Why Every Season Is Now 'Berry Season'

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
Brian Lehrer on WNYC. So, with apologies to the Beatles, we might call this next segment, Strawberry Fields Forever or Blueberry Fields Forever, or maybe Raspberry Fields Forever. Why? Well, if you visited a farmer's market recently, July marks the middle of berry season. It's peak berry time for green markets in the tri-state area. But over the past two decades or so, berries have gone from a fragile, seasonal, mostly local treat to a year round global commodity. And it turns out it's one of the most lucrative commodities in the produce aisle. Julia Moskin's New York Times Deep Dive, did you see it, traces that transformation largely through one company, Driscoll's. You've probably seen the brand at your local bodega or supermarket. It's a seven billion dollar family controlled California operation that now sells four billion clam shells of berries a year across sixty countries. By one market research measure, it's the second highest earning brand in American supermarkets, behind only Coca-Cola. Her reporting shows that Driscoll's is a business that has stopped thinking of itself as a farm at all.
It owns berry genetics and data, and contracts the actual growing out to farmers worldwide. Meanwhile, Driscoll's is facing mountain questions about pesticides, labor, water and plastic use. It raises the question for consumers of whether this is all worth it, to have berries year-round, especially berries that have maybe stopped tasting like much of anything, as some people say.
Julia Moskin is a correspondent in the food section of The New York Times, and she joins us now. Hi, Julia. Welcome to WNYC today.

**Julia Moskin** (1:54)
Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:56)
Listeners, we have about 10 minutes here at the end of the show on this. A, how much have you been willing to pay for a really good berry and why? Maybe as a parent of a young child, you find this is the healthiest alternative to a sweet treat that they'll actually eat. Maybe you are a conscientious objector to out-of-season berries and will only buy at the farmer's market or otherwise in season. What keeps you buying berries or keeps you from buying berries? Help us report this story.
212-433-WNYC or of course, any questions for Julia Moskin from The Times, 212-433-WNYC, call or text 212-433-9692.
How did berries become such a big business?

**Julia Moskin** (2:45)
Well, often I can say that's a long story, Mariah. It's really not a very long story, except if we go way back to the dawn of agriculture. But berries have really only been completely and commercially domesticated, and even then not altogether since less than 100 years ago.
More recently, blueberries and blackberries in addition to strawberries and raspberries. Part of how this happened was of course through more advanced hybridization, but Driscoll's as a company made this resolution in 1989 at their board meeting to make every berry available in every season, in every part of the world. And that of course seemed completely insane at the time, but they pretty much have done it. And that is why I thought it would be interesting to write about.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:40)
And on Driscoll's, you're right that they are less a farming business than a research and marketing enterprise, harvesting berry-related data instead of berries. What do you mean by berry-related data?

**Julia Moskin** (3:54)
Well, I think what we picture and what certainly used to be the truth when we see that clamshell at the market is maybe a giant farm in California. And indeed, Watsonville is where the company started as a family farm in 1904 But part of achieving those goals has been that they have transitioned from owning land and actually growing berries to doing the very expensive research and development work to figure out how best to grow berries. And they have now sort of passed that or outsourced that process on to about 900 growers in 20 countries, where they have 35 different test plots, where they test thousands of different strains at any given moment. And they really never give up the quest to get, to reach the berry of each kind that has the highest yield, that is the most beautiful, that has the best taste, of course, is really the goal that they are moving toward, I think faster than anyone thought is what I was told.

**Brian Lehrer** (5:05)
Is that bad?

**Julia Moskin** (5:07)
Well, it's complicated, you know, it is amazing to have these things that were, you know, incredibly unreachable 99% of the year, right? So now berries are accessible, everyone accepts that they're healthy.
A lot of them, not all of them, as we heard a lot about on the comments over at the Times website, a lot of them are delicious, a lot of them are not. We can talk about that in a minute. So accessible, healthy, delicious, great. Children love them, as a lot of us know, to our cost. But there are serious costs in terms of pesticides, raising, you know, keeping berries warm, which is what they really need, requires a ton of plastic, especially in cooler climates like Peru and China, where they're growing now. And just really the, you know, the carbon footprint of flying all of these very perishable fruits around the world is extremely high.