entertain

Almost everyone at some point or another has come into contact with a DOLE product, be it a pineapple, a banana or a piece of lettuce. This past week I had the wonderful opportunity to tour some of their extensive facilities in Soledad, California.

We began our tour in the vast Lettuce fields outside the processing plants. Lettuce monoculture spread almost from horizon to horizon. As our guides, two burly men in sunglasses, explained to us the ups and downs of large scale, monoculture farming we baked in the sun.

We were allowed to taste some of the unprocessed lettuce straight from the head. It had a strange chemical aftertaste. DOLE uses pesticides on its crops generously. As a result of these poisons, the fields have to be left unmanned for sometimes days at a time. Even after several days, the workers must wear full-body, chemical-protection suits. Contact with these chemicals can have the short-term effects of burns, nausea, delirium, and the long-term effects of birth defects and cancer.

After having witnessed the furrowed, chemical-soaked, homogeneity of chlorophyll that spread before us, we got back into the vans and followed our guides’ truck into the parking lot of the plant itself. After dealing with the bureaucracy of paperwork, name tags, and signing in, that can generally be expected when entering a corporate nexus, we were ferried up several flights of stairs and down a long hallway into the bowels of the plant.

Along one of the whitewashed walls of the hallway ran a vast viewing window. Below us, on the factory floor, lay the organs of the beast that is DOLE. In one end goes a head of lettuce; out the other comes a transport vehicle filled with piles of neatly packaged processed lettuce. This lettuce then travels thousands of miles to stock the shelves of all manner of distributors, from corner stores to Albertsons.

On the floor giant machines, filled with conveyor belts and turbines, hummed and whirred. Workers dressed in white swarmed around it. Some stuck to their prospective stations while others busied themselves with general adjustments and calibrations. Our guides told us that the workers toil at their stations for up to nine hours a day. Below us lay what was basically a highly mechanized assembly line. But the product of this assembly line was by no means the Model T Ford, but rather a ready-made salad packaged and prepped to be shipped across the nation.

The Lettuce began by being chopped and separated. Then it began its extensive washing and sterilization process. Chemicals must both be added and removed before the Lettuce can be considered a product ready-for-sale. It ran along conveyor belts, was sprayed with water, was shot through tubes, was shaken and tossed, and was sprayed again. Portions of the machine resembled a long and multi-chambered washing machine.

After the lettuce has been cleaned it is weighed and portioned out into several sizes of plastic bags. It is manually sorted and loaded into cardboard boxes. The cardboard boxes are stacked onto a forklift that then deposits them into a moving van. They are then shipped to your local purveyor of food to wait on the shelf for your convenience.

To the somewhat objective and unfamished witness, the whole process seemed somewhat overemphasized and distasteful. The lettuce seemed to take a certain amount of abuse as it made its way through the machine. Also the fact that this packaged lettuce is that which is too unsightly to be sold whole is somewhat stomach turning. After having witnessed this industrial salad packing, I will think twice before I buy another instant Caesar from our good friends at DOLE.