On New York’s Upper East Side, during a recent January snowstorm, a crisp head of Iceberg lettuce was selling for $1.49 retail. This agricultural and economic miracle speaks to the efficiency and bounty of U.S. food production and improvements in American diet during the last hundred years.
The chance to eat fresh winter lettuce is historically novel. In the late nineteenth-century, lettuce was a rare luxury, grown in elaborate hothouses and sold as a delicacy to the rich, reserved for festive meals and special occasions.
Philadelphia and Boston built and farmed acres of lettuce under steel and glass. Coal-fired furnaces brought steam heat to greenhouses in the 1880s, and steam pipes were set into pits, tunnels and rows. So-named Boston leaf lettuce was grown in small pots, the root balls wrapped in waxed paper with a ribbon, not unlike hydroponic lettuce sold in markets today. Suburban Belmont’s expansive greenhouses also grew winter asparagus, tomatoes, cucumbers, and melons, sold locally and shipped by train to New York City.
With the rapid growth of the California lettuce industry, born in Los Angeles County, the era of greenhouse lettuce faded. Between 1917 and 1926, the amount of California lettuce that was shipped by rail rose fifteen-fold. Lettuce production soon moved to the Salinas Valley. The growing conditions were equal or preferable, and in Los Angeles, truck farms were being subdivided as residential real estate. Refrigeration made continental transport possible.
Head lettuce was cheaper to grow than its leaf counterpart. It could practically be grown year-round, and was kept in tip-top shape when shipped on ice, thus spawning the name ‘Iceberg’ lettuce. For the next half century, Iceberg was the only commercial lettuce available, winter or not. Nonetheless, until airtight cooling arrived in the early 1950s, moving the fragile green heads was dicey, with shipments occasionally rotting in the summer and freezing in the winter.
While head lettuce is far from the most nutritious salad green — as nutritional food purists will tediously remind us —it is still popular for its long shelf life, crispy texture, and neutral flavor. With its crunchy and watery coolness, Iceberg still dominates the American table.
Iceberg had four-fifths of the U.S. market in 1980. That number is now down to a little over half as romaine lettuce and exotic greens have made impressive inroads. Demand for packaged, washed, and cut greens has soared, along with so called salad kits, arguably at the expense of freshness and taste. Romaine recently even surpassed head lettuce in revenues.
The labor disputes that once wracked California farm labor have long subsided. In 1970, trying to head off the United Farm Workers led by charismatic labor organizer Cesar Chavez, agricultural companies preemptively signed contracts with the Teamsters. In response, the UFW organized the largest farm workers strike in American history. For some months, about 6,000 Salinas Valley workers remained idle. Lettuce prices soared. An emotional, prolonged lettuce boycott caught fire as a national left-wing cause. For several years following, the plight of farm workers and Chicano Power remained in the political spotlight.
Today, lettuce is California’s number-one vegetable crop and a four-billion-dollar business, increasingly international in scope. Dole and Chiquita (Fresh Express) are the two big public corporate players. Privately held Tanimura & Antle owns some 27,000 acres and farms another 40,000 acres on contract. Another private company, Taylor Farms, has made a splash with packaged salad kits and its Earthbound label. There are no independent small producers (“family farms”) in the California lettuce business, in spite of claims otherwise. (Non-resident landowners lease property to the big boys for management and cultivation).
The Salinas Valley’s terraced slopes are a natural gift of rare arable bounty, with four-foot hills and furrows for drainage and harvesting, a natural garden stretching for miles. Thanks to its temperate climate, the valley also has the longest growing seasons for lettuce in the country, harvesting from April to November. Winter lettuce comes from an irrigated desert network of sprinklers and canals where California, Arizona and Mexico meet, and where large-scale farming developed during World War II, using Mexican guest workers as manpower.
Lettuce is cut by field workers who remove the core and unwanted leaves before placing greens on belts, then boxed for transport or readied for salad processing plants. It’s cooled from field temperature to 34 F degrees in about 15 minutes, and once chilled, will remain crisp for two to three weeks. Salad-making factories lie adjacent to the fields, and fleets of precision-drill refrigerated trucks stand ready to move product across a continent.
Migrant guest workers on H-2A visas harvest and box the picked lettuce, working in experienced teams. Wages vary by expertise and crop, from $17 to the mid-twenties an hour. It is very hard labor, and sometimes sweltering, even in coastal areas. Field, irrigation and tractor work is highly regulated by the federal and California departments of labor, and overseen by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, trying to assure a high level of worker safety and hygiene. The largely Mexican-American managers who oversee fieldwork and operations today are likely native-born Californians, trained in big-scale industrial farming and labor law.
This highly capitalized enterprise and complex farm-to-grocery system yields affordable, clean fresh lettuce and vegetables available all year, snowstorm or not, unlike a century ago, when winter lettuce was a luxury, and out of reach for most ordinary people.
Read Full Article »