Vice President Kamala Harris touted her pro-labor stripes this weekend when she claimed in an interview that she did not eat a grape until she was in her 20s because of union boycotts on grape growers. But according to an analysis by the New York Post, Harris's story of union solidarity is inconsistent with the timeline of the grape boycotts.
"This sounds quaint, and so I'm reluctant to say it, but, you know, I didn't eat a grape until I was in my 20s. Like, literally, had never had a grape," Harris told the Nation. "It was absolutely ingrained so deeply in me: Never cross a picket line."
But Harris would have crossed a picket line if she ate non-union grapes in her 20s. For all of her 20s, the United Farm Workers union imposed a boycott on grape growers. And Harris would have had ample opportunity to eat grapes during her childhood, when the UFW negotiated settlements and ended its earlier boycotts.
The first UFW grape boycott took place from 1965, when Harris was less than a year old, to 1970, when she was five years old, the Post noted. The second boycott started in 1973, when Harris was eight years old, and ended when she was 13 in 1978. Harris could have eaten any grapes under a clean pro-labor conscience from when she was 13 until she was 19, when the UFW started its third and final grape boycott.
That boycott, which ran from 1984 to 2000, took place for all of Harris's 20s. That means if the vice president was forgoing grapes through her teenage years until she was in her 20s, as her comments in the Nation imply, she would have gone from needlessly avoiding grapes when there was no boycott to crossing a picket line and disregarding the UFW's strike.
The Post linked Harris's grape story to another seemingly anachronistic tale from her youth that she told during an interview in 2019. When asked which artists she listened to when she smoked marijuana in college, Harris said she listened to Tupac and Snoop Dogg, both of whom did not release albums until at least five years after she graduated from Howard University.