Making the Case for Nuts

It is possible to live a full California life and never wonder once about walnuts. Where do they come from? Are they healthy? Can you smoke the shells? These questions just don’t crop up in the modern everyday.

Today, however, they are “news.” A report in the current New England Journal of Medicine suggests that a diet heavy on walnuts can help ward off heart disease. As might be expected, there is happiness today in California walnut country.

California is the nation’s leading producer of walnuts. It accounts for something like 98% of the U.S. crop. This is not extraordinary. California also is the nation’s leading producer of raisins, almonds, strawberries, broccoli, carrots and many other of the 250 crops grown in the state.

It is common for the producers of these individual crops to collaborate on marketing and promotion. This can involve everything from bombarding food editors with new recipes for raisins, to funding research into alternative uses of the kiwi--to paying Loma Linda University scientists to explore what happens to the cholesterol count of people who consume three ounces of walnuts every day. The game is to find new reasons for more people to buy your crop. A favorable report in the nation’s foremost clearinghouse of medical research is as good as it gets: The jackpot.

*

Walnuts have been around for thousands of years. For those who would promote consumption, this presents a challenge. There is not much new to say. At the same time, American consumers no longer snack on walnuts straight from the shell much anymore. They are the snack of grandmothers. “Walnuts are like dates,” said one walnut salesman, a man in his mid-30s. “You don’t eat dates. I don’t eat dates. No one we know eats dates. The only people who eat dates are all dying.”

Nonetheless, California walnut growers still manage to sell all they harvest--something like 250,000 tons in a good year. They do this by marketing more and more to mass producers of cakes and candies. They also push heavily overseas; Europe offers a particularly strong market because in-shell walnuts remain popular there during Christmas holidays. The walnut people also keep alert for new recipes. Walnuts in pasta is the hot ticket this year.

While the cholesterol research could provide a welcome new sales pitch, the walnut people seem hesitant to run with it: As the lab giveth, it can also taketh away. Ask the oat folks. Or California raisin growers, who used to promote like crazy their product’s high iron content--until it was discovered, as black iron machinery was replaced with new stainless steel, that the iron came mainly from equipment rust.

“Right now, we’d rather let it stay in the scientific community,” said Martin Mariana of Mariana Nut Co. “Let’s wait and see what the other scientists have to say about it. . . .. We don’t expect people to rush out and start buying 16-pound bags of walnuts to snack on when they watch ‘Roseanne.’ ”

But they can hope.

*

Unlike some California specialty crops, walnuts don’t attract a lot of outside investors. Not too long ago, almonds were so overplanted that whole orchards had to be ripped out and sold as firewood. This hasn’t happened with walnuts. It takes a long time and a lot of money for a grove to mature, and so California walnut farms tend to be small, family operations with long, stable histories.

More than a few walnut people suggest the best reaction to the Loma Linda findings would be to ignore them. Let the information seep into the public consciousness at its own pace. It’s reward enough, as one grower put it, “to know that we are producing a healthy product.” It also is good, they tell reporters who come waving copies of the report, simply to have an opportunity to remind Californians they are here--a $700-million-a-year industry that is not threatening to go anywhere else.

In this need, the walnut people are like the rest of California’s farmers. Agriculture is a mystery to most of the state’s 31 million people. Lost in the hand-wringing over defense cutbacks and manufacturing job losses, for example, is the fact that through recession and drought agriculture has remained the most consistent element of the state economy.

No, about the only time we hear from farmers is when they are on the defense--defending water consumption, pesticide abuses, treatment of farm workers. They often deserve the grief, but they also deserve a chance to broaden their story, to remind Californians where the walnuts come from. The way I see it, they are about all that can save us from an economy dependent on electronic gizmos and the threat of war, and a landscape covered in subdivisions.

Pass the nutcracker.