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Discovering the Pluot: A Review of The Perfect Fruit by Chip Brantley

http://civileats.com/2010/03/05/discovering-the-pluot-a-review-of-the-perfect-fruit-by-chip-brantley/

March 5th, 2010  By Stacey Slate

At a farmers market in Los Angeles, Chip Brantley bit into a
plum-apricot hybrid, known as a “pluot,” and contrary to expectations
found that it was not mealy or tasteless but remarkably sweet and
juicy. As Brantley knows, lately consumers have been experiencing
unmemorable plum-eating experiences. Why do the nicest looking plums
often taste unremarkable?

In Brantley’s account, The Perfect Fruit, his fascination with the
breeding and production of stone-fruits is told through a story about
mad scientists and ambitious businessmen, leading him to the San
Joaquin Valley to investigate the consumer and producer ends of the
market. “The perfect fruit” implies that there is a better version of
the fruit we now consume; the challenge to a breeder is to discover it
and for the grower to introduce it to the consumer. Racing to create
the next novelty taste for our commodity-driven market, breeders,
growers and packers are infected with relentless, feverish
competition. This rivalry and contest is the subject of Brantley’s
look into stone-fruit breeding. In America, the story starts in the
20th century with the botanist, Luther Burbank (famously nicknamed
“The Wizard of Santa Rose”), best known for the eponymous potato and
the Santa Rosa plum.

“Viewing the work in retrospect,” wrote Burbank, “I assuredly have no
cause to regret that is was undertaken, yet it has been the most
laborious task.” There is such a thing as the “disease of fruit
breeding.” It is a phrase used by the third generation fruit breeder,
Floyd Zaiger, to describe his indefatigable obsession with inventing
new stone-fruit hybrids, one of which is trademarked as the “pluot.”
This hybrid took Zaiger nearly 20 years to achieve. “Bitten by the
dreaded disease of fruit breeding,” the now 84 year-old Floyd Zaiger
continues his experiments at Zaiger Genetics in the San Joaquin.

Through Brantley’s curiosity—his endless questions to key figures in
the stone-fruit industry, his personal recordings of travels in
California—we learn about seller and buyer relationships and stringent
governmental policy.  His findings illuminate a commodity-driven
market in which a breeder’s passion for invention clashes with a harsh
demand: crops must sell.

In part, Brantley’s research is a personal narrative, but his account
is also a precise explanation of the intricacies of the stone-fruit
market. Simple explanations, such as his definition for price look-up
codes (PLUs), help us to measure the size of the market: PLUs are
“based mostly on color and size. Four colors—red, black, green and
purple—have two codes each, one for large plums and one for small
plums.” Gauging the size of the industry as a whole by learning
important logistical classifications, one conjectures about the
individuality of a breeder or grower: how does he distinguish himself
in the marketplace? In a California valley loaded with crop
production, output numbers are daunting.

In the San Joaquin Valley, pistachio production is valued at $275
million, carrots at $315 million and citrus at $450 million. Grapes
are worth $600 million in sales and almonds weigh in at $500 million.
But the pressures of the commodity-driven market do not come entirely
from organizational methodology of the CTFA (California Tree Fruit
Agreement) and other government-regulated standards. There is the
supermarket to consider—a driving force behind a breeder’s quest for
new varieties—a grower’s obsession with consistency of the product, a
seller’s price per box, a buyer’s acceptance rate and the consumer’s
buying preferences. While the CTFA works to promote the nutritional
benefits of stone-fruit, the supermarket itself—by nature of display
and pricing—plays a huge part in the repeat sale of produce.

In the summer of Brantley’s explorations (part four of his story), we
reconsider why breeders and growers continue to strive for sales
within a tumultuous buyer’s market: it boils down to guts, glory and
competition. The stone-fruit market, as grower Ron Milton explains, is
a “moving target”—preferences change all the time. Organizational
control and government policy may stay relatively firm, but consumers’
tastes and expectations are fickle.

The “simple truth” about plums in the US is stated as Brantley’s
honest opinion: “they often suck. Not always. Maybe not even most of
the time. But often enough so that it feels risky to buy them.” Still,
in the San Joaquin Valley, new kinds of stone-fruit with unimaginable
tastes, shapes and textures, are quietly germinating, growing,
blossoming and hybridizing. Through Brantley’s pursuit, we meet the
great fruit breeders of this generation, and learn the history of the
plum and the science behind stone-fruit breeding. As breeders turn
select seeds into novel produce, they require not only dogged faith in
their toils but a tremendous amount of luck.