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Every single one needs to be picked by hand — even in a pandemic. Seasonal workers say they may be essential, but they feel disposable.

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But it’s not to market yet. The window in which a sweet cherry can be picked for sale is excruciatingly narrow. Cherries don’t continue to ripen once they’re off the tree, the way a peach does, and once picked they don’t store for very long, even when refrigerated. If they’re too ripe, they won’t make it to the packing house, the truck or the airplane, the grocery-store display, your summery dessert. The sugar content must be Goldilocksian — neither too high nor too low. Wait even a couple of days too many, and it may be too late.

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Lewis thinks that people who aren’t used to thinking much about the source of their food, or who assume that the food system is as mechanized and smoothly calibrated as a factory, spitting out produce like so many sticks of gum, ought to spend some time contemplating that figure and what it means. “I’m here to tell you that people do not think we harvest everything by hand,” she says. But hands, belonging to highly skilled workers, are needed for every last cherry. During the harvest, many thousands of people are out picking by dawn, nearly every day, their fingers flying as they watch out for rattlesnakes under dark trees.

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The cherry industry has done everything it can to squeeze every possible bit of extra time into the season. Growers plant at a range of different elevations: Every 100 feet above sea level, one orchard manager says, buys you an extra day until maturity. And they choose different varietals that ripen at slightly different speeds — most red cherries are marketed to the public simply as “dark sweets” but are actually a genetically distinct array, whose different sizes and tastes and unique horticultural personalities are intimately known by growers and pickers. If everything bloomed and matured all at once, Lewis said, there’s no way there would be enough bees, enough trucks, enough bins, to make the scale of the current cherry harvest possible. Most of all, there wouldn’t be enough people. There already aren’t.

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Originally Posted by gaobest (Post 33280774)

Organic cherries today:
Trader Joe’s - $6.99/lb clamshell
costco - $10.99 for a 2-lb clamshell. Eek was it $9.99 or 10.99

i was first at TJ’s so I got the pound. Then I bought the 2-lb at Costco. Either way, my spouse has probably pitted and eaten half of a clamshell by now and I look forward to enjoying them as well when I have my luncheon!

Originally Posted by kipper (Post 33280999)

My local grocery store has cherries for $1.77/pound.

Originally Posted by Jaimito Cartero (Post 33281070)

Two weeks ago, a 2 pound clamshell was $9.99 at Costco. Mediocre quality.
Last week at a normal Costco $8.99, and this week from the Business center, the same. Much better quality.

Originally Posted by vanillabean (Post 33281234)

Safeway CA homegrown. $2.77!

Originally Posted by thelark (Post 33281142)

nice - thought I had a good deal at 1.99 here