Reflections on Working in the Asian Garlic Industry: Alex Eldred '92

From Chinese Field to American Table: Reflections on Working in the Asian Garlic Industry

by Alex Eldred '92
Contrary to the warnings I was given as a young child, my advice is don’t be shy about talking to strangers—whether it’s a taxi driver (perfect for opinionated conversations no matter the country) or a friend of a friend. Maybe it will just be an awkward half hour talking about golf or politics, but maybe you’ll be offered a job as a spice merchant in Shanghai. I was, at least.

College, Spring Break 2006

It had been raining for days on end in Shanghai, and I was moping around my parents’ house downtown. My father was meeting an old friend of our cousin’s for lunch in Xintiandi, and I decided to crash it. Fast-forward through crispy tofu and braised eggplant, and all of a sudden, my cousin’s friend Jeff had unexpectedly signed me up for a summer internship in the city. When I finished my last year at Michigan, I had an offer on the table to manage his dehydrated garlic and onion trading business in China.

This was just before the Great Recession; most of my classmates were headed to finance jobs, consulting firms, med school, grad school, —the usual. Nobody was thinking of a career in Chinese agriculture. But, I’ve always been rather contrarian, so I took it, although in fairness, knowing the city well already and having my parents close by really made it a no-brainer.

I can’t say that my first job really had anything much to do with my undergraduate studies: I was a European literature student who promptly moved across the wrong ocean to manage the sourcing, packaging, and export of dehydrated vegetables—primarily garlic—to clients across the eastern US. Not much overlap with Thomas Mann in this three-person startup in Shanghai where most of my desk time was arranging the logistics of container shipping and scouting for new spice blends to add to our product line. However, I did acquire a failsafe method for learning Chinese in a hurry—frequent business trips to the fields of Shandong province, the rural peninsula halfway to Beijing where nearly 80% of the world’s garlic is cultivated. When nobody speaks English, you’ll learn the local tongue with alacrity, guaranteed.

The core of my responsibilities was locating the large dehydration facilities where fresh cloves and heads go in and powder, granules, and flakes emerge. This is the foodstuff that ends up in your McCormick spice blends and on Stouffer’s frozen pizza. Eventually we expanded to onion sourcing along the Nile. I became somewhat of a regular on the Shanghai-Beijing-Cairo circuit, and ultimately we were absorbed by a Swiss multinational. Suddenly, those German skills were handy. Between the boozy dinners needed to close deals to export by the ton and the smell of full-day allium facility audits, perhaps I should have qualified for an episode of Dirty Jobs. Looking back, though, I don’t regret a minute of it.

What is China like?
I get this question frequently, and I usually turn the tables and ask, “What is the US like?” How do you begin describing a massive country that fits no mold? There’s Shanghai, my home for the last five years, whose luscious glitz in the eastern neighborhood of Pudong has been made famous by Skyfall and Mission Impossible. The art deco, ex-colonial French Concession is on the other side, where most of my foreign friends and I lived— the “expat bubble,” as I both affectionately and disdainfully call it. I hardly ever spent an afternoon in the cafes and shops with friends there speaking less than four languages—Chinese, French, German and my native tongue—a feat that’s hard to regularly accomplish here in Washington. Yet, running into the same few hundred people made it sometimes feel like I was living in a village instead of a Yangtze delta of 22 million. Thankfully, I had a job that regularly yanked me out of that bubble and into a different reality.

What made me eventually leave China? That no matter how well I learn to speak Chinese and understand Chinese culture, I will always be the foreigner at arm’s length.

What do I miss being back in the United States?
Tons. Being able to switch languages three times in the same sentence. Being able to eat tofu that actually tastes good. Being able to make weekend trips to the Great Wall and the Gobi Desert. Being able to get into pretty much any nightclub without queuing up. Most importantly, being assured that even if I have terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days, they will never be boring.

I’m still not ready to move back to Asia, but I can’t wait to catch up next spring with my parents over sesame noodles at our favorite place on Huaihai Road.