Our Good Lives

Published  in edited form May 29, 2013 in the Foothills Sun-Gazette

    "We're not going to give up our good lives," a close friend advised me some months ago as we discussed the problems of rural California.  I'd laid them at the feet of our industrialized food system skewed toward big producers who are now becoming big developers, with escalating costs to small farmers, farmworkers and small towns.  I was proposing possible solutions, including more people growing their own food and eating locally, boycotting products like PomWonderful and Cuties, garlic grown in China, pastries baked in Mexico, and anything Dole has ever touched.  Before I went any further, he put a cautionary hand on my arm and lovingly delivered those nine words.

     "We're not?" I said, surprised.  Boycotting the Big Boys' products is something I've  been doing, for my stomach's and my soul's sake, for almost 30 years.  I haven't given up bananas, except when there's none without the Dole label, and I still drink coffee that's probably not traded fairly. In other words, I haven't given up all of my "good" life, but I'm aware that these parts are not all that good.  What was it someone once said about the unexamined life?

     I've had the privilege of reading some of Mark Arax's fine writing this weekend.  He's offered to include a piece he wrote in 2006 on his grandfather's hoe in the book of writings we're publishing on Agriculture and the Common Good, A Little Piece of Land.  On his website (www.mark-arax.com) under the tab "The Place" he has several fine essays, including one on Stewart Resnick, who owns Paramount Farms, home of PomWonderful and a host of Wonderful-ly packaged nuts.  Resnick also owns the Shafter Industrial Park and must now be considered a major player in this region's development.  But what disturbed me most in Mark's piece was the story of Resnick's decimation of the California Pistachio Commission, which had supported small-scale pistachio producers until its demise.  That, and the fact that he has a temper problem.

     I have a temper problem.  Ask anybody who's worked at RN Market more than a month.  When I tell them, some of my customers can't believe it, but that's because they're chronically nice.  Ask some others who come in at the dinner hour tired, hungry, and dreading going home to cook dinner after an already-long day, with children pulling on their elbows begging for quarters, and you might hear another story.  I try to be understanding, but when the mind-numbed parents push their carts into my elbow or fail to respond to my questions about bagging their groceries, sometimes I break.

     What broke Stewart's hold on his temper at the Pistachio Commission meetings, according to one of the pistachio commissioners, was not getting his way.  He said Resnick would start with "No one appreciates what I've done for agriculture," and end in a rage with "Do you know who I am?  Do you know what I am?  I'm a billionaire!"  Resnick thought there was something wrong with his large share of the fees supporting the marketing efforts that also benefited the independent, small growers, his "competitors."  Forget that that's the purpose of such commissions; he just couldn't make business sense out of it, so he did it in.

     Noting Resnick's control over the Kern County Water Bank, once a public agency, Mark asked if he's truly a farmer or just a developer in disguise.  "You've already begun selling farm water to other big agricultural concerns - Newhall Ranch, Castle & Cooke (Dole) - so they can turn their fields into suburbs."

     He answered like a billionaire.  "If there's some big opportunity for us to take a couple thousand acres and build a nice industrial park, we're going to do it.  I don't see it as 'Oh my God we're paving over farmland.'  That's just life.   But on balance, unless there's a really big opportunity, there's a continuity to farming that I like."

     There's a continuity to farming that I like, too, but people like Resnick threaten that continuity.  There's a continuity to living in small towns that I like, too, but without the small farmers that built them and keep the profits moving through, small towns have only two futures:  to become bedroom communities or farmworker enclaves.  Lindsay has worked for and fought against both ineffectively and at great expense.  The tragedy is they have been ignorant of the problem's source.

     Our good lives are at stake in both the small towns and the cities.  Those city dwellers who will not voluntarily give up their good lives to defend this rural reality will find themselves giving it up involuntarily in the near future as growth, predicted and wished-for by those for whom it is a really big opportunity, subsumes them.  It might be time to re-examine our good lives and decide what we really want to save.
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Trudy Wischemann is a writer and researcher on land tenure implications.  You can send her your good life concerns % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.