LNW: How did the Resnicks become involved in agriculture and what is their business model?

RW: That’s kind of the historical accident—that somebody with a background in marketing just landed in agricultural products. That accident has really changed a lot of the way that we look at products in the supermarket, because everyone now is trying to brand their generic fruit or nuts—to give them a fancy brand name and massive marketing campaigns.

The Resnicks were not from a farming background. After they got together, Lynda started marketing for the companies that they would buy. These business ventures tended to sell tacky trinkets like The Franklin Mint [does] and Princess Diana dolls, that kind of thing. But there was inflation in the ’70s, so the story goes that they basically bought some land just to park their money as a hedge against inflation and they also bought an agricultural company that serviced the land.

YL: They bought that land from oil companies for cheap and inherited an agriculture business with all of these different products: citrus, tree nuts, wine. They have this vertically integrated agribusiness with distribution and branding.

RW: They own everything from top to bottom—they are the sole owners of their company, never floating it for shares. That’s how they became some of the individuals with the most water in the world. There are other companies that might have more water, but they’re not controlled by just two people.

LNW: Wonderful Company sells many different products—FIJI water, POM Wonderful juice, Halos Mandarins. Why does your documentary zero in on pistachios?

RW: One of the reasons we focused on pistachios is because the Resnicks single-handedly created and dominated the market in America. People didn’t really eat pistachios here before. Demand exploded after Wonderful Company’s marketing campaigns—Super Bowl commercials, massive store placement, and celebrity spokespeople. The Resnicks are the biggest pistachio producers in the world, so it’s really their thing. All the water use and problems that result from pistachio production, you can pin it on them, which might not be as true for some products like almonds where the boom happened across smaller farmers, as opposed to this very concentrated company.

Then the other reason we focused on pistachios is that when people criticize water use in Californian agriculture practices, the retort is always, “Well, we need food.” There’s a very direct interplay between people’s needs and environmental protections. But when you look at something like pistachios and the extent to which people are consuming them, it’s harder to make the argument that we need to be eating as many of these nuts as we are.

California’s rain is unpredictable and in some years you’ll have a water surplus and in others you’re gonna have a shortage. One of the ways farmers deal with that is, if there isn’t much water in a given year, they just won’t plant their row crops. Based on the water supply, if they’re growing tomatoes or lettuce or cantaloupes, they can choose whether or not to plant. Whereas with pistachios, it takes seven years to get the orchards to even bear fruit—it’s a substantial investment. Once you plant those trees, you must have water and you will likely apply political pressure to get it. Especially because each pound of pistachios needs over a thousand gallons of water.

LNW: California has the largest system of dams and aqueducts in the world, and the film exposes how these artificial water networks have triggered mass extinction events of delta smelt, salmon, and other species. The Resnicks have lobbied to extend these aqueducts to support their agricultural empire. Beyond water use itself, how have the Resnicks’ business practices contributed to other environmental or social harms?

YL: Aside from prompting mass extinction events, aqueducts, water distribution systems, and the kind of terraforming that’s taking place in California—basically rewiring how water flows—has allowed companies, like Wonderful Company, to create massive crop plantations out in the Central Valley. This terraforming allows residential areas and agribusiness to expand into places where they shouldn’t be. So the suburban sprawl shouldn’t exist where it does sometimes, because now it’s up in the hills where fires are a natural occurrence. I wouldn’t say that the Resnicks are responsible for the recent wildfires, but there’s a connection. Artificial water systems have allowed the building of whole neighborhoods and cities in places that are fire-prone.

RW: We were in LA at the tail end of the worst drought in California’s history. Back then, there were so many news articles about people tearing out their lawns, or taking short showers. Think about how 80 percent of the state’s water goes to agriculture, and only 20 percent to residential use. If California residents save 1 percent of water, that’s probably just a few acres of pistachios. The Resnicks were expanding their business at a huge clip during the drought—they weren’t slowing down at all. So you could say that California’s water woes and the suffering that it endured, even if it was maybe minor at times, was a trade-off, where agriculture directly took the win.

LNW: Oil is a major through-line in Pistachio Wars. How would you describe the relationship between Wonderful Company and the oil industry?

RW: The northern part of California is known to be the nicer place to plant. By the time the Resnicks came in, they were late to the party. The land they got was in the southern and western parts of the Central Valley, where there was a lot of oil industry. There were these huge drilled-out fields that were now unusable or adjacent oil fields that were being sold cheaply. So that was the land that the Resnicks were able to get their hands on.

When oil companies are drilling, they pump water into wells along with chemicals to aid the process. Then they end up with this thing called produced water that they have to get rid of. They’re supposed to inject it back into the ground where the oil was, but that’s expensive, and they don’t want to do it. So, one way oil companies deal with that is by filtering and diluting the water so it can run back into agricultural use. And, of course, there are horrible chemicals in there. The Wonderful Company has admitted to using this kind of water to irrigate their crops.

LNW: The Resnicks have been lauded for investing heavily in their Central Valley worker town, Lost Hills. Most of the residents are employed by the Wonderful Company and many live below the poverty line near an oil refinery. What labor concerns does this raise?

YL: Lost Hills is an impoverished town with people essentially sick and having all these disorders, from breathing in dust, pesticides, and fertilizer, living right next to an active refinery—surrounded by oil wells and large scale corporate agriculture. They don’t even have access to clean drinking water. Meanwhile, the people who essentially own this town, who control the industry around it, live in one of the most expensive houses in Beverly Hills. Their house in Aspen was recently listed for $300 million. Barely any of that wealth goes back to Lost Hills.

RW: It’s a domestic banana republic.

YL: It’s exactly like a banana republic. It’s very imperial in the sense that a banana republic essentially presupposes that there’s this powerful entity, an empire of some kind, that uses the republic as a plantation where things are grown, people are exploited, and resources are extracted for the metropole. Los Angeles is kind of that imperial center. LACMA and the Hammer Museum benefit from the Resnicks’ generous donations. Already well-funded universities are getting a massive influx of money from them. And all that wealth is created by the people who live in Lost Hills.

The environmental degradation and labor exploitation are in a faraway region where many workers don’t even speak English, so there’s almost a racialized divide between the people who are Wonderful Company beneficiaries and those who work in the field to develop their wealth. The American empire certainly does bad things overseas, but the pattern is replicated domestically and my critique of some left, anti-imperial politics is that it very rarely looks inward.

LNW: While the Resnicks are certainly employing imperial procedures domestically, they are also propping up the American empire abroad. In what ways are the couple implicated in American foreign policy?

YL: The Resnicks’ personal Zionist politics and their business politics are very much in alignment. It’s also very circular because American foreign policy created the Resnicks’ business: US meddling in Iran and subsequent economic sanctions created the conditions for the emergence of California’s pistachio industry. Then profits from that industry circulate and cycle right back into this imperial machine that works to basically create a consensus in America that Iran is our greatest enemy. When I first started reporting on the Resnicks back in 2009, there were numerous domestic Jewish lobby groups who were lobbying against Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. At the time, the Resnicks were giving a lot of money to those Jewish organizations. Then, over the years, they have donated millions to American Friends of the IDF and sat on the board of the hawkish Middle East policy think tank, Washington Institute for Near East Policy. They are recycling their profits right back into supporting the imperial logic that made their business possible. It’s a pretty classic formula, which doesn’t really stand out that much, aside from the fact that the pistachio situation is kind of ridiculous. You can maybe understand starting a war over the control of oil, but launching a nuclear war over pistachio nuts? I don’t think people are really into that.

LNW: Is there any recourse? What could a better system look like?

RW: The solution is a more democratically engaged population that’s interested in preserving the environment, balancing consumption against other values, and enforcement at a state level by politicians who don’t answer to business interests. But these things are going to the core of what’s wrong with modern society and what’s wrong with America.

YL: We focus on the Resnicks, but they are just the latest manifestation of a very entrenched system of industrial agriculture. Without addressing the industrial base of our society and the values that our society rests on, you can’t really do much about it. Short of a revolution of some kind—a fundamental rewiring of society—I don’t think that there is much of a solution.

RW: We’re looking at California, which is a Democrat-controlled state—it’s supposed to be the bastion of American progress. But, things are really bad there, so I think people need to look beyond the polarized-culture-war-bipartisan-struggle, and realize that there is a deeper systemic problem with the way that we’re running our society and economy and political system.