Lynda and Stewart Resnick are among the more generous patrons of the arts scene in Los Angeles. They’ve made multimillion-dollar donations that have put their names on parts of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Hammer Museum, as well as other institutions in the city. You might not be familiar with the Resnicks or their business, The Wonderful Company, but you likely know at least a few of their brands, which include POM Wonderful pomegranate juice, Fiji bottled water, and Wonderful Pistachios. Many of their agricultural products are grown in California’s Central Valley, a vast stretch of land that was turned from a floodplain into one of Earth’s most fertile farming regions through heavy hydroengineering in the mid-20th century.
The valley is also rife with poverty and is a hotspot of environmental contamination and health issues, thanks to the iron rule powerful landowners like the Resnicks exert over it. Of special note is the extraordinary amount of water diverted to these farms to grow these crops — particularly pistachios, which require around a thousand gallons per pound produced. In a state with persistent drought issues, prioritizing a nut seems dubious, to say the least. How many museum wings can the Resnicks fund to avoid questions about their business practices?
Yasha Levine, a freelance journalist who has reported on the Central Valley in depth, teamed up with filmmaker Rowan Wernham to direct the documentary Pistachio Wars. The film takes the Resnicks as an entry point to investigate elite control of the Central Valley. Ahead of its release on VOD, I met with Levine and Wernham via Zoom to discuss how they connected, the Resnicks’ history and artwashing tactics, and the broader history of water control in California. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Yasha Levine in Victorville, California.
Hyperallergic: How did the two of you link up to make this film?
Rowan Wernham: I’ve been reading Yasha’s work for a long time. I thought his article “A Journey Through Oligarch Valley” would make a great film, and reached out to him through [writer] John Dolan.
Yasha Levine: I’d never considered making a documentary, but I immediately was struck by the possibilities. Visually, California is such a rich environment; the state has all these contrasts, the beauty on one hand and the environmental devastation [caused by] its industry on the other. So it didn’t take much for Rowan to convince me.
RW: We actually started out more focused on their lobbying for sanctions on Iran, then realized it would be hard to turn into a film, because the world of anti-Iran lobbying is so opaque. The article is about the land barons and old farming money that control California. The Resnicks are one of four or five oligarch farmers covered in the article. We realized there was also a Chinatown story, like a water heist with these good villains in the background. So we changed the focus to be more about the water, with the Iran lobbying being like a twist.
Nut silos at the Wonderful Company plant.
H: How did the Resnicks emerge as the focal point? Is it because they are particularly public facing and aggressively sunny in their self-promotion?
RW: When you’re looking at a corporation called “The Wonderful Company,” which puts this image out there in California, which is supposed to be the environmental leader in America, and then it’s as bad as we show it to be, I think that makes an impact. But the Resnicks also just have a great story.
YL: The Resnicks were my entry into the world of California water politics because, like you said, they’re very forward facing, aggressive, and visible. They stand out among the large farming families that control huge chunks of California because the others are usually much older, going back to the Gold Rush. The Resnicks come from a totally different world. They’re Jewish, they come from Hollywood, and they got into farming by accident. They wanted to be successful businesspeople, and farming was just one of the ventures they tried.
Because they’re new and ambitious, they’ve had to be creative in a way that the older farming families that already control the market don’t. They lobbied to change the rules around how water is governed and distributed. With their aggressive marketing campaigns, they essentially created an entire market for a crop they were growing. That kind of expansion of farming hadn’t been seen in California for several generations. And since then, the Resnicks have been throwing around their money a lot to, put crudely, whitewash their image and buy acceptance in the art world and liberal LA society.
Nut orchards.
H: I used to live in Los Angeles, and for a long time, that name was something I was just ambiently aware of because I had seen it in places like LACMA. Yasha, you staged a protest at the Hammer a few years ago tied to the Resnicks’ donation to the museum.
RW: Following that protest, the New York Times did an article about the Resnicks. They came to us for it, and we gave them part of the film to watch and introduced them to sources. But they still went and wrote what’s basically a puff piece that upsells the Resnicks’ philanthropy and passingly mentions some of the criticism. The Resnicks have flown under the radar because they pass as socially liberal, they’re seen as “good billionaires.” But when you look at what policies and research they’re actually pushing, they’re looking at techno fixes. It’s things like desalination or gene-mapping the pistachio to make it drought resistant. They’re definitely not saying “Maybe we shouldn’t use so much water.”
YL: That protest was just my wife and I. Calling it a protest is overkill, really. We just wanted to get attention on this issue. So I was surprised by how fragile the Resnicks are. It didn’t take much for them to turn on their whole PR apparatus. Lynda Resnick went to Lost Hills to personally give this [Times] reporter a tour about how great their little company town is. It’s normally impossible to get close to them with any questions. The fact that she flew out there to put on this little show for the Times, to me that showed how easy it is to puncture their image. The reality of what they do outweighs the meager cover they can provide by putting their names on museums. By now, everyone knows wealthy people give to these institutions to cover their asses. I wonder if there are diminishing returns to these kinds of donations, and what they think they’re going to get through them.
Porterville resident with no running water. Featured here: Juana Garcia and Donna Johnson.
H: We did see something of a reckoning for the Sackler family and their attempts at artwashing, but that came after many years and many points of pressure.
RW: Recently, The Wonderful Company has drawn a lot of massive ire around their water use, thanks to the fires this year. People made that connection: They see how much trouble they had putting the fires out, then thought about how the Resnicks use so much water. That’s the closest we’ve seen to mass public outrage toward them. With the Sacklers, you have an organized group of people who are families of [opioid] overdose victims. They can say their brother, son, or husband died, whereas with the Resnicks, it’s part of a bigger change in California’s landscape.
H: It’s also harder to make the connection because everything they’re doing is going on in the Central Valley, which, for most Californians who don’t live there, is out of sight, out of mind.
YL: That’s exactly the point we’re making in the film. And I know that with issue-based documentaries, a lot of people expect to hear solutions, but we don’t offer a solution, because while the Resnicks are a significant part of the system, it’s still a systemic issue, and one we’re all implicated in. There’s no quick fix where you can just use less water or switch to some green alternative, and then it’ll all be good. It’s a problem bigger than agriculture, even; it’s part of the capitalist system.
Wonderful Company Headquarters in LA.
H: Thematically, this film reminded me a lot of the work of Mike Davis, who wrote so much on California politics and history. Was he or any other work a notable influence?
RW: Yasha gave me Davis’s City of Quartz to read early on. It’s a great book on the background of California politics. I think Davis’s thesis is probably similar to ours, about overdevelopment driven by speculation and mindless capitalism. There’s also an older PBS documentary series about water, Cadillac Desert, based on the book by Marc Reisner.
YL: That’s the more normie one. It’s more of a sweeping history of the American West and the role water infrastructure played in it. One of the enduring myths of America is that the cowboys conquered the land — this ideal of rugged individualism. But as Reisner’s great book shows you, the West sits on these massive infrastructure projects, these dams and canals. The New Deal propped up this ideal of Western rugged individualism and allowed the creation of this civilization in California and the Southwest.
Visiting the site of the “secret dam” in Porterville, California.
RW: We’re tackling that tech utopian idea of 1950s California, where it was considered progress to convert rivers into concrete canals and computerize the distribution of water, and no one really questioned this. The landscape really is a hell. Coming from New Zealand, and just in my travels, I’ve seen agricultural areas produce food pretty effectively, and I haven’t ever seen anything as stark as the Central Valley. It’s this computerized efficiency, a flat desert with a managed irrigation system, computer-planted trees, and ideally nothing else is allowed to live there — weeds, other plants, birds, insects. You just have the crop with the minimum of water to keep it alive, or a feedlot. It’s peak neoliberal efficiency, but clearly viscerally wrong.
That drove the form of the film. I feel like the format of a regular documentary with facts and experts has been weaponized, since everybody can do it and make their own version of reality. So I wanted to capture more of the experience of driving through California, of seeing it.
Wonderful Halos sign for orchard next to oil field from Pistachio Wars
Pistachio Wars is available on VOD starting November 7.
