In Pursuit of Garlic by Liz Primeau

just shown up at dinnertime, but he agrees to chat a while. “Val had a personality and presence like no one else,” he says. “He got the cooperation of everyone.” Don credits Rudy with coming up with the idea for the festival. Rudy was convinced Gilroy was the true garlic capital of the world in spite of a claim made by Arleux, France, which was drawing seventy thousand people to its annual festival in the 1970s. All Gilroy had to do was have a bigger festival to prove it, Rudy said, and it’s been doing that every year since.
    As for himself, Don says he’s just a farmer at heart, born on a prune farm near Gilroy with a love of the earth in his genes. But he grew up with a strong entrepreneurial streak. As a lad of twenty-two he bought land and started Christopher Ranch to grow garlic. One might say that organizing a garlic festival with his buddies once he got established didn’t hurt his business, but both Christopher Ranch and the festival have done a lot for Gilroy.
    Christopher Ranch harvests 65 million pounds (30 million kilos) of garlic a year in eight fields around Gilroy as well as on leased land in Monterey County and the San Joaquin Valley. “We supply California garlic to the whole country, including parts of Canada, every day of the year,” Don says. “We even borrowed something from the apple guys: we built special cold-storage facilities where we take all the oxygen out and put the garlic to sleep till we need it.”
    Don looks more than a little grim when I mention Chinese garlic. “A few years ago China brought garlic into the United States below cost and took over a whole lot of the market,” he says. “In fact, it took over nearly the whole world, including Canada. We had to cut our acreage down to about 55 percent.” But then the flow started to slow down. With next to no money coming into their pockets, Don says, Chinese farmers got wise and quit growing garlic in favor of other vegetables. “We didn’t know that had happened till suddenly the Chinese price went up to nearly match ours.”
    But Don hadn’t let the opportunities of cheap Chinese garlic slip through his fingers. “I bought a lot of it and sold it at a profit,” he says.
    “You did? No kidding,” I respond. Now there’s bold entrepreneurial spirit.
    “Yes, I did. And we sold it rapidly. Everyone was going crazy about the situation, but I figured if I could make a little money on it while others wept, why not?”
    “You didn’t sell it as your own garlic, did you?” I ask, a little worried about Don’s scruples.
    “I wouldn’t do that! ” He looks surprised that I would even suggest such a thing. “We wouldn’t compete with ourselves. We often buy and sell garlic from other countries if we think we’re going to be short or if we have too much. We sold it as Chinese garlic to people who were already buying Chinese garlic. So I made money on it, and I had a lot of fun, too.”
    Don isn’t exactly a garlic lover himself. He eats it maybe three times a week, slivered and inserted into the meat he barbecues. “I prefer to grow it,” he says. “I love seeing those green tips coming up in spring when everything else is going into the ground. But what I like the best is marketing it. It’s exciting. I like dealing with buyers and agreeing on a price, I like packing it and shipping it. And I like developing products, like the green garlic we package for garnish and the like. You harvest it when it’s eight to twelve weeks along. Its stalks are tender and mild...”
    He looks over my shoulder and waves at his little granddaughter. “She’s looking for me,” he says. He’s had enough chat and is clearly itching to get moving. That’s okay—I’ve had a revealing glimpse of some of the energy that’s made the Gilroy Garlic Festival so successful all these years.
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    The growing and processing of garlic will move to China. There’s nothing to stop it.
    CAO MENGHUI, Jinan Yipin Corp. Ltd., garlic producer