This is the final post in a series on food in Los Angeles that started with Land of Sunshine and continued with Two Cities.
In this post I speculate how the demographic shifts changing the region- largely the result of immigration from Latin America and Asia- and global economic integration will impact L.A.’s food landscape. The answer will likely emerge from a creative tension between the globalization from above of corporations, trade, and finance and possibilities for a globalization from below of migration and social change across borders.
Migration and globalization
Los Angeles is a place continuously being transformed by new arrivals from around the country and across the world. This transformation has been characterized by both growth and change. In 1900, approximately 1 out of 1000 residents of the United States lived in greater L.A.; by 2000, the region was home to 1 out of 17 U.S. residents. Throughout much of the 20th century, Los Angeles was the whitest and most protestant big city in the country. Today, it is almost 70 percent non white. Sixty percent of residents speak a language other than English at home- that’s three times the national average.
Over the same period, the region’s elected officials and business leaders have sought to position Los Angeles as a gateway to the Pacific Rim and Latin America. As a global city feeding off international trade and finance. The twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the nation’s number one and two destination points for containerized imports. Business services and international trade are two of the region’s largest economic sectors and sources of employment.
Latino Urbanism
The obvious food change from being a migration-driven, more cosmopolitan city is the presence of cuisines from across the globe. But what’s at least as important is where and how those meals are being eaten and shared. One of the promising ways that Los Angeles is being transformed by new arrivals is what planner James Rojas calls Latino Urbanism. People who grew up in places with a culture of using public space in more active way –walking and socializing outside, eating at cafes, buying food from street vendors, talking to neighbors across fences in residential areas, living in denser areas near restaurants and retail, etc – have the potential to instill that sense of energy and life into L.A.
In other words, to bring people and food back into visible public places in the city. This would reverse many of the patterns of how people get and eat food in the southern California of the suburb and the metastasized car culture. Grocery stores cocooned by parking lots. Drive-throughs. Cook-outs partly shut in by walled back yards. Restaurants considered exclusive because they offer privacy. (Not that there’s anything wrong with a quiet, private meal, at home or out; it’s nice to have vibrant street life too.)
Food & globalization
If we shift focus a few miles from the streets of Los Angeles down to the docks of San Pedro or Long beach, we get a different vantage point on being a ‘global city.’ The food sector has been one of the more active industries that has become internationalized and more highly concentrated through trade and foreign investment. In 2005, global exports of agricultural products were worth approximately $669 billion, a 23 percent increase from 2000. Global food retail sales exceed $4 trillion annually. The 15 largest global supermarket companies account for more than 30 percent of world supermarket sales and over 50 percent of hypermarket sales. Wal-mart, Carrefour, and Tesco top the list.
If we could peer inside all the shipping containers moving in and out of the ports, we would see plenty of food and other agricultural items. In 2005, two of the top ten importers of containerized goods into the United States were food companies: Dole food and Chiquita brands Wal-Mart, the number one importer and another big box company (Costco) in the top ten, also import lots of food along with other kinds of products. By weight, food is the second largest category of items shipped from California ports, at 15 percent (petroleum is number one). In 2002, Agricultural exports accounted for 24 percent of exports from the port of Long Beach by value. Two of the top five products by volume exported from the port of LA are cotton and pet/animal feed.
Particulate grape vines
Each of these containers, as it moves by ship, by rail, by truck in or out of the region, trails behind it a haze of diesel fumes and deadly tiny particulate matter. The Pacific Institute calculated the environmental and health impacts from just one commodity - Chilean grapes. They found that grapes are shipped 5500 miles from the port of Valparaiso to L.A. or Long beach, causing 2 premature deaths and 47 cases of asthma, and releasing 15 tons of particulates and 7000 tons of carbon dioxide along the way- tendrils of smoke one could compare to near invisible, toxic vines.
Circles and cycles
So the way that we are trading with the world has all kinds of perverse health impacts and ironies. Not just from transportation itself. There’s the circle of poison, whereby pesticides banned in the U.S. are still used in developing countries, with food exported back here still bearing traces of the banned substances. Trade agreements like NAFTA have opened agricultural markets in lower income countries to competition with heavily subsidized large farms. Resulting shocks to peasant farming have in turn fueled immigration to the U.S. from Mexico and Central America.
H 21- a parable
In the first post in this series I mentioned the destruction of the South Central Farm, a large community garden/ urban farm tended by a group of primarily immigrant families. Since the garden was bulldozed the two sides of the dispute have moved on in their own ways. Some of the former gardeners leased land in the Central Valley and sell produce grown their in L.A. area farmers markets.
The owner of the former farm has plans to build a monument to himself, a warehouse shaped like the first letter in his last name. I wrote previously about the warehouse. What’s new since that post is a little research we did on Forever 21, the clothing retailer that may lease the proposed warehouse. Forever 21 churns out youth oriented fashion, knocked off from more expensive designer wear, so they produce much of their inventory in Los Angeles. They ship some of the that overseas and also import some items. So, like the grapes mentioned above, there would be a toxic legacy from the trucks idling at the planned warehouse to the fabric and clothes being shipped to outlets in the U.S. and back and forth to Asia and beyond.
There was a bill in the California legislature that would have imposed a fee on shipping containers to help mitigate some of the pollution from international trade. Our dear governor vetoed it. I wrote about the odd coalition of opponents of the bill who got it terminated, from Sarah Palin to big agriculture and retail interests to the chamber of commerce to Hawaiians paranoid that any uptick in shipping costs would strand them even further in their Pacific (and food-insecure) isolation.
Social change across border
The point of the above parable is that on one hand, we have immigrants interested in sustaining farming and community– on the other, a global system that devalues the interconnections that food can bring, and kills people as a byproduct of keeping costs low. Power is usually assumed to rest with the masters of the international economy. There are hopeful signs, however, that steps can be taken from below to humanize how we deal with one another and with food in an interconnected world.
Immigrant farmers becoming local farmers
One of the ways that migration can reinvent food in Los Angeles and beyond is that immigrants, who often come from agricultural regions and/or have some experience as farm workers in this country, can help bring new life to the aging farming demographic. Latino farmers are the fastest growing group of new farmers in the country. Organizations like ALBA, based in Central California, that train farm workers to become organic farmers, are contributing to this renewal.
Fair trade with home countries
Migration routes can also become networks for fair trade. The idea of fair trade is to pay a price that allows the producers to support themselves – ideally bypassing middlemen so the growers themselves get a larger share of the consumer’s dollar. In places like Los Angeles where there are large concentrations of immigrants from a country or a region within a country, why not try to establish fair trade connections back to the land of origin? This needn’t compete with goals for local food because fair trade could focus on products that aren’t grown in southern California- like coffee from parts of Mexico and Central America or organic jasmine rice from Thailand
(There is rice farmed in California, of course, but growing subsidized rice in an irrigated desert is messed up- a topic beyond the scope of this post and series, which have gone on long enough...)