A big bowl of sweet cherries

It's sweet cherry season in Berrien County, Michigan, and that means a whole lot of people here will be missing out on one of the season's finest fruits. That's a shame because it's been very dry here over the last month, and the cherries are particularly sweet, very firm and crunchy, and intensely flavored (see my post on "dry, dry, dry"). Too bad most of them will be consumed by folks in and around Chicago, and other markets away from where they've been grown.

And too bad most of the money being spent in Berrien County on sweet cherries will not be for locally-grown cherries. Instead, that money will leave the county, and enhance quality of life in California and Washington State, and with it, any chance to multiply through recirculative local spending.

If you want to work at it however, you can find local sweet cherries at fruit stands and at least a few local farmers markets. But don't waste your time looking in the produce section of the major chain store Supercenters; they carry the tasteless varieties from industrialized factory farms 2,000 miles west of here.

I have a vision though, that someday, people here will have an easy opportunity to experience the night-and-day difference between cherries grown on gritty, glaciated soils, and those grown so far away from here that their carbon footprints are deep enough to fall into. Someday, soon I hope, people here will learn about the correlation between place of origin and quality of food.

Because this place, through a fact of geological happenstance, became a place where fruit can be grown with particularly unique, and outstanding qualities. That same fact makes Berrien County, Michigan like no other place in the world, in terms of flavorful fruit production. Here, a cherry tastes like it ought to, sweet, intensely flavored, crunchy like a Michigan apple, juicy like a Michigan melon. No other place is like it.

But the superior quality for eating, and the "greener" distribution method, and the just-picked freshness, are not the only differences. Community, and what local purchasing does for it, also plays a role. For community is a concept that improves the general quality of life when folks make informed choices to support one another. That bowl of cherries might take more effort to procure at a farm stand or farmers market than it does in a Supercenter, but oh what a difference it could make for Berrien County if more of us chose to make that effort.