Bing

My ride home takes me through South Sacramento where I can almost always find a Mexican or two selling fruit on our hot afternoons. One guy in particular at Lemon Hill and Samson is very nice, has a passion for what he's selling and is knowledgeable about his products.

Early last month I bought a good two pounds of Bing cherries from him and asked where they came from. He said Stockton, and with a little more prodding I discovered they were from a specific orchard near Peters, which I guess you could call Stockton West. My cherries (at five bucks a bag) traveled maybe 65-70 miles to get to me, presuming they didn't have to first get processed through some distribution facility down in Fresno or some shit like that; and these didn't. His mangoes and watermelons were most decidedly non-local and he knew about his fruits. Name me one supermarket checker who'd know where the lemons come from.

70 miles. Not too bad when you consider most supermarket items travel 1,300 miles on average.

These Bings were good, although I still prefer the earlier sweet double cherries. I don't know what variety these are and I'd like to find out.

Then last week I'm biking home and the guy has Ranier and Bing cherries on the table and again, the price is 5 bucks a bag. Rainer sounds like Washington. I opted for the Bings, but as I was loading them in my bike pannier I asked again if these came from the same Stockton orchard and he laughed, "oh no, our local cherries ended last month, these are from Eastern Washington...same as the Raniers."

Hmmm...in the back of my mind I knew that our cherry season was over; it was damn near mid-July. But I bought them anyway. They travelled a minimum of 890 miles to get to me. But the price was the same?

I would really like to be able to calculate the true incremental cost of an additional 820 miles but I have no good way to do this. I tried with my Eggplant calculation last year, but I was focused on carbon. What about just plain old dollars? And who in the supply chain ate that incremental cost, because it wasn't me, the cherry "consumer."

I can only imagine that the majority of "local" fruit and vegetable stands quite often supply foods grown hundreds of miles away. It feels like they'd be harvested in the next town over but that's all it is: a feeling. The same feeling is used to get you to buy green products, to get you to think that WalMart is all about being the greenest retailer in existence, to get you to think that the shit you buy is natural when it required a few gallons of petroleum distillates to get it to you. Even I was duped, and while I could have made a better choice here I didn't. I'm as much Merikan as everyone else.