'Pistachio Wars' and the Terraforming of California, with Yasha Levine
Publicly subsidized privately profitable, that old story.
Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since I started FilmDrunk in 2007. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.
—
Half of LA burns down and suddenly everyone is an expert on California’s geography. Mostly this is harmless, like when people blame the Resnicks, who own the Wonderful Company and lots of water rights, for there not being enough water for LA’s fire fighters (almost certainly not the case, but the Resnicks do plenty of other bad things).
Other times it can be borderline disastrous, like when Trump released a bunch of dam water into the Central Valley — despite that water not going to LA and no one who received it actually wanting it right now — seemingly just as a photo op to prove that any lack of water had been Biden and Newsom’s fault. That kind of ignorance can kill.
Either way, it’s weird whenever California’s Central Valley ends up making national news. The San Joaquin Valley (the southern half of the Central Valley, the top half being the Sacramento Valley) is where I grew up and where I now live, a place it’s impossible to drive through without seeing giant billboards screaming about the dang DemocRATS hoarding all our water (I’ve seen them at least since they still said Gray Davis).
Even being a local, much of the way water works in California remained opaque and obscure before I watched Pistachio Wars, a new documentary co-directed by Yasha Levine, about water, the Resnicks, and the Central Valley. Sometimes it takes an outsider like Levine (who was born in the Soviet Union) to question systems people who have been born with just take for granted. It’s wild how many high school parties we threw out in the middle of nowhere next to giant canals whose existence we never really questioned.
I got to speak with Levine recently and did a big write-up for Defector. The TL;DR version of this is that you should go read that now. I also posted audio of the entire conversation here.
In Pistachio Wars, Levine goes to Lost Hills, a tiny town in Kern Country where half the residents work for the Resnicks. The Resnicks built a shiny new park there, but it’s already falling apart, possibly due to chemicals in the city water supply. The story reminded me a lot of the tiny town where I grew up. Which also didn’t (and doesn’t) have a bank, a grocery store, a hospital, etc. When I drove through a few years ago, it still didn’t have any of those things, but now it has a massive POM Wonderful distribution warehouse.
Much has been written about the obvious folly of suburban sprawl, bad zoning, and poorly-planned development, and how those relate to climate change and the destructiveness of wildfires. All of that is important, but also, as Levine points out, 80% of California’s water goes to agriculture. Which means that even if we disappeared the entire population overnight, we’d only save less than 20% of the total water.
Agriculture grows food that people eat, as farmers here never tire of pointing out. And they’re right, to an extent, but the politics of that are complex, especially so when you’re talking about industrial farmers planting huge orchards in the middle of a drought and using public water to grow cash crops for export. As Levine put it to me, “Pistachios get the absurdity of the system of how resources get allocated, why certain crops are grown and some crops are not grown, and who ultimately makes the decisions of what kind of food is produced in America.”
Levine pulls at a lot of disparate strands in Pistachio Wars, which attempts the monumental task of trying to find answers for why certain crops are grown certain places, who benefits from it, and who loses (see also: Mark Arax’s book about Valley water). In order to do so, he traces the history of the US market for pistachios. Apparently it all goes back to the Iranian Revolution. Iran used to be the world’s number one exporter of pistachios, and then the US-backed Shah got overthrown and the country was put under strict sanctions (which it basically as been ever since), essentially creating the market for California pistachios, which didn’t really exist before it. And the Resnicks now “control something like 60 percent of the industry […], bringing in at least 20% of their agricultural revenue.”
It’s all a big tangle, of neoliberal privatization in the 90s, global politics, and old-money locals. Obviously, Chinatown comes up. But there’s also a sense of clannishness that pervades life here in the Central Valley (especially in the rural areas), and Pistachio Wars is one of the only works I’ve ever seen that explores this.
I’ve written about Road House, which was filmed in the town where I went to elementary school. In Pistachio Wars, Levine takes a strange trip to East Porterville, another uncanny Central Valley town next door to where I used to play basketball or golf growing up, and meets a guy who I can only describe as the nice version of Brad Wesley, the evil local landlord from Road House. Or at least, the version of Brad Wesley who smiles when you come knocking and gives you a box of oranges. Sometimes it do be like that. Okay, just read the article, I’m rambling now.
More Self-Indulgent Plugs
-Here’s the bonus Frotcast (available free!) with me talking to Yasha.
-We recorded a new Frotcast this week with Joe Sinclitico, talking Super Bowl ads and Jamie Foxx’s special. For some reason Brendan’s internet never works when Matt goes out of town so there were some technical difficulties, but I know how everyone loves to hear Joe.
-I was a guest on the Co-Main Event podcast last week, talking movies and MMA with my old pal Ben Fowlkes.
-Matt had me on Bad Hasbara to talk about Golda. As I said on the show, this felt like a movie that maybe wanted to be critical of Israel, but also wanted to be a Girlboss Biopic, and with those two things being sort of contradictory it just ended up being a movie about smoking. Seriously, if anyone wants to do a quantitative analysis of smoking in movies I’d be willing to bet Golda is the smokingest movie in the history of a cinema. I watched it twice and can now afford to buy a tote bag entirely in Camel Cash.
They won’t all be plug posts, I promise.
I was psyched to see your name on Defector! Hope to see more in the future.
Despite living in LA since 2015 I never had a reason to drive up to the Bay Area until 2021 when my brother moved there. I was struck by two things:
1. There’s a popular saw that “between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh lies Kentucky”. Well, between Los Angeles and the Bay Area lies Texas.
2. There are at least two points on the trip on the 5 where the stench from the industrial cattle farms is so bad I nearly vomit.
I have family in Paso Robles and I have made the drive there or to Sunnyvale about ten times and the summer trips are always worse.