Elementary Chef

Most of the year it’s so quiet at our place you can hear the flap of a bird’s wing, or a car going down the “big� road, half a mile away. In summer, there are times when I might be the only person in a couple of square miles, after our neighbors, few as they are, go to work.

Winter is a different story altogether. Harvest time.

They come one at a time, in their own cars, and in bunches on busses. The pickers come blessedly late; according to the weather. If it’s too cold, you can’t harvest lettuce, so they have to wait until any hint of frost goes away. In the fields in Yuma, there’s not much just-before-sunup work at this time of year.

The guys who run the massive equipment that helps in harvesting may have been working long into the night before, parking all kinds of trailers and tractors at the exact right spot for use in the morning. That’s noisy stuff; we’re glad to catch a few hours’ shuteye before the crews arrive.

Some years are amazing, the way things work out. I remember one day last season we had hundreds of pickers harvesting lettuce in the square mile around our house, all at the same time. I stood in the road one day, and tried to count the cars and busses, but eventually gave up and said, “Yep, there’s a lot of people out there!� ;>)

It is noisy all day. You’ve got the trucks and tractors and big packaging equipment running. Every now and then you’ll hear a brief few notes from somebody’s radio playing Tejano or Salsa or some other kind of music with a Hispanic flair. (The hip-hop, or heavy metal people seem to have different jobs.) You can hear the radios in the white pickup trucks that belong to management at full blast, shouting orders in Spanish. Now a lot of these guys have cell phones, but they still yell.

We often have pickers in the broccoli field right across the street. (I know, the politically correct term is probably “agricultural workers�, but what we say is pickers. Those who come earlier in the season for weeding purposes we call hoe-ers. ;>)

Hey, it is what they do. No dissing intended. It’s hard, awful, work out there in the mud and sun all day. I know I couldn’t last half a day in those jobs. Anyway, I digress.

I’m trying to think of a way to describe those extraordinary packing machines. Yes, they are huge. Imagine a single, albeit very large, tractor with a long metal framework extending out both sides for probably fifty feet. The machines don’t do the packing; the people do. All the machines do is hold the cellophane, the rubber bands, the boxes, as they work their way down multiple rows at the same time, with each person working one row. I say persons because the pickers are about equally divided between men and women, as far as I can tell. But for the short time they’re out there harvesting, this tranquil spot in the desert sounds for all the world like living down the road from GM’s Ypsilanti Stamping Plant. Or Zug Island. (If memory serves.)

Whether it’s individual bunches, heads for retail sale, or loose in boxes for the food service trade or salad plant, it’s now all mechanized. When I first moved here in 1986 we saw a phenomenon we called “the dancing lettuce.� Then you could see a long trailer with big open boxes, about four feet by four feet sitting on top. As the tractor pulling the trailer moved exceedingly slow down the rows, you could see lettuce appearing to jump up and down in the boxes. That’s because there were people on the other side picking the lettuce and tossing it up and over into the boxes. It was a cool sight, and I’m sorry to see it go. But it’s probably easier for everybody to do it differently now.

We have small fields, often divided into 20 or 40-acre parcels. It’s not like the Midwest, where you can see wheat or corn stretch off for miles. That’s because there is no rain in Yuma, or at least not enough to grow a crop. There is no free water coming out of the sky, so it has to come from somewhere else. The small parcels each have a little canal (otherwise called a ditch) that eventually feeds from the Yuma Main Canal. Farmers have to pay the irrigation district for the water, just as you pay your home water bill to your city or county.

There is an ancient joke that an Arizona farmer may well forget his wife’s birthday, or his anniversary, but he damn well remembers his day on the ditch.

The Big Daddy of All Canals, the All-American, is on the other side of the I-8 freeway, and feeds the Imperial Valley in California. But one way or another it all comes from the Colorado River.

After the produce is harvested, it goes away to a variety of shipping locations (gigantic refrigerated buildings called “coolers,� ) or the Dole Salad Plant we have here. They package those ready-made salads at your local grocery store.

The odd thing is, that due to the way things are shipped and handled, the chances of my getting broccoli from the field right here at my local Albertson’s is slim and none. Hard to know, anyway. Nearly all the produce grown here goes out in packages and boxes marked “Salinas, California,” which is where most of the produce distributors have their offices.

That might change this year, due to the Great California Spinach Scare. We’ll see!

lettuce, Arizona, produce, Yuma