Every summer when I was growing up, my mother made it a point to make sure one of our visits to her sister Lois in Yuba City occurred near the end of July.
The timing had everything to do with the peach harvest.
There was a Mr. Singh that my aunt knew who would sell lugs of cling peaches for a dollar.
A typical lug – a wooden crate that would hold roughly a quarter of a bushel – weighed roughly 20 to 22 pounds.
Typically, crates averaged 24 to 48 peaches.
Mr. Singh’s “special” lugs were a $1.
That was virtually a steal even for 1968 prices let alone today where a dollar might buy you two peaches at the store.
The special lugs Mr. Singh sold had less peaches than lugs headed to supermarkets.
The reason was simple. They were significantly bigger than an average peach.
And because American marketing ingenuity was in its heyday in the 1960s, Madison Avenue had convinced people that the perfect peach was roughly the size of a tennis ball.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The juiciest and sweetest peaches tend to be larger, but they did not look right to the bulk of consumers in a produce section or a roadside fruit stand.
The special lugs was where the bigger peaches ended up.
The ones that people had been programmed to believe “weren’t optimum” peaches were by far the sweetest.
So why should you care about any of this?
It’s because perceptions are often wrong.
They also miss the mark by so much that it’s comical.
Take peaches as a whole.
They’re almost as American as apple pie.
And nowhere is that played up bigger than in Georgia, the self-proclaimed “Peach State” that even issues vehicle license plates with an image of peaches.
The 59,425 square mile State of Georgia is home to orchards that produced 24,800 tons of peaches in 2023.
Sutter County, by comparison, has 608 square miles. That’s about one percent the size of Georgia.
In 2023, Sutter County farmers harvested 110,000 tons of peaches. That’s almost five times the amount than Georgia does.
Sutter County, that includes Yuba City, is the largest peach growing county in the United States.
California, that produced 475,000 tons in 2023, is the leading peach growing state by far.
Next, is South Carolina at a distant 67,900 tons followed by Georgia in third at 24,800 tons.
Singh, for Punjabi Americans that are Sikhs, has religious significance for men just like Kaur does for women.
And while we’re talking about Punjabi Americans, another perception that is way off base is that somehow they haven’t been part of America’s fabric until lately.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
In the Central Valley there are Sikhs who can trace their American roots back 130 years.
That’s probably longer than many of the trolls that poison the Internet can trace their American linage.
The unfortunate incident in Florida involving the Sikh truck driver out of Stockton who made an illegal U-turn on a freeway and killed three people fed the ugliness that regurgitates bile in the bowels of the Internet.
To be clear, Harjinder Singh, 28, crossed into the United States illegally from Mexico in 2018. The State of California issued him a commercial driver’s license that is illegal to do so under federal law for anyone who enters the country illegally.
That doesn’t make all Sikhs driving a truck illegal migrants, not by an extremely long shot.
It might surprise you that the typical American truck driver doesn’t look like Jerry Reed of “Smokey and the Bandit” fame.
Another perception that is wildly inaccurate.
As many as 40 percent in the western United States and 20 percent nationally are Sikhs.
Consider this a long introduction to how we may harbor misconceptions about Sikhs among the nearly 40 million people who call California home.
Punjab is a state in India.
There is not one religion in Punjab, or India for that matter
The major religions of India include Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, and Buddhism.
Others include Baha’i Faith, Jainism, Judaism, and Zoroastrian.
The first immigrants from Punjab started arriving in the United States in the late 19th century. Most were Sikhs.
In the initial “wave,” some 3,000 people from India came into the United States via Angel Island, the West Coast’s answer in the Northern San Francisco Bay to New York’s Ellis Island.
Most initially ended up in the Central Valley, providing the manpower to build California’s fledging agricultural industry.
The 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone law slowed immigration down to a trickle.
A new quota system replaced that law in 1943.
It wasn’t until 1965 immigration reform that significant growth in immigration occurred.
By the end of 2021, those arriving from India were the second largest groups of immigrants to the United States, behind Mexicans and ahead of Chinese and Filipinos.
Unlike late 19th century immigrants from India, most today arrive via employment of family-sponsored avenues under United States immigration laws.
Roughly four-fifths of adult Indian immigrants have a college education.
That has led to Indian migrant households to have median household incomes more than double of other immigrants and native born Americans.
As for Punjabi Americans, they now number almost 320,000 according to the Census Bureau. Many of them are Sikhs, who are descendants of those who first settled in California almost 130 years ago.
Roughly half of all Punjabi Americans (156,700) live in California and account for 0.42 percent of the state’s population. New York is a distant second with 30,341 Punjabi Americans.
Most Punjabis in California are in the Central Valley and Bay Area.
Numerically, Yuba City has the highest number of Indians at 11,000 with the vast majority being Punjabi Americans.
Punjabi Americans account for 12.9 percent of the population of Sutter County.
That makes it the most proportionately Punjabi American county in the United States.
Livingston, in Merced County, has 2,798 Indian Americans residing within its city limits or 19.9 percent. Again, most are Punjabi. As such, Livingston is proportionally the most Punjabi American municipality in the United States.
One final tidbit: The first Sikh, the first Asian, and the first Indian elected to Congress has a tie to San Joaquin County.
Dalip Singh Saund served as the secretary of the Stockton Gurdwara, the oldest Sikh temple in the United States that was founded in 1912.
Saund represented California’s 29th Congressional District, which included Riverside and Imperial counties, from 1957 to 1963.
