FRUIT
The first thing I did after Covid when I recovered my appetite and felt like eating was to buy fruit. Fruit is healthy and fruit is good for you and it tastes so good. Eating fruit makes me a better person. I bought cherries (handpicked the label said), oranges, apples, bananas, watermelon, blueberries, strawberries. They come washed and wrapped in cellophane and are all without spots or blemishes with none beginning to go bad. They are so easy to eat. I especially liked the cherries which are expensive any time of year but plentiful right now.
But as I ate my fruit I thought back to my Amtrak ride down the West Coast through orchards of all kinds in the north and then huge green irritated fields in the Salinas Valley south of San Francisco. Around the fields it was bone dry but in the fields were long pipes on huge rollers that moved slowly across the fields, irrigating them. And quite often out in the middle of nowhere there would be twenty or thirty cars parked, a parking lot with nothing around it but fields and then in the distance lines of farm workers who had driven their cars to pick the crops in the hot sun. Much or my fruit comes from California where they are running out of water and Mexicans pick the crops by hand. Wherever my fruit comes from, California, Florida, Mexico or Guatemala, it is picked by hand. And when I fret about inflation raising the price of food it is probably not because these workers in the hot sun with big floppy hats are being paid more now. Somewhere else in the supply chain something is pushing up prices.
The fruit I get is spotless because someone sorts out the damaged fruit and it goes into orange or apple juice or strawberry jam which is also hard manual labor.
So as I eat my fruit or drink coffee I also realize that I am able to do it because the West Coast states, which are running out of water, are still for awhile using what they have while they have it to grow fruit and vegetables. And the fruit is as clean and beautiful and cheap as it is because someone is picking it by hand, probably paid by the bushel, in the hot sun.
I don’t have a solution to this and wouldn’t even be thinking of it if I hadn’t seen it for myself out the train window, mile after mile. So I don’t think about it very long and or think about any of the other ways my comfortable lifestyle contributes to the discomfort of others or to the rapidly changing world. But today I thought about it briefly.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 