The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious, how the worst apple took over the US & continues to spread

[freshwest]

125. Thanks. That last sentence is a question, that I've asked produce managers. The answer is simple and

very frustrating. The apples from the South Pacific, which are heavily hyped by advertising and meme media, are forced into our market by trade agreement.

At the same time, our produce is sent overseas at little profit and foreign producers want access to our market. I didn't want to buy Chinese produce and many dollar stores and some grocers will sell vegetables and fruit grown there, often with growth chemicals that are illegal here, to increase size and weight.

Only one market I go to has COO (country of origin) labels on the bins of produce. (COO labeling of ingredients was taken out by Bush. Most Americans didn't make a fuss.) The ones from China don't sell well, as people want to buy local. There being a couple of good reasons for that, to help our own growers and to be green. Because there is nothing 'green' about having your food shipped around the globe as if it was a luxury item, going through all that oil and everything else that is involved, when you could pick the apples off your own tree.

This is why the produce is on the verge of being rotten, they keep it very cold until sale, then offer it to the stores, and within a week or even a day, whether it's a root crop, greens, fruits or vegetables, it rots in the refrigerator, all mushy and ready for the compost pile.

It's become like gambling buying food or anything else, and there's not any recourse. I understand the desire of people, too, to get their favorite produce year round. That's why so much comes from Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, etc. But it is as close as rotten already when it arrives home as can be conceived.

It's wasteful and is a result of the WTO, etc. Every nation is supposed to get to parity, none with an advantage in that system. But it's dumb in practice, just as NAFTA was, which did damage to agriculture where I lived for a few years in the southwest. Some ranching families who had been on their land for a century, were driven out of business.

You cannot compete with scrub cattle imported from Mexico for a dollar a head, full grown to the packing houses competing with the evolved practices the area I lived in for years had. They had spent years improving the breeds to give the most amount of lean beef, given their animals veterinary treatment to be healthy as they grew for several years in improved pastures. And all carefully bred and records kept to keep the animals healthy and a standard 'product.'

But they were confronted with a competitor, like China, who only looked to the bottom line and shipped what would be slaughtered without all that care and at minimal cost to produce. Essentially, they were dumped into the market as a form of price rigging and allegedly to enrich Mexican ranchers. One of the things hyped to the American public where I lived was that it would reduce immigration by lifting the standard of living there. Another lie.

At least those I knew from there didn't say it helped them at all. The trade agreements broke the middle class in Mexico and they had to come here to work. Those who underestimate the education and intelligence of those who cross the border, should consider the example of the family I knew best. All university educated, with good paying jobs that suddenly disappeared and who came to the USA to work as cooks in restaurants, tree trimmers, laborers, babysitters / housekeepers.

The main recipients of the wealth from the agreement were the CEOs and the corporations, workers who were set to make a better living by the new rules, or the rich owners or their cronies. And they always market their scam, selling the stories which we easily go along with, that the goods or produce here are just not good enough, so we must now have the 'new thing' that it just so happens they are selling. It's an endless circle of greed and displacement.