Opinion: Farmers losing water to save tiny fish
By Rebekah Rast, Fresno Bee
When you buy a head of lettuce at the grocery store in the next couple of months, you might notice a higher price tag at checkout.
This isn’t the first time the cost of lettuce has increased. In late 2009, in a supermarket in Queens, New York, a customer noticed a head of iceberg lettuce went from 89 cents one month to $2.49 the next, according to an article in the New York Daily News. Why?
The article attributes the shortage of lettuce to a cold front in California. The real reason, according to Sarah Woolf of California’s Westlands Water District, is that lettuce production in California has been cut in half due to lack of water reaching the Valley.