Persimmons from California’s Central Valley
Despite California’s epic drought, there were Central Valley persimmons this afternoon in Talin Market, Albuquerque’s international district grocer, when my sister, Lisa, and I stopped by to pick up a few things.
They were priced at $1.29 a pound, with the box label suggesting they had come all the way from Gridley, Calif., a little town midway between Yuba City and Chico in the valley’s northern stretch. It’s not a big persimmon hot spot, recording just 78 of California’s 4,091 acres of persimmons in the 2012 Census of Agriculture. (pdf here, not surprisingly Fresno County is the state’s largest persimmon producer)
It is interesting to think about how and why persimmons make their way from Gridley to my local Asian market.
Why? Because Asians like persimmons. They have good taste that way.
Drought hasn’t really hurt fruit production much, it seems. We are just plundering the groundwater to keep the machine running. Gridley, at least, is above a bit more of a sustainable aquifer.