Pick Of The Crop -- Rising Sun's Small Produce Operation Puts You Closer To The Dirt

THE PRODUCE CLERK IN MY neighborhood supermarket was apologetic but not very helpful:

"Yes," he said. They did have bananas, lots of bananas, hundreds of them. But, no. None of them was ripe. Every banana in the store was in perfect shape and every banana in the store was green.

I drove a few miles to the Roosevelt neighborhood and there, on the corner of Northeast 65th Street and 15th Avenue Northeast, I pulled into the small (too small) parking lot of the Rising Sun Farms & Produce Co.

Rising Sun had ripe bananas by the tableful. I bought a couple (at 59 cents a pound, why settle for one?) and a package of almond-rolled ripe dates and figured I had picked up my ration of potassium and fruit sugar for the day.

You don't find many produce shops like the Rising Sun inside the city limits anymore. They make great sense nutritionally, but not economically for would-be green grocers. The Rising Sun, and places like it scattered throughout Seattle, are to their neighborhoods what the Pike Place Market is to downtown Seattle: a charming but antiquated aberration in the marketing of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Bud Goodwin owns and runs the Rising Sun - which, despites its name, has no affiliation with the Japanese or Japan. He runs its 80 hours a week. And he believes in it.

"It's not a hard business to get into," he said, "but it's a tricky one."

Goodwin got into it 15 years ago, "Almost by accident."

A philosophy major from the University of Idaho, he had gone east to explore the world of business, discovered Wall Street and recoiled in horror. " `If that's what business is,' I told my brother who was living back there at the time," he recalled, " `I don't want any part of it.' "

Instead, he rode motorcycles, studied transcendental meditation, and hung around Eastern Washington with friends who were farmers and orchardists.

"I tried to buy into an orchard," he said. "But the land boom that was starting up then priced me out of it. A farmer friend had just harvested a load of asparagus and I offered to truck it over to Seattle to sell.

"I first tried to get a stall at the Pike Place Market, but that proved to be a terrible ordeal. At that time, the Market was restricted to farmers and locals. And since I was neither a farmer nor local I couldn't get in. They shut me out."

Goodwin tried another approach. He went to the city and applied for a peddler's license, got one easily, and found a street corner in Montlake where the landlord gave him permission to sell his Yakima asparagus.

"People loved it!" he chortled. "We sold it all and went back for more. I was thinking, `This is wonderful. This is a great life. I'm making a living and people are coming up and thanking me for it.' "

Goodwin began looking for a more permanent site. He spotted a closed vegetable store just south of Roosevelt High School and made the necessary inquiries.

Goodwin's steady clientele has kept him busy ever since. In theory it's easy: buy the best fresh fruits and vegetables you can at the lowest possible price and sell them for a little less than the major stores can.

"But that's where it gets tricky," he said. "You have to know your suppliers and you have to know your customers. If I buy a load of oranges or fresh, ripe peaches, and they sit out in the sun all day, they'll spoil and I'll not only lose the fruit, but if someone buys a moldy peach, I'll lose my customer."

If he buys and sells right, he estimated, "I should be able to underprice the supermarkets by 10 percent or more. And because I am small, I can afford to ripen and sell ripe fruit."

Hence, at the Rising Sun, on a recent spring Sunday morning, you could buy "black avocados, three for a dollar," or sweet red peppers for 98 cents a pound, half of the mass-marketed going price.

Some of the small store's patronage comes from distant parts of town, but not much. "We have customers who drive here from all over, some even from West Seattle, which surprises me, but the majority of our business is with the neighborhood, which is as it should be.

"Students from the university, a lot of graduate students and young families, some wealthy folks from places like Laurelhurst. And it's an ethnically diverse part of town, with many Asians and a growing number of Arabs."

It's a hands-on business, he observed, that has its own uncertainties, but clear rewards. "People aren't willing to get down and dirty anymore," he said. "They may not like the risks of being out on your own."

But Goodwin, a scuba diver in the off-season, does. He moved ceaselessly around his store, which is really little more than an expanded double-door garage, arranging displays, cleaning up, watching the morning sun intensify over his bright pyramids of produce.

"In the larger stores there are so many people involved," he said. "You might have a purchaser who doesn't even know what store he is buying for. Then you could have a produce manager and any number of clerks. Here it all comes back to me."

The Rising Sun Farms isn't on the cutting edge of produce procurement. Don't expect bins of radiccio (Italian red chicory) or miniature carrots. "We don't carry much of those kinds of things because our customers don't ask for them."

There used to be more people like him, "30 or 40 years ago," he recalled. But they dwindled.

"Then we saw great strides in refrigeration. You could get and hold produce year round. So farmers were tempted to save a few cents and pick fruit a few days earlier and ship stuff a little less ripe. Now we can eat almost anything year round, but with a little less flavor.

"And most people have forgotten what it's like to eat a tree-ripened peach - a peach that almost falls off the tree when you touch it. After all, ripe fruit has to be handled very carefully. It's a double-edged sword."

He looked thoughtful.

His education in philosophy and his years in meditation had little do to with the buying and selling of fruits and vegetables, he said.

I wasn't sure I accepted his premise.

"But in season, I will always try to have ripe peaches."

(Copyright, 1993, John Hinterberger. All rights reserved.) John Hinterberger's food columns and restaurant reviews appear Sundays in Pacific and Fridays in Tempo. Greg Gilbert is a Seattle Times photographer.