I don’t know if this happens to you too, but ever since I started working in the fresh produce sector (many years ago), I’ve had the feeling that I live in a parallel world. Now, I haven’t lost my mind. Well… maybe I have. But let me explain, and you can judge for yourselves by the end of the episode. I suppose it happens in any sector, in any business. Every business has its own codes, its own rhythms, its culture, its jargon and bit by bit that separates you from other groups and from the way they see life. We live in the world of urgency —everything was needed yesterday—, the world of daily surprises —let’s see what happens now—; and, of course, you get contaminated by it. Then you go and deal with the public administration, with the kids’ school, with the car garage or the home-insurance people, and you can’t for the life of you understand how anything works. How is it possible they still haven’t got back to me? How is it possible that institutions behave this way? If we ran things like that, we’d have shut up shop long ago! … And you turn into that insufferable know-it-all — who has a strong opinions on absolutely everything that, ultimately, leads you to a complete perplexity with those other realities. And to make sense of it, I often tell myself: those are parallel universes, and I live in mine. The fruit and vegetable business seems to operate in its own universe, under its own physics, with its own fundamental constants. To explain it, I’ll have to call on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, and on how we have to accept that space and time are not absolute. And that, just as with relativity, our everyday experience doesn’t let us grasp how it works intuitively. How could it ever be intuitive that space-time curves? Because space and time, in our case too, are intertwined in a particular way, creating this strange universe of ours. In other words, the fresh produce business also has its own rules. Rules so fundamental, and so different from those of other economic sectors, that we could quite reasonably speak of an alternative universe. A universe defined by those three fundamental dimensions: Space, Time, and a set of fundamental constants (and I’d name Volatility as the chief of those constants). And if we stretch the analogy a little, I’ll borrow the concept of the multiverse as explained by David Deutsch (a British theoretical physicist who has written several popular science books, and who also happens to be the father of quantum computing). In that sense, each fresh produce product seems to have its own separate universe. And, as in the multiverse that Mr Deutsch describes so well, each universe resembles the one before it but with a few differences that make it unique. So welcome to a new episode of Freshconomics Podcast and let’s see if I can make this mad ramble about physics and fruit entertaining.
