FRESH DEMAND: THE CONSUMPTION OF CHILEAN PRODUCE IN THE USA W.L. Goldfrank University of California, Santa Cruz wally@cats.ucsc.edu Paper presented at the XIX Annual PEWS Conference, April 16-18, 1992, Duke University, Durham, NC "Do I dare to eat a peach?"--T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" When T.S. Eliot's bewildered and alienated modern Everyman walked along the beach asking himself this question, surely his mind focussed neither on pesticide residues, nor vitamins and minerals, nor his middle-age spread, nor his food budget, nor the political morality of supporting dictators, nor yet the proprieties or status meanings of consuming relatively expensive counter-seasonal produce. Presumably we have come a long way from the confused indecisiveness of poor Prufrock, because we spend millions of dollars to eat peaches year round, and not only peaches but grapes, nectarines, plums, cherries, raspberries, kiwis, and many more. A growing number of social scientists has in fact turned increasing attention to the internationalization of the fresh produce business, not long ago limited to local, regional, and national channels with the exception of a few items like bananas and coconuts. For understandable reasons--above all the economic importance of this business to the producing zones in the periphery and semi-periphery, virtually all of this attention has gone to the growing, packing, and transportation of these commodities, virtually none to their distribution, marketing, and consumption. It is this imbalance I mean to help correct in what follows. CONTEXTS Several overlapping and intersecting contexts surround my subject, as it were, among them the changing diet of affluent and middle-income consumers in the core countries, the rise in produce exports as part of Chile's neo-liberal economic reorientation, and the aforementioned internationalization of the fresh produce business itself. Starting with the last of these, we can refer to Friedland's (1991) provisional summary of what researchers studying produce internationalization have learned to date. First, the social definition of "fresh" has come to mean "not ostensibly processed," or made into something visibly different, although many human hands have touched the commodities themselves before they reach the consumer. "Sell it or smell it" is the industry watchword, and governmental regulatory agencies police the use of the term "fresh," recently banning its use, for example, to describe reconstituted frozen orange juice. Second, with the exception of one product (bananas) and one very small market segment (the carriage trade), internationalization is a phenomenon of the last twenty years. The tables presented by Friedland reveal a world-wide quadrupling of fresh fruit and vegetable exports between the early 1970s and the mid-1980s, and growth of at least another fifty percent from that point to the end of the decade. (These tables do not, unfortunately, separate out the intra-core and core-periphery dimensions; we know that intra-European commerce comprises an important proportion, much of it intra-core rather than involving semi-peripheral Portugal or Greece.) Third, four innovations are driving expansion in this sector: the availability of counter-seasonal produce thanks to the development of long-distance cool chains; the growth of a mass clientele for fresh as opposed to canned or frozen produce; further differentiation of the produce market with niches for new varieties as well as new products (so-called exotics); and the possibilities for value-adding at the retail level, increasing ease of preparation as with pre-washed and cut salads, pre-cored and peeled pineapples, and microwaveable trays of mushrooms. (These last are now available, thanks to a Santa Cruz firm, with a choice of four sauces including an "Oriental" and a "Mexican" option which supermarkets are encouraged to feature in their Chinese New Year and 5 de Mayo promotions.) Taking a step beyond Friedland, one could assert that the internationalization of the fresh produce business implies a large-scale move toward the wholesalers' and retailers' dream of supplying affluent consumers everywhere with a complete line of temperate and tropical commodities throughout the calendar year, yet another triumph of capitalism over nature. The second context for my subject is the neoliberal reorientation of the Chilean economy, in which produce exports have come to account for a significant proportion of both foreign exchange (about ten percent in 1989) and waged employment (perhaps as much as fifteen percent). In previous papers (Goldfrank 1989, 1990) and in collaborative work with Gomez (1991)--not to mention his and others' publications (e.g., Gomez & Echenique 1988)--many aspects of the Chilean produce boom have been analyzed. In terms of commodity chains, these include such upstream activities as research and development, technological transfer, input sourcing, infrastructural investments, and labor supply; they include the organization of production itself among large, sometimes multinational corporations as well as medium and small growers, and their relations with packers and shippers. We have discussed as well some downstream activities, especially pertaining to transportation. Finally, we have analyzed the changes in Chile's rural class structure that facilitated the emergence of both a dynamic market in land and a desperate low-wage labor force. But the marketing and consumption of Chilean fruit have received only passing mention, enumeration of some aspects, no more. As for the third context, in all this work we have insisted, as has Friedland in his appraisal of internationalization, that a major factor causing the produce boom is dietary change among the core countries' upper and middle strata. Gomez (1991, p. 10) recently went so far as to call this change .ul "the essential new fact" accounting for the Chilean agroexport boom. There are many ways to characterize this shift in the upper third or so of the income hierarchy, and as Mintz (1985, ch. 5) pointed out in his pioneering study of the promotion and consumption of sugar, the meat-and-potatoes habit of the wealthier Euro-Americans in the modern era is an historical and cross-civilizational aberration from the standard dietary pattern of "grain-plus" or core-carbohydrate "fringed" by other foods. The current shift, however, encompasses more than a departure from a carnicentric diet, and more than a return to the historical norm: it includes variations on an entire complex of such value-themes as nutrition, health, fitness, convenience, and cosmopolitanism. And this shift is happening very fast: the Harvard health letter reported last year that whereas in 1982 56% of faculty at the medical school ate red meat four or more times a week, in 1991 that proportion had dropped to 11% (Nutrition Action, 19, 3 April 1992, p. 2). The following is another example, this one from the mass media: advice columnist Abigail Van Buren, "Dear Abby," recently printed a letter from a Minnesota woman (SF Chronicle, March 27, 1992): My fiance and I are very compatible except in our eating habits. I love just about everything, including fruits, vegetables and ethnic foods (Chinese, Mexican, etc.). The problem is that he is very much a meat-and- potatoes man and refuses to touch anything he has never had before. I am very scared that after we're married, our food differences will end up causing huge problems....Have you any suggestions? Ms. Van Buren recommends seeing a dietician or the prospective family physician, tells her huge readership that the traditional U.S. diet is worse than unhealthy, and predicts that unless the man wises up, the couple "will disagree three times a day for as long as [the] marriage (or [the] husband) lasts." Are we witnessing the emergence of a "produce-stand" ethic? One measure of how important fresh produce has become is the volume of market research and economic analysis it has generated. Relying on much of this research, Roberta L. Cook (1990) tells us the following about contemporary trends in the demand for produce. New product development in food accelerated in the 1980s, reaching 12,055 in 1989; the average supermarket produce department sold 65 items in 1975 but 210 in 1988. The changing age structure of the US population augurs well for produce sellers: those 55-64 years old buy 39% more fresh fruit and 34% more fresh vegetables than the national average. Aging baby boomers will want higher quality as well as larger quantities as they move into their peak earning years. Cook documents the increasingly clear division into "upscale and downscale markets," citing a Food Institute finding that households above the $40,000 income mark spend over 25% more on fresh produce than those earning between $20,000 and $30,000. She cites data showing an inverse correlation between household size and produce expenditure and indicating the preference of working women for convenience foods. She documents the trend toward fresh ("1988 was the first year that fresh vegetable consumption equalled processed" [p. 69]) and suggests that sometimes increasing health and nutrition awareness conflicts with the desire for convenience. What she fails to say, however, is that this is precisely where fresh fruit comes in, as it requires virtually no preparation beyond washing or peeling or cutting. Table grapes, by far the largest single Chilean agricultural product shipped to the US, have yet another advantage: they lend themselves to perfectly calibrated portion control. PORTS OF ENTRY The first link in the commodity chain is at harborside, principally greater Philadelphia for the markets east of the Rockies and Los Angeles for the West Coast. Shipping from Valparaiso is about a day shorter and ten cents a box cheaper to the eastern US--due north via the Panama Canal, and consumption of Chilean fruit is greater in the East and West than in the Midwest and South by 40-50%, due partly to differences in class composition, partly to lags in cultural trends, and partly to ease of transportation from these ports of entry, which have major advantages in cooled warehousing capacity and refrigerated trucking services. The port of Houston has failed to make much of a mark in the receiving business, and with the Chapter 11 reorganization of International Cargo Network, the major importer, it appears that for 1992 at least, Philadelphia and Los Angeles/Long Beach will handle virtually all of the deal. But Gulfport, Mississippi and Tampa, Florida are bidding to compete in the southern sector of the eastern market; the former already handles large volumes of Central American fruit and offers two fewer days and hence $40-50,000 lower costs per ship than Philadelphia. And other cities are bidding to compete with the established centers: Seattle, Tacoma, San Francisco, and San Diego on the Pacific; New Bedford, Wilmington, Baltimore, Norfolk, and Miami on the Atlantic. Initial inquiry into the port actvities of unloading, inspecting, warehousing, and trucking Chilean fruit led me to a paper presented by LaRue and Heinzelmann (1990) at the 2nd International Fruit Congress held in Santiago in late November 1990. Its authors are Executive Director of the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority and Director of Port Operations of the Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA); the DRPA has an office in Santiago to facilitate its dealings with Chilean shippers and growers. The major impression derived from this paper is the strength of the transnational sectoral alliance between Chileans and North Americans. The paper describes how over the previous three years the latter used the ideology of free trade to lobby Congress and the federal bureaucracy to remove the restrictions of US marketing orders limiting imports which might compete with California produce. It recounts multimillion dollar public investments on both banks of the Delaware, investments in warehouse modernization and refurbishing, cooling and heating facilities. It boasts of Philadelphia's having dispatched 25,000 truckloads of Chilean fruit during the previous (1989-1990) season, 1500 a week at the peak, via its excellent freeway system and its enormous fleet of "reefer" (i.e., refrigerated) trucks. It mentions that within a 300-mile radius of Philadelphia live 60 million consumers, or 25% of the US market; within 500 miles, 36%; within 1000 miles, 64%. It describes an industry-wide conference at which the ILA assured that not even a strike would interfere with the unloading operations, the federal government assured tha inspection would be routine and speedy, and the port assured that it could manage increasing volumes of fumigation. Further, stevedores were to receive increased training in how to handle delicate produce so as to minimize damage, and newspapers' food editors were to attend another round of workshops to further publicize the commodity. Then comes perhaps their most revealing datum: Chilean fruit represents about 700,000 man-hours of dockwork alone, more than one-third of the port's annual total. No wonder, then, that the DRPA and the Philadelphians are eager to please their commercial allies in Chile. WHOLESALING PRODUCE To the observer first encountering the wholesale business, it appears as a motley array of firms, both in terms of size and in terms of the degree of specialization. Local, regional, national, and international markets are variously serviced by everything from transnational integrated packer-shippers with brand name goods to single-commodity specialists. Some firms operate in spatially concrete terminal markets in large metropolitan areas, others deliver directly to supermarket chain central warehouses (for a detailed description, see How 1991). In terms of handling Chilean produce, the giant multinationals Dole and Chiquita-Frupac deal directly with retail merchants, including those imports along with all the other fresh commodities they sell. Before its acquisition by Chiquita, Frupac had worked through independent jobbers in California, but in 1991 achieved vertical integration. David Del Curto, the largest of all the Chilean grower-shippers and and the only one of the largest firms wholly owned by Chileans, sells to retailers and local wholesalers through Jac Vandenberg on the East Coast and David Oppenheimer on the West Coast. Another large Chilean firm, with significant participation by Dutch capital, is Frutas Naturales, which markets its fruit under the brand name "Clee." Before the current season, they linked up with Florida-based DNE World Fruit Sales, the largest independent shipper of Florida citrus. This kind of integration appears to be growing in produce distribution, and independents such as Sbrocco International find themselves wholesaling internationalized lines that include along with a Chilean grapes and stone fruits such items as Italian chestnuts, Spanish clementines, and Caribbean melons. Yet another type of player in this market is Pandol, the Delano, CA firm specializing in table grapes, a firm which early on became involved in importing Chilean grapes. In the past few years, in partnership with the Chilean firm Andina, Pandol has started growing grapes in Chile's northernmost producing zone near Copiapo, in a valley similar to the Coachella which yields a harvest in November before the principal zones to the south begin theirs. PROMOTION Advertising and promotion are essential to the commercial success of new products, and the Chileans have been quick to understand their value. To be sure, nothing in the produce business approaches the megabucks spent by Nike or Reebok to sell athletic shoes. For years the Chileans have concentrated on inexpensive radio spots and in-store displays, but recently the advertising agency representing the Winter Fruit Association and the public relations firm working with the Chilean Exporters Association have been branching out in new directions. For example, video recordings depicting growing, harvesting, and packing are now available for in-store viewing. And for the 1991-92 season, a Chilean tour was organized for food writers and editors from six major "women's" magazines (e.g., Ladies Home Journal), four major newspapers, and two television food shows. According to the public relations executive, the editors will among other things visit Chilean families "so they can learn first-hand that Chilean society is a current counterpart to that in the United States" (The Packer, 1/11/92, p. 4D). Newspaper advertising by supermarket chains and independent grocers is another vehicle of promotion. In the course of the 1991-1992 season, Chilean fruit was featured or mentioned almost weekly, occasionally as a loss leader, more often as one of several special "buys" of the week, sometimes as simply available. Having followed this sort of promotion for the last few years, my distinct impression is that the newspaper treatment has helped to normalize Chilean fruit, to make it a routinely expectable and affordable item among others. Sometimes the advertisements label it as "Chilean," sometimes as "South American," sometimes as merely "imported." But its treatment is no different from Washington apples, or Texas onions, or other featured products, although it is different from Mexican produce, whose country of origin rarely receives mention in the advertisements. RETAILING Supermarket chains, independents, and greengrocers account for most produce retailing, although restaurants and hotels provide an alternate route to the final consumer. In the latter connection several aspects deserve mention, among them the boundary between the upscale mass market and the carriage trade, and the competitive struggle for preference as a garnish among grapes, parsley, strawberries, and pickles. The presentation of entrees, as shown in photographed spreads in the glossy magazines, may include small bunches of flame or Thompson seedless for color and for a suggestion of Roman luxury. Restaurant and hotel purveyors tend to be more interested in such air-shipped luxury items as raspberries and asparagus than in table grapes and stone fruit: the whole point of "dining out" (as opposed to fast food or middle mass convenience eating outside the home) is to escape from the quotidian and to assert--if only for one evening--one's difference from and superiority to the hoi polloi. But direct retailing to the public accounts for by far the largest proportion of produce sales, and within this category, chain supermarkets have the largest market share--and it is growing. In Great Britain, nine chains now do 70% of the produce retailing, and as Ian Cook (1991) describes, the leaders among them have made significant efforts to increase consumer knowledge and purchases of imports, including exotics he calls "vanity" foods. In the USA, supermarkets have in the last decade increased the size and attractiveness of their produce departments. These are now estimated to account for 15% of profits on only 9% of sales, and with one minor exception, shoppers on "stock-up," "routine," or "fill-in" trips are more likely to make a produce purchase than any other single acquisition. DARING TO EAT THE PEACH: THE CONSUMER Here I present fragmentary data from two sources, a professional national sample survey [1] and home-grown semi-structured interviews. 1[Market research on imported fresh fruit was kindly made available to me by Vance Research Services, which conducts the national sample survey reported annually in .ul Fresh Trends, a glossy publication of .ul The Packer, the weekly newspaper of the produce business.] 1992 was the first year in which the national produce survey included questions on fresh fruit imports, a fact which itself is a significant indicator of their growing importance. Consumers were asked if they saw or purchased (% saw, % purchased) New Zealand kiwis (59%-43%), Chilean table grapes (37%-29%), Chilean tree fruit (30%-21%), and Central American melons (26%-16%). Males were significantly more likely to report having seen and bought Chilean fruit than females (49% to 35% seeing grapes, 40% to 28% seeing tree fruit; 36% to 27% buying grapes, 28% to 19% buying tree fruit). The data on age are more intriguing, with noticing and buying both more likely in the older generation, but a significantly greater proportion of those who notice also purchasing among the younger age groups. Thus 26% of the 18-29 year-olds saw Chilean grapes in the market, compared to 47% of those over 60; but 20% of the 18-29 group bought them as compared to 33% of the older group. For tree fruit the difference is more pronounced: 22% of the young noticed and 18% bought, whereas among the older consumers 40% saw but only 22% bought. Not surprisingly, residents of the Northeast and West were more likely to see and to buy Chilean fruit than those of the North Central U.S. or the South. But there were no differences among the regions in the purchasing behavior of those who recall seeing Chilean fruit in their markets. As for income, households with more than $50,000 led the lower brackets in likelihood of seeing and purchasing, although the relationship between income and consumer behavior is not monotonic--the $35K-50K group trails both the $12.5K-22.5K and $22.5K-35K groups. Unfortunately, the data do not say anything about the volume or frequency of these purchases. But they do reveal judgements about quality. Chilean grapes were rated as excellent by 15%, good by 62%, fair by 18%, poor by 1%, and inconsistent by 3%. For tree fruit, the proportions are excellent--11%, good--54%, fair--23%, poor--5%, and inconsistent--6%. These quantitative data reinforce the hope among Chilean producers that U.S. sales have considerable potential for augmentation in the future. Winter grape consumption is less than half that of summer; there clearly exist produce consumers who have not yet discovered the Chilean product. As for more qualitative data, in the winter of 1992, I conducted about thirty focussed interviews with a non-random sample of shoppers and consumers, in an effort to go behind the numbers, to discern some of the cultural meanings and attitudes surrounding Chilean winter fruit in the U.S. market. Some excerpts from my respondents' answers deserve quotation (my questions are in parentheses). ----Norma T. buys Chilean grapes from her New York neighborhood greengrocer and also from a street vendor's cart near her midtown office. At 25, she is a college graduate who scuba dives, jogs, and bicycles; she describes herself as "addicted" to sushi and to highly spiced Asian and Mexican foods. She reports: "I love Chilean grapes, especially the red ones. They're so crucnchy, they taste so fresh. (Does price matter?) Not at all, unless it's out of sight. I usually pay a dollar and a half for a nice bunch from the cart on the corner. I used to eat pretzels or bagels or even sometimes a hot dog. No more. No way." ----Sarah S. described her discovery of Chilean nectarines as a revelation. Approaching 50, she works as a middle manager in a Bay Area county's statistical service. With her attorney husband (they are so-called DINKs, double income, no kids), she enjoys a comfortable six-figure houssehold income that allows for frequent dining out, strenuous world travel to eco-tourist hot spots, and more scuba diving. Since she often jogs at lunch hour, she prefers to eat at her desk, typically a meal of nonfat cottage cheese and sliced nectarines. "The flavor's as good or better than the summer ones from California. I have them almost every day.... They don't cost too much, especially compared to eating out. They make me feel healthy. (Do you worry about pesticide residues or other chemicals?) Not really. Not from Chile. I just associate that country with cleanliness, high standards. Not like Mexico, I'm a little afraid of Mexican cantaloupes and veggies. (You seem to know a lot about produce.) Oh yeah, I have my own vegetable garden and some fruit trees. Some weeks that's all I eat, well, with grains or something. (Do you want to live forever?) Not really. But I can't stand the idea of being inactive or feeble or chronically ill. I mean, when it happens I just want to drop or die in my sleep as healthy as I am right now." ----Polly M. gives the appearance of middle class prosperity as she watches the checker total her grocery bill one February morning. I notice a sizeable number of Chilean plums in her cart. (Do you like those Chilean plums?) "Oh. They're from Chile? I didn't know that. Yeah, this time of year you can't get a decent tomato. I buy these for my salads." ----Andrea M. is a middle-aged staff worker in a university office. She battles her tendency to gain weight with Chilean grapes. "It's a treat, you know, something a little special that's better for me than cookies or pastry. I need treats, sometimes more than once a day. Coming from the far North [she is a native of Saskatchewan] I can't believe I'm eating grapes in January. They just help keep me going." William and Laura H. are Californian political progressives and professional edducators with adult children and a substantial income. They admit to obsessing about their food consumption and their budget; they buy Chilean fruit throughout the winter. They explain this seeming extravagance with reference to their overall shopping basket: "We used to buy a lot of meat, good meat, expensive, lean cuts. Now we don't see meat unless it shows up in somethng Thai or Chinese. Even over a dollar a pound it's [fruit] a lot cheaper than beef or lamb. And there's no cholesterol, zero. (Ever boycott grapes?) Oh, sure, even picketed at the Safeway. For years I would never buy grapes except at a farmers' market. But I got into the Chilean stuff a couple of winters ago, right around when they got rid of the dictator, you know, what's his name, Pinochet. Now I'm hooked. (How's the quality?) Great, really good, except, um, sometimes the peaches. Well, the California peaches can be pretty mediocre too, you know, they're not like France or Italy." What are these respondents telling us about themselves and this commodity? Foremost seems to be a concern with health, part narcissism, part dread. To be overweight, or to show "symptoms" of aging is frightening. It perhaps defies analysis to disentangle the status-marking and social acceptability aspects of so-called healthy eating from the rational effort to avoid illness, but for this middle to upper-middle end of the stratification hierarchy, red meat approaches tobacco as a taboo. Strong moral overtones accompany the emphasis on healthy eating, as if the working class and the poor deserve to be sicker because they do not take good enough care of themselves. A privatized form of prayerful communion with produce--combined with the ardent pursuit of exercise--has replaced reading the Bible as the indivdual's path to salvation. But this new "produce-stand" ethic is simultaneously a hedonistic one: both the food consumption and the physical exercise bring sensual pleasure even as they represent self-discipline and self denial. CONCLUSION It is perhaps worth recalling the original meaning which Karl Marx gave to the concept of the fetishism of commodities, that is, the way the appearance of things conceals relationships of social and economic power. This paper has attempted to convey the final steps in a long chain of such relationships, which are routinely hidden from the consciousness of health- and status-seeking consumers. In our contemporary conquest of nature, we have come to take for granted the availability of many goods that were once produced by our own or our neighbors' quite visible hands, in plain view, displayed and sold perhaps at local farmers' markets. Now the livelihoods of thousands of workers and commercial intermediaries depend on the changing and partially manipulated consumer preferences of a global upper stratum disproportinately located in North America, Western Europe, and Japan. Too much knowledge of the exploitation of human beings and/or the spoliation of nature required to satisfy those preferences could leave a bad taste in their mouths. .bp REFERENCES Cook, Ian. 1991. "New Fruits and Vanity: Highlighting the Role of Symbolic Production in the Global Food Economy." Paper presented at the International Multidisciplinary Conference on the Globalization of the Agricultural and Food Order, June 2-6, Columbia, MO. Cook, Roberta L. 1990. "Challenges and Opportunities in the U.S. Fresh Produce Industry." .ul J. of Food Distribution Research. February. Pp. 67-74. Friedland, William H. 1991. "The New Globalization: The Case of Fresh Produce." Paper presented at the International MultidisciplinaryConference on the Globalization of the Agricultural and Food Order, June 2-6, Columbia, MO. Goldfrank, W. L. 1990. "Harvesting Counterrevolution: Agricultural Exports in Pinochet's Chile." Pp. 189-198 in T. Boswell, ed., .ul Revolution in the World-System. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ___________. 1991. "State, Market, and Agriculture in Pinochet's Chile." Pp. 69-77 in W. Martin, ed., .ul Semi-Peripheral States in the World-Economy. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Gomez, Sergio. 1991. "La Uva Chilena en el Mecado de los Estados Unidos." Paper delivered to the Workshop on The Globalization of the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable System, Dec. 6-9, Santa Cruz, CA. __________ and Jorge Echenique. 1988. .ul La Agricultura Chilena. Santiago: FLACSO. __________ and W. L. Goldfrank. 1991. "Evolucion del mercado agrario mundial: el caso del Chile neoliberal," .ul Agricultura y Sociedad #60 (Julio-Sept.), pp. 13-28. How, R. Brian. 1991. .ul Marketing Fresh Fruits and Vegetables. New York: Van Nostrand, Reinhardt. LaRue, John, and Ray Heinzelmann. 1990. "En Preparacion para la Temporada 1990/1991 en Estados Unidos." Paper presented at the 2nd International Fruit Congress, Nov. 26-29, Santiago. Mintz, Sidney. 1985. .ul Sweetness and Power. New York: Viking.