This Is Where America Gets Almost All Its Winter Lettuce

[Mosby]

Unless you're a homesteader, a Sunbelt resident who eats only food from your local farmers market, or an extremely devout carnivore, you've almost certainly eaten lettuce from Yuma, Arizona, a city of 93,000 at the nexus of Arizona, California and Mexico. The Yuma area, including the Imperial Valley across the California border, produces about 90 percent of all the leafy vegetables grown in the United States from November to March, when it's too cold to grow produce in most of the rest of the country.

If you're familiar with the geography of the American Southwest, you're probably scratching your head right now. Because Yuma is in the middle of the desert. It's probably most famous today as the sandy setting of the 2007 Western "3:10 To Yuma." So you may think Yuma looks something like this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/04/yuma-lettuce_n_6796398.html?utm_hp_ref=taste&ir=Taste

This is where most of the Colorado river water goes, Yuma AZ and Imperial Valley CA.

[ChazII]

1. Thank you, Mosby

This was a terrific article and I learned some facts about Yuma that I did not know before.

[BlueCaliDem]

2. Wow. Didn't know this. Thanks for posting, Mosby. Very informative, and I've gotten

a new and heightened respect for our iceberg lettuce to boot!

[GreatGazoo]

4. There is a special beauty to the flat plains between mountains

The pics look a lot like Southern California and Oxnard. So much sky.