of mechanized processing, as consumers just don’t want clingstone peaches due to how difficult they are to cut apart cleanly.
Source: orchardist in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, Canada’s western-end orchard region. I grow apples, but I know many other orchardists, including peach growers.
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.
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.
Asking as a person who buys about 4 lemons per year.
The best time to plant was a few years ago, the next-best time to plant is today.
This feels like a weird argument; you can decide you want to grow your own fruit today, plant that tree, and continue to buy fruit for the next few years until it's ready. This isn't rocket science. For most people it's not particularly likely that they're going to decide in the next few years that they don't like apples or lemons or whatever anymore.
Your lack of desire to either plan ahead or be patient doesn't invalidate the approach.
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.
Bankrupt everyone who grows peaches then?
There are actual costs in growing, harvesting, and delivering produce to market you know.
Just give it away still requires someone to pay for it
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.
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.
(Even with the ideal foresight to not produce those oranges in the first place, the people who wanted to eat them still wouldn't be able to eat them.)
You should realize - even when they themselves don't - that when people complain about wasteful destruction of e.g. food, what they're really complaining about is the distribution of wealth that made this destruction the sensible thing to do.
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.
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafting
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
That’s not to say that we can’t get amazing fruit in Massachusetts, but the selection is quite different. Apples, blueberries, raspberries, and cranberries are all fantastic. Oranges, peaches, sweet cherries, avocados, and many other things are mediocre at best. Getting great in-season fruit and produce is the primary reason why I now have a very large garden, but I need to temper my expectations even for some of the things I grow. Outside of a farmer’s market, this is the ONLY way to get a decent tomato in Massachusetts.
No thanks. The most wonderful strawberries I ever tasted were wild ones picked on a disused Welsh railway line, probably a centimetre or so in size.
But here in California, we have tremendous strawberries in our markets: Camarosa, Albion, Gaviota. Each is different in size, texture, flavor-profile.
I usually buy a "flat" of strawberries from the local farmer's market during peak season every weekend. They go in my oatmeal, my smoothies and in my lunches.
E.g: https://www.ocregister.com/2024/07/13/farmers-market-pops-up...
Some of the wild species taste better than the commercial species but those also tend to be too delicate to be commercially viable. It is a common problem for berries generally.
I tell you all this in hopes you'll understand what I mean when I say that the strawberries you can buy along the northern California coast are freaking amazing. I don't say that because I don't know any better. I say that because I've had S-tier wild fruit, and know from personal experience that these were every bit as delicious.
Ripe, Watsonville farm-stand strawberries are something else entirely. They can indeed be fist sized. I encourage you to try them yourself.
Alternatively, you can go to pick your own places along the way - also fantastic.
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.
The Sunnyvale farmers market was a different story though. Two of the vendors gave out samples. One of them tasted like Safeway strawberries. The other gave out these small strawberries that were really sweet, and this vendor had a lot more business even though their berries were $1 more expensive. However, the ones that the vendor actually sold were much bigger than the sample strawberries. I was suspicious, but bought them anyways. Sure enough, when I tried them, they tasted like Safeway strawberries. My takeaway from this experience is that America sells bad produce less so due to supply reasons and more so that Americans just have poor taste in produce.
Or maybe you don't generalize about an entire country based on your experience in one small city.
I love California, but it's funny/sad the extent to which many Californians deny that other parts of the USA have us beat in some regards.
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
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.
Been to Maui once, and this was pretty much my exact experience as well. Thought I was the only weird one to do that. I only slowed down though until it got really bad before stopping. Wish I was smarter to stop earlier ::face-palm::
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.
You would need revenue to cover such an expensive mode of transportation. Flying will probably be on the order of $20k. So you need $0.5/lb just for flight costs even if you can sell all of your peaches.
Today I bought very nice oranges from Spain, and super sweet and tasty fresh blueberries from Morocco. Price was same as usual in the supermarket.
I am sure the californian peaches could be sold at a reasonable profit , somewhere in the world, if there was actual demand. The problem I see : no demand for US produce.
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.
It's disgusting.
Real apple juice is dark brown and tastes nothing like the golden liquid mentioned above.
"Apple cider is raw, unfiltered, and often unpasteurized apple juice, resulting in a cloudy, dark appearance and rich, tart flavor. Apple juice is filtered to remove pulp, pasteurized for a longer shelf life, and often sweeter. Cider is usually seasonal and refrigerated, whereas juice is shelf-stable"
Europeans consistently visit a gas station and conclude this must be all there is to eat in America.
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.
I've observed the same thing; But my theory is taste in food is shaped by how recently a families lineage transitioned to processed foods and industrialized agricultural practices. e.g. I've observed a deterioration in taste in South Asia over the past 20 years, which I attribute to the same effect.
Um: My dad grew up in Iowa, so I'd be there seeing family every so often. Years ago it struck me how many Iowans I saw there were ... not svelte.
Iowa is a gigantic field corn, soybean, and pig farm with a few colleges, windmills, and one “city”. Commodity crops, not vegetables.
The one thing Iowa is known for is “loose meat sandwiches”, which is a Sloppy Joe with no tomato based sauce. Cuisine is not on the menu there ;)
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.
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.
https://www.hazelnutbargaining.com/
He switched to almonds and walnuts, which are less labor intensive and have better management on the processing side. But they are an export-heavy market and have also been hammered by the strong dollar. Inflation-adjusted crop prices are near all time lows while costs are at all-time highs. Farming is a hard business!
Farming is hard. I heard Urea prices are up 2x since the start of the year. How many farmers will go out of business because of that…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvLMH0wb_0k
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.
They overproduce for votes. Countries without farmer blocks swinging elections stockpile non-perishables for food security.
Overproduction is the method. Food security the aim. If they weren’t a swing voting block, the overproduction loses purpose.
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.
Also which government? Because there are at least 3-5 relevant ones here, maybe more.
That'd actually be quite easy for this particular federal government actually (current administration aside). And probably California too.
The DoD (for one) runs lots of logistics, warehousing, HR (2.8M), and finance stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_City_Army_Ammunition_Plan...
edit: Actually, they don't even need to take over the business. Another company is already operating it. The government could simply sign a contract to buy the 50,000 tons of canned peaches and the company would can them. Again, not to endorse the idea, but it is very straightforward logistically.
You said the government shouldn't do this because they lacked the expertise and (implicitly) would balls it up. I pointed out that it didn't require any expertise. That is all.
No. A government shouldn't do this unless canned peaches are especially important for national security or something like that.
Have a conversation with someone who grew up in communist USSR/Russia sometime... It definitely isn't cool.
If we had govt controlled food supply, we'd never have the likes of hot sauce (sriracha, pace, etc) and would likely never have seen a lot of options form. For better and far, far worse.
I don't know how it'd get to that if we had even more supply. I'm saying we'd be better off dealing with the problems of overproduction rather than the problems of unprofitable businesses and killing production capacity because it isn't profitable in the short-term.
I also never said you couldn't have non/not-for-profit food production, just that they shouldn't be for-profit.
If the government was responsible for running the farms, we would not have near the variety we have today... and for that matter, it would be much closer to soviet communism. I'm absolutely opposed to that.
And how do you know we would be better off? What would you do with oversupply? We had mountains full of cheese for decades from oversupply.. and that's a single product. Canned fruit doesn't even last that long before breaking down. The alternative is waste year after year, vs. cutting back and planting something else, which is what is happening... part of the market was allowed to fail (Del Monte) and part is being bailed out (farms) in defense of being able to have ongoing production, even if the product is different.
That seems far better than having mountains full of rotten peaches in cans.