Dried Fruit Deglet Dates Pitted (1x5LB )The date palm has been cultivated and prized from remotest antiquity; its fruit has been the staple food and chief source of wealth in the irrigable desert of the middle East and North Africa. Spanish missionaries carried the tree to the New World in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it was not until the early 1900s that the United States cultivated a commercial date crop in southern California. Deglet Noor dates are Called the Date of Light , a semi