Survival of a Last-Chance Peach

Ten years have passed since farmer David Mas Masumoto wrote his epitaph for a peach that nobody wanted, a peach with “flesh so juicy it oozes down your chin,” a peach with “a natural perfume that can never be captured,” a peach that “tastes like a peach is supposed to.”

His 1987 essay in The Times editorial pages about his obsolete Sun Crest peaches and his plans to bulldoze them to make room for a more market-friendly variety got people’s attention. Strangers called him at his home near Fresno urging him to keep his peaches; they wrote letters begging him to keep up the fight for food with flavor.

When the bulldozer arrived, Masumoto turned it back. He decided to give his Sun Crest peaches one last shot. He gave himself a year to find an audience for his peaches. Maybe if he grew his peaches without pesticides and sold them as organic, his peaches would find a home. The events of that year became material for the award-winning book by Masumoto, “Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm” (HarperCollins, 1995).

“In trying to save my Sun Crest peaches,” he wrote in the book, “I discover that they are more than just food, they are part of a permanence, a continuity with the past.”

This was a farmer who had once persuaded his father to replace a field of Le Grand nectarines with a more profitable vineyard for raisins. They were nectarines that, as Masumoto wrote, “had the same quality as my Sun Crests, wonderful taste but poor color, luscious fruit that no one wanted.”

If he could change his views, maybe the industry could as well.

These days, Masumoto is still growing Sun Crest peaches and the flavorless industry he described back in 1987 has begun to change. Last week, on vacation in the Midwest between his peach and raisin harvests, Masumoto talked by telephone about the future of peaches.

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Question: In your book, you wrote that the peach brokers you dealt with didn’t want to hear about your Sun Crest peaches. They didn’t want to hear about flavor. They wanted to hear about shelf-life and they wanted to hear about color. Have things changed in the peach industry since you wrote the book?

Answer: Things have changed. Not fast enough for me. But things have changed. I go by this 20% theory--that there’s 20% of the people now paying more attention to flavor and quality, which is enough of a critical mass to start changing the whole industry. With just a few voices here and there, everyone scoffed at us: “No one wants good-tasting peaches.” Well, 20% market share, if you want to call it that, is enough to start turning heads. And once a few heads start turning, then a larger chain will come in and say, “Well, hey, we need to pay more attention.” We’re still going through the process of getting to that next step, though.

Q: Is there one thing you noticed that told you, yes, change is really happening?

A: From the farmers’ viewpoint, one of the things I’ve noticed most is a change in the way a lot of the nurseries sell us different varieties of fruit. They always used to advertise new varieties with three-week shelf live and red color. They never mentioned how they taste, how they eat. Now you look through their catalogs and they’ll say: “Eats well, wonderful flavor.” So you know they’re getting the message.

Q: It’s not easy, though, for larger operations than yours to emphasize flavor.

A: It’s difficult because taste is a very subjective element. And as farming becomes more of an industry, those subjective things are hard to grapple with. The factory farm wants things to be based on quantity as opposed to quality, because then you can quantify the costs of how to make a peach. On the other hand, from my perspective, it’s essential that we maintain the quality. I want that human element as part of that peach, as part of that flavor. It’s what differentiates us from processed food.

You know, we have a wonderful treasure in a good-tasting peach. If you buy processed food, you get consistency, but you never are surprised.

Q: Some retailers have started promoting tree-ripened peaches--a sign that they know more people are looking for flavor. What does tree-ripened mean to you as a farmer? Is it a different standard than what I might have as a consumer?

A: It’s another subjective element. Tree-ripe to me is going to be different than my neighbor’s tree-ripe, which is going to be different from somebody else’s tree-ripe. So it’s almost a buyer beware type of thing. Part of me doesn’t want a standard because I think it’s kind of ridiculous to have those kind of things. On the other hand, it’s tough when a consumer buys a peach that is marketed as tree-ripe and it’s no different than the typical rock-hard peaches that unfortunately a lot of people get. Then everyone says, “See, these peaches are lousy,” and they never go back or even look at a peach.

The good thing is that this whole movement toward quality as opposed to quantity has begun to move through the distribution channels. We’re all kind of groping for these kinds of common definitions, common language. And even from the grower’s side, there’s been a lot of talk about what is tree-ripe and how you can determine that. Ultimately the market sorts things like that out on its own. Consumers will tell retailers if they’ve got the right definition or not when they make a decision whether to buy a tree-ripened peach again or not.

Q: Tell me about this year’s harvest. What were the peaches like this year?

A: This year the quality was good. It wasn’t the best year. But it was good. We had a fairly mild winter and a warm spring, which meant everything was about two weeks early this year. We finished about the middle of July. Being two weeks ahead, you sort of stumble a little at the beginning and it’s hard to catch your balance because no one’s prepared.

Phone calls are made saying, “Here come Masumoto peaches, are you ready?” “Oh, no,” they say, “we still have cherries on the shelf.”

Q: Once your peaches are off the tree, what happens? Do you get a response from retailers or from customers?

A: This year we tried to coordinate the whole journey of a peach much better. The peaches went all over California and through parts of the Midwest.

And when you’re dealing with a different product, be it my peaches or someone else’s tree-ripened peach, you have to have all the partners along the way “get it.” Because it just takes one bad link to break the whole thing. A peach that’s riper than normal just can’t sit on the dock that extra day in 90-degree weather in Chicago. And if the forklift driver doesn’t quite get that, we’re in trouble. That’s why when you make these changes in an industry, everyone, including the forklift driver, has to be educated that those peaches need to go into cold storage quick. You don’t have that little cushion that you used to have. On the other hand, if people get it, boy, you can get a dynamite peach on the other end. Everybody wins.

Q: Before you made the decision to grow your Sun Crest peaches organically, did you pay this much attention to what happened after the peaches left your farm?

A: The conventional marketplace looks at peaches as acommodities. And commodities are just numbers, which means I’d pick it, I’d pack it, it would go into cold storage. That’s it. Hasta la vista. I’d have no clue where they went. And the old way of marketing used to be: No news is good news. You didn’t want to hear because you only heard negative stuff--if you had an arrival problem or if a retailer demanded some kind of price adjustment because the product wasn’t good. So you wanted that anonymity built into your produce, which is exactly the opposite of how I think produce should be done.

I like to drop in at a few of the retail places and talk to the produce managers about the peaches or do in-store tastings. I think there should be more personalization of produce. We are starting to see more names now attached to certain produce and more product identification in terms of, “This is a Sun Crest peach,” or “This is an Elegant Lady peach.” Consumers see that and say, “Oh, I like those kind of peaches.” A peach is not a peach is a peach.

Q: It’s interesting that even as the food industry gets bigger and bigger, farmers like you are managing to make it seem smaller too.

A: Exactly. There are millions of pounds of peaches sold every year, millions of people buying what I consider fairly tasteless peaches. I’m not saying they’re wrong; they’re paying good money for peaches that are satisfying to them, and my goal isn’t to try to change those people. It’s just to try to say, well, maybe there’s an alternative. And I think there are enough people out there who are looking for that peach, the peach they remember from their childhood or the peach that they know can have a rich flavor. I don’t need to change the world; I just need to change a few things.

Of course, the irony is that the more successful these little fringe changes are, the more things start edging toward the mainstream. And that’s why you see a big supermarket chain starting to deal with tree-ripe.

Q: It surprises some people that you don’t sell your peaches at farmers markets, where there is a built-in audience for your peaches.

A: We’re just not set up for it. With the Sun Crest peach, I’ll have about 80 tons of peaches that ripen in 10 to 14 days. That’s a lot of farmers markets.

If I went the farmers market route, I possibly could change things: In other words, plant less of one variety, stagger them through three or four months of the summer. It’s in the back of my mind. I have a 12-year-old daughter who would love to go down to the Santa Monica farmers market, make money Saturday morning and have a great time after, seeing art and doing all the cultural things she can’t do here. We have a family farm, which means the business of farming should be built around family. She knows her father’s work, and when I think of that statement and how rare it is for children to know the work of their family, I think, hmmm, that’s important. So, we’ll see.

Q: You’ve got a son growing up in the business too.

A: Yeah, he’s 6 now and he’s just wonderful. He loves to tag along with me in the fields doing everything that a 6-year-old farm boy should be doing: throwing rocks and playing with irrigation water, getting stuck in the mud and picking up sticks and saying, “Look, a sword.” Actually, I think the sticks start out as snakes and when they break, they become swords.

Q: In the book, you wrote about your mother and father helping to pick, sort and pack a specialty harvest of peaches. Do your parents still help out?

A: Oh yeah, we still do a specialty pack with the whole family. This year was an interesting year. My father had a stroke. And it was a big question of: What happens? The wonderful thing is that he recovered fairly well in time for the harvest. It was wonderful to see him back out. We were family again. It really made you understand that power in needing a family. And for him, being able to do this was important. I mean, he’s a farmer. And what do farmers do? They harvest. It makes you realize what’s important. And it has nothing to do with markets, it has nothing to do with prices. It has to do with the chance to have my father out there in the fields, doing the family business.

Q: What are you planting for the future?

A: I just grafted over another two acres to fill a gap in our harvest needs. Some of my neighbors thought I was foolish because I grafted over to an old variety. Again, a wonderful taste, doesn’t have the best cosmetics. I’m kind of stubborn.

Q: What’s this one called?

A: It’s called Flavorcrest. It comes out about the second week in June. And the trees will be bearing in about three years. Just about in time for my daughter’s 16th birthday. I think it’s going to work. And if it doesn’t, well, I did it for the right reasons.