We live in the land of the world's best tasting orange. The New York Times calls our area the "Napa Valley of the Navel Orange". But when you go to the supermarket, can you buy any? No…Oddly enough, you can get oranges from Australia, South America, South Africa, or the Central Valley, but you can't get that world's best orange which grows in our own neighborhood.
Why? Perhaps it's globalization. The number of distributors of California produce has concentrated down to a very powerful handful, companies like Walmart and Costco. These corporations are global in scale: Their stores are spread across the globe, and they source globally for those stores. Hence, we're stuck eating South African oranges when we live in the orange-equivalent of Napa Valley.
It's too bad, because our local growers need help. The fresh-pack orange business pretty much started around here more than a hundred years ago. A lot of the groves we have are from that era. A little known fact is that the older the tree, the smaller the orange, but the sweeter the orange. So we're growing great tasting, on-the-small-side oranges. The big-box retail market, however, wants "big and beautiful". So our growers struggle to sell their "tastes great!" oranges and our open space and heritage dwindle with them.
Thanks to years of suburban sprawl, the Inland Empire now has millions of people living in it. We are now reaching the point where we have enough people living here to eat all the oranges that we grow! The very thing that destroyed so many groves, ironically, will now save them—not only do we have the world's best tasting orange in our own back yard, WE NOW HAVE OUR OWN MARKET ALSO! All we have to do to save our local oranges is merely eat them! We call it "Eat2keep".
But how do we eat2keep if these local oranges aren't sold in the supermarket? Well, just in our own neighborhood here, we short-circuit this big global retail network, and we connect local growers to local consumers ourselves. The way we do this is IOC's "Share of the Crop" program.
When people join the IOC as Citrus Supporters, instead of providing a free calculator or pen or umbrella with their dues, the IOC gives them a free "share of the crop"—two five pound bags of locally grown oranges each week for the length of the season that they joined. In turn, the IOC procures these oranges from local growers and pays them up to five times what the big box retailers pay them. This is a "keep it living" wage—enough to keep their groves up in Cadillac style.
In this way, groves are made financially sustainable for the long-term, and at least some part of our open space and heritage are preserved. In 2005, IOC's 1200 families helped support 24 growers this way, eating2keep 167 tons of oranges! You can join too!