Here in California’s San Joaquin Valley, for six weeks starting in mid-February, pink and white blossoms adorn the leafless limbs of millions of trees, a floral prelude to the peaches, nectarines, and plums that will stock America’s supermarkets from May through September. And here, off a country road just west of Modesto, lies the experimental orchard of Zaiger’s Genetics. It looks like countless other farms, a cluster of buildings surrounded by rows of trees. Nothing indicates that a revolution in the taste and texture of the fruit America eats started on this land. Nothing indicates you’re about to meet—as Zaiger’s Genetics’ stationery reads—the “Family Organized to Improve Fruit Worldwide.”
I am, as even the slightest acquaintance will tell you, obsessed with the study of fruit. And so I have visited the Zaigers five times in as many years. I know that Floyd and Betty Zaiger will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary this year, and that their daughter, Leith Gardner, and sons Gary and Grant live nearby and actively participate in the family business. Floyd Zaiger, 74, is in my opinion our greatest modern fruit breeder. I admire his creativity and persistence. Most breeders consider themselves lucky to develop one or two successful varieties in a lifetime, but over the past two decades Zaiger has introduced three sweeping innovations: Pluots (plum-apricot crosses that most resemble plums); white-fleshed peaches and nectarines that are firm enough to ship; and new mild-flavored, low-acid yellow-fleshed peaches and nectarines. He has, in fact, expanded the possibilities of fruit.
But Zaiger has also worked hand in hand with industrial-scale growers and shippers, many of whom have turned this country’s peaches and nectarines into a flavorless commodity: big, hard, red rocks. And though many of the varieties Zaiger introduced have wonderful flavor, many others are merely preternaturally sweet and so firm they crunch when you bite into one. Since when does a ripe peach go crunch?
On this chilly February morning, as I park my pickup and enter the family’s modest office, I wonder, Is Floyd Zaiger genius or accomplice?
Zaiger, a plainspoken, modest man who wears checked shirts, drives a ten-year-old car, and hunts with a bow for recreation, is still amazed that people come from all over the world to call on him. He was born in Nebraska, grew up poor in Iowa, and, at age 12, after he moved west with his family in 1938, lived in a migrant labor camp and picked strawberries. After graduating from UC Davis, he found work as a high-school teacher in Modesto, 75 miles southeast of San Francisco, and started breeding azaleas and rhododendrons.
Then, in 1956, Fred Anderson, a renowned fruit breeder who once worked for the legendary Luther Burbank, took him on as an apprentice. Zaiger quickly struck out on his own. He ran an ornamental nursery during the day to make money and at home pursued his dreams, planting experimental seedlings by moonlight.
“I’d caught the dreaded disease of fruit breeding,” he recalls.
Among Zaiger’s dreams was the desire to finish work started by Luther Burbank, one of his heroes. A century ago, Burbank, the greatest fruit breeder of his era, managed to hybridize plumcots (half plum, half apricot). But most were small and sour. They never fulfilled Burbank’s promise of a “new order of fruit.” But Zaiger’s Pluots did. His trans-species crosses are Zaiger’s Genetics’ most celebrated creations. Somehow, he succeeded where the master had failed. How did he do it?
Sitting in his office, Zaiger flips through one of the data-filled notebooks documenting some of the million or so crosses he’s made. “Breeding fruit is a game of numbers to break the links between desirable and undesirable characteristics,” he says. “The wider the cross, the greater the variability. You need to grow enough crosses so that the genes express themselves to the limit. And you need to be both extremely patient and ambitious.”
In developing the Pluot, Zaiger originally crossbred stone-fruit species, such as peaches and plums, to create new rootstocks for grafting trees, ignoring the fruits themselves. Almost all the hybrids were sterile, like mules, but Zaiger noticed that a few plum-apricot crosses bore fruit. He started saving the large, attractive, and flavorful ones, and used their genes as building blocks.
Zaiger selected the best hybrid seedlings over several generations of trees, then evaluated the results in test plantings before releasing the first commercial varieties in 1989. He trademarked them as Pluots. Compared to regular plums, which often are bland, or sour under the skin, Pluots frequently have a sweeter, richer flavor. Some varieties are a typical plum color, but others have red, green, yellow, or mottled skin and flesh; when ripe, the best, such as Flavor Supreme, Flavor King, and Dapple Dandy, are truly luscious.
Today, California grows some 3,000 acres of Pluots, less than 10 percent of the state’s plum plantings. But this portion will likely swell to 25 or even 50 percent within a decade. Once viewed as specialty items, Pluots increasingly are available at supermarkets. One major grower sells Pluots as “Dinosaur Eggs,” much to Zaiger’s annoyance, since, he maintains, he thought of the name first.
“You have to look at a fruit and see the potential 10 to 15 years down the road,” Zaiger says. “It’s like a chess game, where you need to think several moves in advance. When you finally come up with a successful variety, it’s like hitting the jackpot, but much more so, because it’s something you put heart and energy into.”
Lunchtime approaches, and Zaiger heads to the house, where the family gathers in the kitchen each day at noon. Over plates of Betty’s salmon, potatoes, and salad, they talk, like farmers everywhere, of the weather, and about work. Leith opens the refrigerator and I notice it’s filled with vials, each carefully numbered. In there, next to the mustard, lie the genes for the hot new peach and nectarine varieties of 2010. The conversation now turns to some of the wilder experimental crosses still in the Zaiger pipeline: white apricots, Nectaplums, Peacotums.... This is the family business.
Betty keeps track of the finances, while Gary and Grant supervise the farming of the 125-acre orchard and do preliminary evaluations of new crosses. But it’s Leith, the most ambitious and organized, who holds the title of general manager. “The boys are daredevils, excellent skiers and swimmers, but they don’t like to make judgment calls,” says Floyd. “Leith always had a special touch. She could walk up to an unruly horse that had given the boys fits and settle it down.”
It’s raining hard outside, but after doing the dishes Leith dons a long rubber coat and drives a golf cart out to the orchard to gather buds for pollen. February and March, when the actual crosses are made, are two of the family’s busiest months. She consults a list, then heads to a genetically valuable Pluot tree, identified by a number and its position in the rows. She twists off about 100 pink buds, choosing those that are at the “popcorn” stage, just before they open, and puts them in a paper bag.
“There’s a three- to five-day window of opportunity for each tree,” she says as she records her actions in a notebook, crouching to shield it from the raindrops. Once the flowers open, random pollination would skew the results of matchmaking.
When she has collected buds from a dozen trees, Leith heads into a trailer, the family’s new laboratory, and spreads them out on racks under lights to dry.
Once they’ve done so, Leith brings them to a group of workers gathered around a table in a large greenhouse. They snip the flowers into tiny pieces, then mash them in a strainer over glass bowls to extract the pollen.
Some 2,000 young trees are growing in blue plastic tubs near the greenhouse. The Zaigers’ program of mating varieties that would not naturally bloom together requires detailed choreography, as workers rotate some trees into the greenhouse for pollination and others into a cooler to delay flowering.
In the greenhouse, Floyd Zaiger watches workwomen pluck the stamens (the male flower parts) from the trees to prevent self-pollination; the thin, spiky pistils (the female parts) look a bit surreal on their own. To demonstrate the final step in the marriage of genes, Zaiger twirls an eyebrow brush in a vial of peach pollen and daubs a smidgen onto the pistils of a nectarine bride.
When such a union bears fruit, the seed is saved and planted; with some unstable crosses, the embryo within is too immature to grow by itself and must be nourished in a test tube and then transplanted to a growing medium. This standard breeding technique, embryo rescue, represents the limit of the Zaigers’ use of artificial methods. None of their hybrids result from genetic engineering. “Our hands are full already,” says Zaiger.
After planting the seeds, the Zaigers wait several years for these seedlings to bear fruit, and then repropagate the most promising ones in a full-scale orchard for evaluation. Those that don’t make the cut, get cut; many rows consist mainly of stumps.
“Fruit breeding is a combination of science and art,” Leith says. “My dad eats, breathes, and dreams fruit varieties. Me too, sometimes.”
Not everyone is thrilled with all of the brave new fruit introduced by the Family Organized to Improve Fruit Worldwide. “Fifteen years ago Floyd Zaiger said to me, ‘This is going to revolutionize the fruit industry: I can make sweet fruit hard as a rock,’” says Andy Mariani, a California grower and fruit collector who participates in trials of new Zaiger varieties. “I thought to myself, ‘Who wants to eat balsa wood impregnated with sugar?’”
Mariani, who goes out of his way to praise many of Zaiger’s Pluots and calls Zaiger’s Honey Kist nectarine superb (“It has real nectarine flavor”), prefers older stone-fruit varieties. Take, for instance, the fuzzy Pallas peach with a distinctive beak at the bottom. Developed in 1878, it has tender white flesh—so juicy it dribbles all over when you take a bite—and a rich, sweet, honey-almond flavor. “It’s as good as a peach gets,” he says.
Yet Mariani also recognizes the drawbacks of some of the varieties he loves. Of that Pallas peach, he admits, “It’s pale, it cracks easily, and it falls before it’s ripe. The only thing it has going for it is flavor. But you can’t sell flavor alone.”
And that is the problem facing someone like Floyd Zaiger. In order to become, as one grower has called Zaiger, “the most successful fruit breeder of the past 15 years,” he had to work with the forces of the marketplace. That meant delivering (in the case of peaches and nectarines) fruit that is very large, very red, and very sweet.
Ed Laivo at Dave Wilson Nursery, which licenses Zaiger varieties, observes a generational divide at the nursery’s fruit tastings: “Visitors over 35 years old prefer fruit that’s soft and juicy so that it runs down your chin,” he says. “With visitors under 35, odds are that they’ll come to their first tasting trained to expect firm fruit.”
Both a cause and a result of these expectations is the emergence of low-acid varieties. They can withstand the American distribution system’s rough handling yet deliver acceptable flavor. Old-fashioned fruit tastes tart when firm because its acidity is high; when it’s fully ripe, acidity drops, and sweet and tart come into balance. With the new varieties, however, acidity starts low and remains low, so they can be picked hard and crunchy and still taste sweet, right off the shelf.
Zaiger’s work on low-acid varieties began by chance in 1968 when, on a visit to Europe, he noticed that white-fleshed peach and nectarine varieties fetched a premium over yellow ones. Fruit sellers and shippers there took great pains with the exquisite but delicate fruit. American farmers at the time had largely stopped growing white varieties because the fruits were so easily bruised that they couldn’t be shipped long distances. If picked green enough to ship, the fruits would taste tart. Only the Babcock peach and its offspring, which did taste sweet when picked firm because of its low acidity, had any kind of presence in the United States. But it had an unpleasant tinge of bitterness when immature.
Upon his return, Zaiger started breeding for the European market, which preferred white varieties with a balance of acidity and sugar. He earned awards from the French government, including one for his efforts in developing white peaches with classic flavor. Eventually, by crossing tender low-acid white peaches with tougher yellow types, he created low-acid fruit for American growers—mild white peaches that were sweet, but not bitter, when firm enough to ship. Zaiger’s first major selection, White Lady, appeared in 1986; since then, new-style white varieties, some from rival breeders, have rocketed to reach an estimated 18 percent of California’s crop this year.
Zaiger enjoyed similar success with nectarines, which are really fuzzless peaches (not, as some suppose, peach-plum hybrids). Originally much less common than peaches, nectarines tended to be small, with greenish-white flesh and a distinctive rich, winy flavor and aroma. It was Fred Anderson who started the trend toward modern, yellow nectarines—firm, large, and red-skinned. Just as the fragile white nectarine neared commercial extinction in California (which produces 90 percent of the nation’s nectarine crop), Zaiger single-handedly transformed and revived it with Arctic Rose, a stunningly sweet, moderately low-acid variety, in 1989.
Until recently, most of Zaiger’s white-fleshed fruits were exported to East Asia, particularly Taiwan, where low-acid peaches were familiar and prized as symbols of longevity and good fortune. Nectarines required a bit of repositioning (California exporters changed the Chinese name from “oily peach” to “rosy peach”), but they, too, took the Asian market by storm. California growers rushed to plant the profitable new varieties; only since 1997, however, as production burgeoned and the Asian financial crisis limited exports, has the great wave of white fruit hit American consumers.
Building on his work with white varieties, Zaiger next introduced low-acid yellow-fleshed peaches and nectarines. The first small crops, of Sweet Scarlet peaches and Honey Kist nectarines, were harvested in 1995, but only now are the new fruits starting to reach grocery stores in volume. Nurserymen estimate that more than a quarter of the yellow fruit now being planted in California is low-acid.
This raises a problem of identity: The mildness of low-acid yellow-fleshed varieties makes them markedly different from traditional fruit, but they look the same. A buyer expecting conventional peaches for cooking, for which the tang of acidity is crucial, might be dismayed to discover he’s purchased blander fruit.
To differentiate the mild yellow varieties, Zaiger encourages growers to print “Zee Sweet—low-acid” on their supermarket stickers. But such designations rile those growers who aren’t ready to jump on the low-acid bandwagon.
Mariani’s verdict on low-acid fruit is mixed: “When harvested ripe, traditional acid varieties are more interesting, richer in flavor,” he says. “But when fruit is picked firm for shipping, low-acid varieties are better. They’re adapted to the marketing system that’s in place.”
The changes wrought by fruit breeders began long before Zaiger’s work, and in the end I can’t fault him for adapting varieties to the American market. Fruit is grown thousands of miles from consumers, and shelf life and appearance are paramount. But I expect more—fragrant, juicy, great-tasting fruits—because I know how good Zaiger’s best can be. Zaiger himself is well aware of the compromises that commerce has entailed.
“We have the genes now to put aroma back into peaches and nectarines,” he says as I get ready to head home. “A lot of sacrifices were made in getting fruit firm enough to be sent around the world. We wanted bigger, redder, and firmer. Now I’m searching for flavor, flavor, flavor.”
The words echo in my ears as I drive away. Floyd Zaiger’s greatest achievements may be yet to come.