Jim Simonian isn't the sort to sip pomegranate martinis, buff his skin with a pomegranate scrub or read the sort of magazines that would apprise him about Academy Award nominees getting Pom juice in their gift bags.
The latest thing is not his thing -- as you can gather on the journey to his pomegranate orchard.
His day starts in Fowler, population 5,293, where he's the mayor and has been on the city council for 14 years ("I don't think I'm going to run again," he says, "people call you every time a dog barks or someone steals their trash can lid.").
On the way to one-runway Selma airport, he points out the house where he was born and raised and the grapevines that his grandfather Paul Simonian planted about 1910 giving Simonian Farms its start. The plane he flies to the western Fresno County ranch, when it's not too foggy, is a 1974 Centurion II cared for so well it looks brand new.
At Pilibos Ranch, which Simonian Farms leases, he walks past the very first tractor that Mr. Pilibos ever bought, inside a ranch house where he exchanges a few words with Jess Urbanek, 87, the former ranch manager who has lived here 70 years.
He gets into a truck with Jess' son, Dwayne Urbanek, 47, the current farm manager, and they head out to a grove of the latest thing.
Pomegranates are popular right now -- the new blueberry, which is the fruit equivalent of the fashion world announcing a new black. Recent research and marketing informed the world of pomegranates' anti-aging properties. Now, people are eating them, drinking them and slathering them upon their bodies.
Elizabeth Arden's Red Door Spa in New York City is offering a Pomegranate Warm Stone Facial. At the Niagara Falls Marriott you can get a Pomegranate Pedicure. Bartenders nationwide are mixing pomegranates with sake or vodka or gin -- combining the benefits of a buzz and Botox because the pomegranate is supposed to promote youthful skin.
There are pomegranate juice mixes and teas of every description, a pomegranate antioxidant pill, and Trader Joe's carries pomegranate yogurt.
All of this has left Simonian, 64, who has been farming pomegranates for 40 years, puzzled, if not downright perplexed.
What happens when an old fruit, long grown in the San Joaquin Valley, becomes the latest chi-chi craze?
"Hey, do you drink?" Simonian asks. "Have you ever had one of those pomegranate martini things? Are they any good?"
Tough-to-eat treat
The pomegranate -- despite ancient renown of mythic proportions -- was until its recent glory an obscure, lumpy, leather-skinned fruit known mostly for being hard to eat without staining your shirt.
For the past 25 years, Garrett and Jane Wimer have had a yearly pomegranate jelly-making party at their Fresno home with its two pomegranate trees in the yard. Garrett even designed his own press to get the juices out of the infamously difficult pomegranate, with its catacombs of sweet/tart ruby seeds.
Garrett, 67, who teaches astronomy at Fresno City College, would often invite his students to the annual pomegranate party.
His students would often ask what a pomegranate was.
"I'd always say, 'What's a pomegranate?! Don't you know pomegranates saved the human race?' " Garrett recalls.
Then he'd tell an ancient myth about a god who became angry and planned to kill all humans. Another god intervened by saying, "Let me take care of that for you" and stained the sand with pomegranate juice to pass for the blood of the human race, until God No. 1 cooled off.
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