Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can) by Peter Matthiessen

Author:Peter Matthiessen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, History
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2013-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

• • •

Chavez talked for a while about gibberellin, the plant hormone that the growers pump into the fruit to make it fat and hard; the result looks and feels almost as good as plastic fruit, and it keeps much better than a natural grape on the trip across the country. “The next time you’re in New York,” Chavez said, “try a strawberry. Get a real big one, the nicest-looking strawberry you can find. Don’t put any cream or sugar on it; just eat it. I mean, wash it first, because it may have parathion all over it. Then taste it. And after that, get a piece of cardboard and eat that too; they taste about the same.” He grunted. “Here at Davis Agricultural College, at the University of California, they’ve decided that people don’t really care about taste anymore, they can get that from the cream and sugar: what they care about is a big berry that looks nice. If you find a little puny berry that’s really sweet, like berries used to taste ten years ago—well, probably that comes from Mexico or Latin America or France, maybe Arabia, but it doesn’t come from this country. And the same thing is happening with grapes.” American food corporations, he said, prepared cherries for the consumer by leaching out all their natural hues (and with them any nutrients the fruit might have) and shooting them full of artificial color.

Loss of quality in grapes means loss of sugar and taste. Possibly the agronomists at Davis are mistaken about what people want, since table-grape acreage in California, in the last ten years, has been cut nearly in half in response to a decline in sales, and a few growers would like to outlaw the use of gibberellin.

Though Lyons and Mrs. Huerta were still with the Di Giorgio people in the motel room, Chavez seemed in no great hurry to go back. We sat at a poolside table under a two-decker row of rooms, from where they could see and call him if he was needed. From the diving board a big pallid man with a small close-cropped head, wearing large orange bathing trunks—the sort of man who was probably called “Whitey” long before that name came into fashion—was performing big board-splitting jackknives for his wife and son. Ba-whoom-pha! Over and over against the shimmering flat asphalt of the airport, the man catapulated himself into the air, rising above the tight, hard shrubbery of the motel landscaping into slow orbit against the bare blue sky; at the moment of impact, his re-entry splash sizzled out on the hot jet howl of the straining airplanes. Thin-backed, thin-headed, in a row of two, wife and son attended dutifully. Now and then the woman glanced with birdy disapproval at a female sex threat in a lounge chair who every few minutes, like a sprung mechanism in a cuckoo clock, performed a loose circuit for the other guests and returned into her chair again.

The more Chavez watched the lonely performance of the woman, the more distressed he became.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.