Back in March, I spent a day in California’s Central Valley. After nearly a decade of reporting on Stewart and Lynda Resnick – the husband and wife duo behind the Wonderful Company, which sells $5 billion worth of mandarins, pistachios, almonds, Fiji Water, Pom Wonderful and a whole lot else – I had finally secured some time interviewing key farming executives while going inside their nut orchards, citrus groves and processing plants.
Some of the fruits of that reporting have been published in the past few weeks – you caught my features on Wonderful’s bet on seedless lemons as well as the one on how they became one of the biggest beekeepers in America, I hope?
If you don’t know the Resnicks yet, please get familiar. They are America’s richest farmers, each worth an estimated $5.3 billion. That fortune – which includes owning 135,000 acres of farmland in California’s Central Valley, Texas and Mexico – even landed Lynda this week near the top of the Forbes list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women. She’s No. 4.
Philanthropy is what takes up most of Lynda’s time these days. The California Institute of Technology, to which the couple pledged $750 million in 2019, is nearing completion on a 79,500-square-foot sustainability center to be named after the Resnicks, while the University of California at Davis also recently nabbed a $50 million gift for sustainability research. Education has long been a focus for Lynda, who has provided thousands of scholarships. Wonderful even partners with two K-12 charter schools in the Central Valley called Wonderful College Prep Academy.
While visiting the charter school in Delano, California I saw a garden that instilled healthy habits and the power of growing your own food to kids of all ages – including many who have limited resources and access. Olive trees in the courtyard are pressed into oil in class. A salmon-searing demonstration took place at the front of the cafeteria at lunch. Chef Devinder Kumar, previously at Stanford, is hyper-focused on bringing fresh and healthy ingredients to the students, and proving that school lunch in America can be empowering.
Straight from the cafeteria, I ate sauteed oyster mushrooms, quinoa with tomatoes and microgreens, cucumber-onion salad and roasted rainbow carrots with broccolini. There was a diced beet salad, white fish topped with pineapple slaw, and a scallop with a zesty tomato sauce. As I enjoyed these bites, I thought more about the harsh realities that so many students across the country face. Most of the academy’s 2,400 students eat multiple meals a day on-campus. In all, about 6,500 scratch-cooked meals are served at the two schools daily. That underscores how crucial this work is, and why those lunches could be a model for what’s really possible nationwide.
— Chloe Sorvino, Staff Writer
Order my book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, out now from Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books.
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What’s Fresh
America’s Richest Self-Made Women. Forbes’ Ranking Of The Country’s Most Successful Women Entrepreneurs, Executives And Entertainers. By Forbes Staff.
Supreme Court Weakens Clean Water Protections. The ruling will make it much easier for wetlands to not be protected under the Clean Water Act, reports Alison Durkee.
The Ukraine Invasion Reveals How National Security, International Trade, And Climate Change Are Connected. As Nives Dolsak and Aseem Prakash write, Russia uses energy trade for politics. Renewables don’t support national security as China dominates their supply chains. Nuclear supports climate and security goals.
The U.S. Is Preparing To Put Billions Into High-Speed Rail. It's been a global outlier in the technology sector but the Transportation Department may dole out more than $6.5 billion for bullet trains in California and Nevada, writes Alan Ohnsman.
Loved trying my first griot in Montreal last week while I was in town to do a talk about my book Raw Deal at the creative business summit C2. There’s a thriving Haitian immigrant community in Montreal, and I picked up this take-out plate – with plantains, rice and beans, fermented hot sauce and mac salad – at the long-standing Marché Méli-Mélo, which first opened in 1984.
Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food and agriculture as a staff writer on the enterprise team at Forbes. Her book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, published on December 6, 2022, with Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books. Her nearly nine years of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out Burger’s secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California’s Central Valley, burnt-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire, a century-old slaughterhouse in Omaha and even a chocolate croissant factory designed like a medieval castle in northern France.
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