http://youtu.be/cJZcFq8ige8?t=2s (Sun-Maid Commercial)

 http://greatist.com/health/dried-fruit-decoded/ (Article by Leah Rocketto)

http://youtu.be/1GpiDqhArE0 (The Story of the Real Sun-Maid Girl)

After watching the advertisement for Sun-Maid raisins, I had begun to form a lot more questions about the product. For example, is the great central valley of California really that lush and green as the commercial claims it to be? Are the raisins only made with sun? Who is this animated girl they use to represent their product, and why does she put on sunglasses after she was put on the red carpet at night, when clearly those sunglasses would have been more useful in that sunny vineyard scene?

I decided the commercial clearly wasn’t going to give me answers, so I went to do some research myself. First off, I did a simple Google search about the San Joaquin Valley. Of course the first link led me to a Wikipedia page, but that page was enough to inform me of the many disturbing attributes the Valley is known for. The Valley is mostly known for their agriculture in grapes and cotton, and the work is said to bring in about 12.8% profit within California itself. Petroleum is also a big business within the Valley, with scattered oil fields and wells making up the third largest oil field in the United States. But sadly, that was not what disturbed me the most. It was the poverty report made by the United States Census Bureau in 2007 which found that six counties within the Valley were some of the most impoverished counties in America. So sadly it’s no surprise to find out that a majority who live in the Valley are of Mexican descent. I could continue with more facts about the Valley’s pollution closely resembling some of the worst pollutant cities (Houston and Los Angeles), but I wanted to move on to something less disturbing.

My second question was simple, which I somewhat already had an answer too. Obviously it would take more than just sun to make a raisin. There has to be some form of labor that harvests the grapes, and even more so, a chemical that keeps the crop bountiful. So back to the internet I went in search of these chemicals, and I came across an article that was informative. Leah Rocketto states that to mass produce these raisins, chemicals like sulfur dioxide and acrymalide are used and traced within the product. Both chemicals can cause stomach pains, skin rashes, asthma attacks, and even nerve damage.

So my quest to find something less disturbing failed, but I still had one last question to answer. Luckily I found a video made by the producers of Sun-Maid raisins about the woman on the box. Her name was Lorraine Collett Petersen, and she worked for the company as a seeder and packer. The executive, Leroy Payne stumbled upon her one day and knew she would be the one for their mascot. The video explains it better, and I my initial thoughts were humbled. I thought it was a cute story, but I couldn’t help but notice how much the image of the girl on the box has changed since Lorraine’s death. It went from a woman, to a Barbie doll, and I think that was the most disturbing part of my research I found.