Here's Ross Kamerud's letter to the editor that prompted this story:

While grocery shopping the other day I was thrilled to find that Gedney “the Minnesota pickles” were on sale.

I grew up in Chaska and as a boy I would sneak below the deck at the Gedney Pickle Company where employees tended to the huge tanks of brined cukes. (Entrance was gained from the nearby creek bed. The plant was then located on East Sixth Street.)

If the employees caught me, I was met with a spray of water in the face. Later I spent summers working with pickles. One year I pulled huge weeds from the path of an automatic cucumber harvester. The cukes grew like weeds down in the river valley.

Unfortunately, agriculture workers were exempt from the minimum wage scale. Evidently the poor didn’t need minimum wage if they did agriculture-related work. One year I fed cukes into a pickle spear cutting-packing machine. Then I graduated to the pickle juice (“cover brine”) mixing room.

I picked up the pickle jar at the grocery store and the memories came back vividly to me. In my mind the jingle played, “Gedney, it’s a Minnesota pickle… .” It was a great purchase!
Until I was putting one on my burger – and I read the fine print: “Product of India.”

I did a double take.

It was true: “Product of India.” Is this the craziest thing you’ve ever heard of?

With real unemployment greater than 15 percent, minimum wage that hasn’t kept up with inflation (and maybe even exempt for cucumber pickle pickers and packers), a crop that grows fine even here, gasoline at more than $2.50 a gallon, peak oil, a finished product that is mostly water.

What sort of twisted economic, accounting, globalism-gone-wild model has us buying pickles from India some 7,500 miles away?

Maybe I should plant cukes in the backyard this year.