Having wondered this for awhile, I decided to ask the people in charge of ordering food for Bon Appetit about the hands through which these apples pass before they meet my mouth.

Jewett dining hall Manager Julie Zumwalt, Executive Chef Christian Chemin, and Prentiss dining hall Chef John Aldinger, all buy food for Bon Appetit and tell the same story about the apples’ origins. While different Bon Appetit chefs are responsible for ordering food at different dining halls, almost all of the food on campus comes from the same distributors. Food Services or America (FSA), Charlie’s Produce, Edwards’ Orchards, Snow Foods, Pacific Seafood and Franz Bakery are several of Bon Appetit’s main distributors for everything served on campus, from fruit to meat and dairy. Chemin said that there is close communication between dining halls about what products to order and from whom.

Almost all of Whitman’ fresh fruit comes from two vendors during the winter: Edwards Family Farm in Milton-Freewater and Charlie’s Produce in Spokane. Any apple currently on campus, whether it comes from Jewett, Prentiss, Lyman or Reid, originated at Edwards. Edwards Family Farm is a very small, independent grower that sells much of its produce on the farm and also delivers locally.

Ron Edwards, who grew up in Milton-Freewater and took the farm over from his grandparents, grows 14 different varieties of apples as well as other produce. He keeps apples on hand and sells mainly to Bon Appetit during the winter.

Edwards does most of the work on the farm himself. He occasionally hires a few helpers to prune trees and pick fruit, and his wife, Ilse Edwards, often makes deliveries. Aldinger said that Bon Appetit will continue to buy Edwards apples for another month or so, at which point Edwards’ apple stock will run out and Bon Appetit will buy apples from Charlie’s.

As a corporate policy, Bon Appetit strongly encourages chefs in all of its locations to buy locally grown produce whenever possible. Maisie Greenawalt, director of communications and strategic initiatives for Bon Appetit, said that while the company also encourages purchasing organic produce, local produce takes priority. “If you buy organic fruit but offset that by shipping it halfway around the world, you haven’t really taken any burden off the planet,” she said. She said that Bon Appetit emphasizes overall sustainability in its buying policies, which the company believes is found in local growers. Greenawalt said that local growers tend to be “better stewards of the land than large-scale agribusiness.”

Aldinger said that while Bon Appetit buys local produce when they can, they are usually “not searching for organic.” Aldinger said that the main reason for this is the price, which tends to be double that of non-organic fruit.

Apples are the only locally grown fruit that Bon Appetit can get on a regular basis during the winter. The chefs order Hermiston melons and Klicker strawberries when they are in season, and they occasionally order peaches and raspberries from R&R farms. They also buy other types of produce from local vendors like Castoldi’s and Yakima Valley. Chemin makes it a point to visit many of the local farms with which Bon Appetit does business. When the produce is in season, local growers call Bon Appetit and offer what they have. All other winter produce comes from Charlie’s Produce in Spokane, which distributes products from all over the United States and South America.

Zumwalt said that when she orders from Charlie’s, she asks for locally grown produce whenever it is available, but local produce is clearly limited in winter and not possible when ordering fruit such as oranges and bananas that must be grown in warmer regions. When Zumwalt places an order, she corresponds with Charlie’s sales representative Shane Weeks, whom she trusts to select high-quality produce.

Weeks selects produce for Whitman from a number of different brands. The bananas available at Bon Appetit most often bear the Chiquita label, and the oranges are usually Sunkist brand, but Weeks also selects from “off-label” brands. “Off-label” means that the produce comes from an independent grower or brand that the customer does not usually recognize. The “Charmer” brand of oranges is one example of an off-label in the campus dining halls.

Weeks’ main criteria for selecting a box of oranges for Whitman are skin smoothness and weight. He said that growers cannot always control the quality of their fruit. “A lot of it has to do with the weather,” he said.

Weeks said that when the buyers at Charlie’s purchase fruit from growers, they try to get the best fruit they can for their money and therefore buy from many different growers. The oranges Charlie’s carries come from different orchards in California. Three to four times per week, shippers from Charlie’s drive refrigerated trucks to California and pick up oranges from growers in Salinas, Porterville, Santa Maria, Lindsey, and Oxnard.

Shippers from Charlie’s also pick up bananas from the California coast. Charlie’s purchases bananas grown mainly on plantations in Ecuador, which are picked green and shipped to California on a refrigerated boat. The bananas do not begin to ripen until they reach the distributor, where they are treated with ethylene gas. Ethylene works as a plant hormone to induce ripening. Weeks said that the quality of a banana usually depends more on the way the distributor gases it than on the grower, and that bananas should be gassed slowly for higher quality.