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VINS D’ÉMOTION
Towards an understanding of the concept of cultinessBy: Jack Hughes
What do we mean exactly when we use the term culty to describe a wine? I think generally people mean something like hyped (or perhaps over-hyped), but this does not seem to grasp the social relations that are present in this specific commodity form. That there is a disconnect in the popular understanding of the concept can be illuminated by looking at discursive practice within the natural wine scene. For example, there is a huge distinction between something like Frank Cornelissen, very hyped and abundant wines that many newer fans of natural wine attracted to (in part thanks to his celebrity endorsement by Action Bronson) and Aurelian Lefort, an almost impossible to attain and ifykyk producer that many long time natural wine drinkers may not even be aware of, yet are among the most whispered about wines amongst cavistes. Cornelissen is hyped, whereas Lefort, while also being hyped, reaches beyond the distinction. One of the concepts that is used to describe that gap in the perception and reception of these two producers is precisely this culty quality to Lefort, that Corneliessen, no matter how hyped he is, simply does not have. If this popular conception of the cultic does not grasp the fundamental social relation it is trying to denote, how might we better understand the nature of this phenomena that the concept is signifying?
It seems to me that what the concept is actually signifying is a certain cuvees’ degree of potentia, a certain heightened and overdetermined capacity to affectuate. Because of the social dynamic of our affects, the wines we designate as culty are wines that can evoke emotion at an increased degree (gradus potentiae) than other wines within the same plane. The social discourse itself imbues a greater weight onto these wines and their affectual capacity is augmented by the social discourse which precedes one's interaction with them. The illumination of this dynamic necessitates a turn to Spinoza, specifically to Ethics III, prop 31;
31: If we imagine that someone loves, desires or hates something that we ourselves love, desire, or hate, that will make us love, desire or hate it with greater constancy. But if we imagine that he is averse to what we love, or loves what we hate, then we shall undergo vacillation of mind.
Demonstration: Our imagining that someone loves something is (by 27) enough on its own to get us to love the same thing; but if we already love it, this imagining provides a new cause for our love, by which it is further encouraged. So we shall love the thing with greater constancy.
Because of this anthropological striving to align one's desires and loves with the community, you feel joy sensorially but also socially, amplifying the emotion from both sides, and giving the experience of the wine reason for distinction. This experience contributes to your personal affectual history (ingenium) and thus partially determines future desires, contributing to the continued appetite to seek out these culty wines. They, for structurally overdetermined reasons, have more power. By structurally overdetermined here I mean the variety of lines that make up the conjuncture: for example, a producer interned with a certain culty producer, a wine gets put on an important wine list, some caviste with influence come across the wine and decides its special, the producer occupies a unique terroir, or maybe they are a particularly interesting person. There is a kaleidoscope of forces that effect the bottle’s potentia beyond the juice itself, although of course that is a large component. In the last instance, a wine can not be considered culty that is boring. A wine can certainly be “flawed” but never boring. The acceptance and celebration of those flaws, when present, even impresses us with an expanded (perhaps liberated?) definition of “good”.
The very limited production, like Pierre Andrey, also produces a proximity to production that lets one see through the fetishism of the commodity in a way not usually able to be accessed on the world market. One of natural wine's most intriguing aspects is that the whole culture is built upon de-fetishing the commodity. The definition I am employing here is Balibar’s in the Philosophy of Marx:
‘The fetishism of the commodity,’ Marx tells us, is the fact that a ‘definite social relation between men themselves ... assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.’ Or, alternatively, ‘to the producers ... the social relations between their private labours appear ... as material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things.’
Natural wine, while never able to get beneath fetishism to a Real, does build a system of signification that acts to shed the commodity of its concealiatory manner, opening up the discourse of the commodity to the level of social relations. In fact, in many ways, the social relations in natural wine are primary to the commodity. The producers, the earth they are working, their place within the history and culture of natural wine and so on, overdetermine the affectual composition expressed in the commodity form proper, in its use-value (primarily taste and experience). In other words, the culture and discourse of natural wine is a culture of the illumination of the social relations which produced their commodities. Through storytelling, history, geography, biography, and so much more we reach beyond the commodity form and beneath it discover the world. When you are drinking a wine that is 1 of 66, for example, you viscerally feel closer to those social relations of production, and a part of the normalness of wine-as-commodity slips away, leaving you with clarity on how beautiful it can be. This scalar aspect is also a part of the potentia of cultiness.
One other aspect of the cultic wine was shown to me by my partner one night when she remarked that the wine (of a very culty persuasion) was amazing, but seemed like a lot of other wines we drink. And she is right. Her ingenium (essence, as defined as the historical sum of all of our affectual determinations) of taste has been unconsciously shaped by my tastes, since I usually decide on what to open. The $30 percy/varda/camo bottles that are commonplace in her glass are in many ways quite similar gustatorily to the culty wines we are discussing here. But it is precisely this social, anthropological power of these wines that distinguishes them to the in-group and evokes so much emotion. Another part of the cultic distinction then, seems to be the social territorialization of the wine and the production of subjectivity to those within the territory. From outside that territory, from someone not involved in the natural wine discourse, the same desires are not experienced the same. Prop 51 from the same book: Different people can be affected differently by one object; and one person can be affected differently at different times by one object. Because my partner and I have different ingeniums, our affectual compositions relating to the same object are quite different. This phenomena is also a part of the formation and production of culty wines, since it produces an interior/exterior, magnifying and specifying the desire to be in the community.
So given these three aspects, anthropological striving, commodity de-fetishization, and the territorialization of the ingenium, how should we try to define cultines in wine? Perhaps the best formulation comes from Prieure Roch, these wines are Vins d’émotion. Culty wines are nothing else than wines of great emotion.
Last week I had the great pleasure of enjoying an absolutely orgiastic experience opening some of the cultiest wines out there. Most of these wines were brought by my friend Krys from his cellar for his birthday (shoutout Krys). These were bottles I have been hunting for years and never been able to grasp. And finally they all fell right in my lap all in one night. Sometimes that's how it goes. Here's my drunk tasting notes I made on my notes app when I got home + some sober context for each one.
SAINT-SANDOUX – AUVERGNE
Tense, light red fruit, floral, oxidized orchard fruit, sour acid, singular mineralityCarotte & Fred Gounan (along with Patrick Boujou) were at the forefront of natural wine production in the Puy-de-dôme, the region that really put the Auvergne on the map and in the natural wine imaginary. Fred is a former motorcycle mechanic who returned to his family's agricultural roots in 2000 and up until 2023 made wine with his partner Caroline “Carotte”. The domain has been since transitioned to a pair of danish cavistes, and while it would generally be seen as worrisome, Le Cave du Mamie caviste (and auvergnat) Jules reassured me that the transition might actually be positive and he has faith in the new guys to continue the legacy.
PRIEURE ROCH VIN DE FRANCE 2022
LADOIX-BURGOGNE
Powerful, cool herb nose, high acid, tanic, long finish, spicy, perfect natty burgFounded in ‘88 by Henri-Frederic Roch with vineyards purchased from the all-powerful Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, Prieure Roch represents the radical edge of high end (re: collector) burg. Always whole cluster and sans-soufre, I've heard these wines described as “really really good Julien Altaber” and I am inclined to agree. The problem is that they do occupy the collectors territory, and have experienced an exponential exchange-value/use-value disarticulation. Definitely a classic in the cult category.
PIERRE ANDREY AUX19DJ90
METZ-MOSELLE
My auxerrois goat. My favorite alsatian variety done perfect. This wine has the perfect balance of flaws. Perfect VA, perfect trapped CO2, a touch of brett. The natty tingle cut through the fatty texture which then faded into a singing acid on the back palate. So so good. Pierre Andrey and Florence Bouleaux are some of the more avant garde producers in all of natural wine. The couple works in environmental management and medical equipment and makes wine on the side as a passion project. This ameteurality has not stopped these wines from gaining iconic status in just a few vintages. Perhaps it was overdetermined from the start when they began making wine with Schueller Pinot Gris that they acquired in exchange for their labor during the 2014 harvest. All of the wines are produced in demijohn, meaning that each cuvee has a tight production capacity, usually 66 bottles. This scalar dimension is just one, but very interesting, aspect of these wines to me.
ROTALIER-JURA
Sous Voile Labet magic. Crazy long and powerful finish. The tannin on it was psychedelic. chewing. Sous voile with energy like ive never had itSo much to say about Labet, but I think the best thing I can do is to point you towards this film. Pure geophilosophy. https://vimeo.com/646011474
CORNAS-RHONE
Cornas overflowing with purity. Cornas with everything intensified to its limit and then expanded through the restricted structure of appellated Cornas and into the natty realm. High acid, low booze, meaty, mineral and expressive.Hirotake comes from Japan, and after moving to Bordeaux to make wine, he became enamored with the wines of Northern Rhone legend Thierry Allemand. He famously originally didn't work the vineyard at all, no vine treatments, no tilling, no pruning, just undisturbed natural vines. This carried into the cellar as well, which was carved into the side of a mountain and was notoriously natch, with mushrooms growing on barrels. In 2022, from what I have heard due to incessant xenophobia in the Northern Rhone, he ceased making wine in Cornas and moved back to Japan to make wine in the Okayama prefecture.
ARDECHE-RHONE
Pure.Personally Sage is one of my most desired producers. I think when I first learned about him his project just aligned with my ingenium; my favorite region, obscure garagiste background, a bunch of my favorite grapes, and those labels…oh man those labels. They are famously pure and expressive, and the hype from some choice heads who I trust really built this one's potentia up to me. Add on the experience of getting denied the ability to drink these several times last time I was in Paris, and he was really at the top of my list lol. A metal worker by trade, Daniel is a longtime scenester who made wine as a garagiste just for the art before transitioning into full time production. My sense has always been that these are real caviste’s wines.
Vive de vins d’émotion!
TENANT COUNCILS OF SAN DIEGO - MARCH NEWSLETTER
We are hoping to publish these on a regular basis to provide updates on our organizing projects, news about housing policy in San Diego with context, and political education. If you have any questions or want to join our efforts to organize the tenants of San Diego against their landlords, please email tenantcouncilsofsandiego@gmail.com or attend our upcoming general meeting on April 11th at 2pm in the City Heights Library Community Room!
Organizing Update:
TCSD has several ongoing organizing projects, including:
-
Protesting a landlord’s lack of transparency and discrimination against Somali tenants;
- Amending tenants’ leases to change their flat rate utility charges into higher utility fees through the RUBS (ratio utility billing system) method; and
- Failure to adequately remediate or compensate tenants for mold issues.
However, this month we want to focus on supporting our fellow tenant organizers in Los Angeles by donating for their eviction defense fund:
Árbol de Hierro is a tenant association of the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU) that represents eight immigrant families from Oaxaca who are facing an unjust Ellis Act eviction in Mar Vista. The association’s name, which translates to “Iron Tree” in English, was chosen to symbolize the strong roots that the families have grown after living in their units for 30+ years.
In December of 2024, tenants received notice of their new landlord’s intention to use the Ellis Act to evict them from their homes. The Ellis Act is a California state law that landlords use to displace long-term rent-stabilized tenants from their homes, provided that the landlord intends to remove the property from the housing market. In reality, landlords buy rent-stabilized buildings and then use the Ellis Act to flip the property and earn a greater profit. This greedy landlord’s actions threaten to displace the vibrant Oaxacan community that has been a part of West LA for decades.
Árbol de Hierro’s landlords are San Diego residents, so throughout 2025, TCSD assisted Árbol de Hierro in shaming these landlords in their neighborhoods with protests at their homes. (More about that on our Instagram here and here.)
Unlike San Diego, Los Angeles has a municipal code that allows tenants who are 62 years of age or disabled and who have resided in their units more than one year to request a one year extension after receiving a no-fault eviction notice. The Árbol de Hierro tenants’ one-year extension of tenancy expired in December of 2025, and they now face a court battle to defend their homes. Many of the tenants have small children and disabled or elderly family members who have established local support networks. They cannot afford to stay in Los Angeles if they are displaced from their units, and now they are asking for community support in raising funds for legal fees. They are grateful for donations of any amount and for your support in protecting the Oaxacan community of Los Angeles.
Árbol de Hierro has almost met their funding goal, so we want to try to help them reach it!
You can donate at: https://www.gofundme.com/f/protecting-oaxacan-families-from-eviction.
San Diego Tenant News:
Lemon Grove Discussing Tenant Protection Ordinance
In San Diego County, only Chula Vista, San Diego, and Imperial Beach currently have tenant protection ordinances with more protections than the state’s Tenant Protection Act. In February of 2026, Lemon Grove City Council adopted a temporary ordinance that gave tenants 120 days to vacate their apartments for all no-fault evictions. They also increased the relocation assistance that landlords must pay tenants. This was thanks to the advocacy of the tenants of the Sierra Grove apartment complex, who pointed out that their landlord was violating the state Tenant Protection Act of 2019 regarding the requirements to evict tenants for substantial renovations. The landlord, Orsett Serra Grove, purchased their building in November of 2025 and promptly wanted to evict all tenants to raise the rents. Mayor Snow of Lemon Grove, who is a tenant rights’ attorney, had originally wanted to enact stronger protections that would severely restrict large landlords’ ability to do renovictions, but most of the city council opposed the proposal.
Unfortunately, in mid-March, Lemon Grove City Council repealed the portion of the ordinance that gave tenants 120 days to vacate their apartments when being evicted. This reversal of the policy has led to growing disagreements in the city council over how to proceed in passing a permanent tenant protection ordinance. The city is holding a public workshop on April 9, 2026, at the Lemon Grove Community Center (3146 School Ln, Lemon Grove, 91945). Lemon Grove will hopefully see a proposal for a permanent tenant protection ordinance in early summer, albeit with stiff opposition from several council members.
The Context: Avoiding Tenant Power
City councils are slow to move on proposals that would improve existing tenancies or give tenants more power to stay in their homes. Politicians tend to prefer developer-centered incentive programs requiring construction projects to create a certain percentage of affordable units. Although these units are classified as “affordable”, many are ultimately more expensive than the rents that the long-term tenants displaced by redevelopment projects were paying. Redevelopment projects can price tenants out of their neighborhoods entirely. As our friends at Los Angeles Tenant Union have argued, “affordable housing” is often an outright scam: affordability is “the term by which city officials promise housing for the poor and working people and, by those very same housing schemes, take it away.”
It is easy to see these flaws with developer-centered incentive programs in the City of San Diego’s affordable housing ordinances. San Diego’s “Inclusionary Affordable Development Regulations” require new developments, including those adding on to existing buildings, to reserve 10% of units for low-income or very low-income renters. “Low” and “very low” income are calculated using the Area Median Income, which was $130,800.00 for San Diego County in 2025. In 2025, a unit was very low income if the rent was $1,635.00 a month and low income if it was $1,962.00 a month. Rent restrictions on low or very low-income units generally last 55 years. SDMC §§ 142.1301-142.1314. However, if a developer adds accessory dwelling units (ADUs) restrictions only last 10 years. SDMC §§ 141.0302. Under these Affordable Development Regulations, there is no requirement to preserve existing tenancies or naturally occurring affordable units destroyed by a development project. Furthermore, the law doesn’t stop landlords from massively inflating rents for the other 90% of units in a given project and driving up rents across the neighborhood.
San Diego’s “Dwelling Unit Protection Regulations” (SDMC §§ 143.1201-143.1212) are only designed to preserve naturally occurring affordable housing when a property is demolished to make room for a new project. After a landlord destroys an apartment complex, the law requires that the landlord replace each unit where a low-income or very low-income resident lived in the past five years with a unit that would, in theory, be affordable for that resident. However, there are several caveats:
- First, “affordable” doesn’t mean that the rent is as low or lower than the previous rents at the building;
- Second, the protected low-income units may count toward and reduce the 10% Inclusionary Affordable Development Regulation requirement;
- Third, since the demolition regulations have no robust notice requirement and residents can be evicted six months before the demolition even begins, the original residents are unlikely to return to the “new” affordable housing anyway.
None of San Diego’s housing ordinances touch the primary mechanism that landlords use to displace residents and raise rents: Renovictions. Developers across San Diego buy up buildings, evict all the existing tenants under the pretext of making renovations so big that they can’t be completed with the tenants in place, and then raise the rents drastically. Currently, only tenants are fighting the battle against these so-called “substantial remodels.” For example, Imperial Beach only recently passed some protections against renoviction in response to extensive organizing by the tenants of Hawaiian and Sussex Gardens. Even then, the version of the ordinance that passed did not, in fact, help the tenants who advocated for it at all. Their landlord, F&F Properties, is the same landlord that lobbied hard against San Diego’s Tenant Protection Ordinance when it was being debated.
The most impactful and truly “affordable” housing solution is to give tenants the power to stay in their long-time homes and punish forcible dislocation. Since city councils and the state legislature won’t grant us that power, we have to organize to create that power ourselves.
Airbnb News:
San Diego City Council is currently opposing taxes to disincentivize turning land owner’s extra homes into Airbnbs. This is unfortunate, since the conversion of housing units to Airbnbs is driving displacement and depletion of existing housing stock across San Diego. Numerous landlords are also illegally evicting their tenants to convert their apartments into Airbnbs. City Council decided to modify a tax proposal to disincentivize empty second homes and short term rentals so that it only taxes empty second homes after Airbnb lobbied 2.5 million to persuade City Council to oppose an Airbnb tax. City Council claims that ultimately the taxes they are passing to tax empty homes will raise revenue to assist in building new housing. They insist that however homes are added to the market, it will lower the increased cost of housing. But as we noted above, there is a lot of housing development that actually drives up rent in neighborhoods. Other cities have banned Airbnbs entirely unless the Airbnb is also the land owner’s primary residence for a significant portion of the year. It is shameful that San Diego City Council cannot even pass a tax to address the issue.
Upcoming General Meeting on April 11th:
On Saturday, April 11th at 2pm, join us at the City Heights Library Community Room as we discuss recent developments in tenant organizing and how you can get involved! Can't attend in person? Join us virtually!
CRICKET IN A CAGE
Lumière d'été -
dir. Jean Grémillon, 1943
By: Ali Mehraban Ramirez
Gremillon’s direction anchors a web of romantic fallout to the labor process of a dam construction (a destructo-production) in the mountains of Provence. An airy hotel, named “The Guardian Angel”, from which we see and hear this construction, has the quality of a curio cabinet. Tucked away in this valley, the characters collecting dust within are shaken out of arrangement by the explosive conjuncture of an incoming dynamite specialist, a fashion illustrator, and a tortured artist - all in for a brief summer stint away from Paris. These characters breach the stillness of the quiet hotel, opening it up for a brief moment to the concrete world it’s kept buried in memories - nostalgic and nightmarish alike.
Dynamite explosions and the machinic churning of the expressionist work site lay down the rhythmic division of the film’s three acts, becoming the bass for some of the most beautiful and dramatic moments of the film (including montage that could have come straight out of Man with a Movie Camera). The “creative destruction” of the dam’s production, as an object of the film, illuminates different parts of the film as a field: Internally, the willingness to kill for unrequited love (and secure the impossibility of this love), or to destroy oneself when faced with the loyal love of another. Externally, the wartime context of the film’s production itself - right in the midst of the Nazi occupation of France, a few years from Liberation Day and the ensuing reconstruction of Europe which was capitalized upon by the American Marshall Plan. (For a more contemporary version of this dynamic, see this dispatch from comrades in the midst of the current war in Iran.)
As soon as we are settled into our stay at the glass house of a hotel, the fuse is lit. In one scene, the working class heart-throb (Julien), guided by the mistaken and fateful direction of the caged and diminished hotel manager (Cri Cri), enters the room already occupied by the chronically sitting duck and wounded prey (Michèle), and gropes around blindly in the dark, finding first: the arrangement of sunflowers sent up to her by the chronically hunting aristocrat and uber-predator (Patrice Le Verdier), and second: the desperate kiss missing its expected target of the emotional-contortionist firebrand (Roland) who enters and exits the film by crashing against the mountain with spontaneous self-combustion.
This encounter is a perfect exposition of the film. In it, Roland is replaced by his volatile unavailability, and Patrice by his poison gestures of love, and we get through this contretemps scene an arrangement around which the union of Michèle and Julien will be both interrupted and inevitable. This dream-like (or even sleepwalking) first kiss is a moment of becoming-necessary, a surplus of contingency, and their reaction to it perfectly attests to this,
“It’s not my fault.”
“It’s not mine either.”
In this parapraxical moment, we see chance/fate intertwine with intention/desire in the complexity that lends this film its charge.
One of the many beautiful shots comes together when Julien just barely saves the suicidal Michèle from being blown to bits at the site of the dam. (Roland told her “If you really love me, you should leave me”.) He whisks her to safety, sheltering inside a large steel cylinder as rocks rain down from the explosions. The couple sitting there, as if in the barrel of a gun aimed at the plein-air landscape behind them. They are in the crossfire of everything within the film’s narrative terrain, and also in the extra-filmic level where the actors are being “shot” into characters, stuck in the frame, dealing with the roles written from above.
Just after this scene we can see Roland experiencing a similar extra-filmic lucidity. Having awoken from his drunken entrance the night before, he strolls into the hotel bar, ordering a drink as he steps into frame, and taking a look around the inside of the frame itself he says, “ Beautiful light, mmh?” as if referring to the magic of photography, the exposure of light onto film which has captured him faithfully. There in the hotel, with all its glass and metal elements, we peer in and see the drama of summer light refracted through its elements.
The minor characters are perfect caricatures; Monsieur Louis, the easily disturbed classicist and his jolly companion Louise, Tonton the waiter with his along-for-the-ride refrain “Why not?”, Vincent and Ernest the proud laborers who are always already heroes, even in their simplest moments. Beyond their comedic relief, these characters also illustrate the outer coordinates of the high classes and the low classes, just as the blunt geography does with the luxurious estate of Patrice up the mountain, and the workers down in the valley.
Alongside this layer of class stratification, is the texture of the war and occupation that the Vichy censors couldn’t snuff out. The sadistic Patrice absorbs much of the film’s latent hatred towards the fascists, with Cri Cri as the faithful collaborationist, hiding the truth about his murderous past. In the end, however, Patrice and his reign of terror are defeated.
Ernest, the worker, has been trying to shoot down an evil eagle throughout the film, at one point describing the perched creature like a “weathervane”. Audiences at the time were surely being prompted to imagine the iconographic eagle of the Nazi regime. Patrice steals Ernest’s hunting rifle after another failed attempt at downing the eagle, and takes it out to shoot Julien who is climbing wires high up over the valley, in the midst of a suspenseful rescue attempt. Before pulling the trigger on our daring hero, Ernest wrestles him to the ground. Patrice recovers the rifle once again and is now facing off with the swelling crowd of workers. As he threatens to shoot them, they remain fearless and steadily approach him, driving him off the edge of the cliff behind him and falling to his death. Another intensely Soviet styled scene follows: Michèle and Julien, arm in arm, boldly march into their liberated future, against the wind and towards the whole earth.
Raymond Aimos, the actor who played Ernest, was a resistance fighter and died in combat during the liberation of Paris, only one year after the film’s release. Watching these scenes in light of this historical trajectory, only adds to the careful depth of this film. Lumière d'été concisely navigates a multi-polar love story of epic proportions while letting the residue of time be exposed, much like the lives spent within the hotel Guardian Angel, set against dust clouds and caught in the mystified glow of the summer light.
March 24th, 2026
CALIFORNIA FARM TO SCHOOL PROGRAM - PART 2
A MARXIST WORLD-ECOLOGY ANALYSISBy: Marcelo Brasil
5. The power of farm labor contractors over labor supply chains
The district-level logic of cheap procurement, established through trade policy and the appropriation of extra-human and human natures, is operationalized by the specific structure of the migrant labor supply chain. A key mechanism is the use of third-party labor intermediaries contracted through programs like H-2A visas. It has been reported that “sixty-one percent of farmers…hired a farm labor contractor to recruit employees.”(“Survey: California Farms Face Continuing Employee Shortages,” 2023)
These third parties, known as Farm Labor Contractors (FLCs), enable companies like Wonderful Citrus, HMC Farms, and Sun Pacific Farms – all of which have contracts with SDUSD and other schools – to outsource recruitment to firms like “Fresh Harvest.” (US Department of Labor (2022). This practice reduces costs and increases profitability. Farmworkers employed by FLCs, who represent approximately two-thirds of California’s crop workers, typically earn less than direct hires. A University of California Davis (UCD) study identifies FLCs as the largest single employers of California workers, and workers at Wonderful Citrus are no exception. There, contracted workers – who typically fill less than two bins of mandarin oranges during an eight-hour shift – earn on average around US$12 an hour, on a piece-rate basis. This is where FLCs extract profit. FLC commissions are typically 30% to 40% of Farm Worker Wages. (UC Davis, 2025) If Wonderful Citrus allocates US$15 per hour for labor, the FLC may pay the worker US$12, retaining US$3 as profit. Additional revenue streams for FLCs include recruitment fees and transportation costs, which can burden workers with significant debt. In comparison, Wonderful’s direct hires performing the same work, according to Salgado, earn at least US$15 an hour. (Bloch, 2019)
This structure adheres to what Intan Suwandi identifies as a core neoliberal logic: production “is increasingly organized in global commodity chains (also known as global supply chains or global value chains), governed by multinational corporations straddling the planet” (p. 1). Suwandi’s analysis demonstrates how neoliberal capitalist imperialism functions through arm’s-length contracting and the externalization of costs to maximize profits. Corporations and farmers “increasingly prefer to externalize their operations because forcing outsourced producers into intense competition with one another is a more effective way of driving down wages and intensifying labor than doing so in-house through appointed managers.”(Smith, 2016:81)
Farmers also use FLCs to deflect liability; if labor violations occur, the contractor, not the farm, is typically held responsible. For instance, in a case against Wonderful Citrus, it was reported that “of these 33 individuals, it appears 12 individuals were Wonderful direct hires and 21 worked for farm labor contractors providing labor to Wonderful”(State of California Agricultural Labor Relations Board [ALRB], Admin. Order No. 2024-04, March 18, 2024)., including contractors such as Guerrero Labor Contractor, O.F.R. Incorporated, Kern Labor Contracting Incorporated, and Paragon Personnel. Investigations detect labor law violations in 70 to 80% of FLC cases, fueling perceptions that FLCs systematically exploit farmworkers. (Gifford Center for Population Studies, UC Davis, 2025) Such a system solidifies the “cheapness” required for profitable appropriation, a dynamic partly realized through the Farm to School program. The substandard material conditions provided by FLCs are a direct result of this cost-cutting imperative, and the literal fruits of this labor are ultimately served on a student’s plate. Consequently, many “farmers reap over US$7 billion from the harvest of valuable commodities like almonds, grapes, and pistachios.”(Bloch, 2019) This model illustrates how school procurement metabolically functions: cutting costs through neoliberal outsourcing is the operational norm.
While migrants provide cheap labor for farms, schools decide how to procure goods, effectively benefiting from this system without socializing costs. This process begins with district personnel like the Nutrition Director and the Farm-to-School Specialist – positions with higher salaries than teachers and cafeteria workers – who design menus and select vendor farms like Wonderful Citrus, Dole, Kingsburg Orchards or Sun Pacific Farms. They then issue a purchase order to a local produce distributor, for example, SDUSD and SUHSD use American Produce Distributors (APD).(San Diego Unified School District & American Mushroom Inc., 2022) APD finalizes deals with selected farms and delivers the produce to school sites. The simplified chain is: SDUSD orders from APD → APD procures from farms → APD delivers to schools.
This managerial process exemplifies capitalism as a world-ecology where specific actors make sourcing decisions based on a logic of accumulation by appropriation generated by imperialism. The produce – picked by migrant workers, transported by trucks running on stolen Venezuelan oil (Matza, 2025), delivered to school yards, and prepared by an underpaid, and overworked precarious cafeteria staff at 17.16 dollars an hour, almost entirely female 93%… more likely to be Black or Latino… 35.9% of food service workers in California are migrants (Hinkley, Sara. 2024)– is ultimately served to the future labor force – a fitting Cecil Rhodes’ model of imperial provisioning. On top of this, SDUSD just recently eliminated 221 classified positions because of a $47 million budget deficit; this includes bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers and special education aides—workers essential to the daily functioning of schools. (Hessedal, 2026). Having established these material mechanics, the program then obscures them beneath a veneer of “free market” ideology under “fiscal discipline,” a discipline applied not to vendors or administrators but to the most vulnerable workers, who according to an interview with a cafeteria worker, even before these layoffs, they were “understaffed, and do not have breaks.” (Interviewee B, 2025)
This hierarchy extends beyond the supply chain into the school itself. Administrators–and their lavish salaries (superintendents in SDUSD currently hold a $445K salary, and principals currently hold a 175k salary)– at the school are dependent on not only exploited farm workers, but also on the appropriation of unpaid human and extra-human nature for their benefit, especially when standardized testing or “performance standards” and attendance is part of how an administrator is measured… .or an important metric that measures “highly effective teachers” or “high performing schools.” (Commission on Teacher Credentialing 2014, 5) Moreover, a high performing school can only attain that if students are well nourished. “School Nutrition Association” did a study that read “on average students who eat school breakfasts have been shown to achieve 17.5% higher scores on standardized math tests, and attend 1.5 more days of school per year.” (School Nutrition Association, 2022) Therefore, the school’s own reproduction is inseparable from the search for “cheap” nature.
6. Vendor case studies: The imperial architecture of “local” food
The theoretical framework and procurement logic establish a systemic imperative for “cheapness.” This section analyzes specific corporate vendors to demonstrate how that imperative is materially realized through business models built on imperial supply chains, political power, and exploitation of workers. These case studies reveal the concrete architecture of the “local” food served in schools.
6.1 Wonderful Citrus and HMC Farms: Guaranteed markets and militarized capital
This analysis raises a critical question: does supplying schools function as a guaranteed market for agricultural capital? Historical precedent suggests it does. In the 1960s, consumer boycotts targeted California grapes to protest unfair labor and anti-union practices led by the United Farm Workers. In response,
“Growers, in their greatest coup, successfully petitioned the US Department of Defense to buy the grapes which consumers didn’t want to eat, and [fed] them straight to the troops in Vietnam. In 1968, the military bought 6.9 million pounds of fresh grapes. By 1969, they bought 11 million pounds, with shipments to Vietnam increasing five-fold.” (Patel, 2008: 69)
This dynamic mirrors the current Farm to School program: even amidst potential market fluctuations or ethical scrutiny, growers would likely secure a guaranteed buyer in the Department of Education, just as they did in the Department of Defense, also referred to as the Department of War. In Farm to School’s grant program, it is clear “....to incentivize farmers and ranchers….a sustained market for those products through school food purchasing.” (Socolar and Bowles, 2025) The irony is compounded by the fact that much of the farm and reproductive labor originates from regions devastated by environmental catastrophes often induced by the U.S. military, a key appendage of U.S. imperialism that is often erased from promotional discourse.
Connecting war to environmental damages is essential to a world-ecology lens. Frontiers deemed “empty” or “hostile” are appropriated by the capitalist class, a process often secured through invasion or conflict to guarantee nature’s “free gifts.” In war, “most nature, including most humans, was sacrificed in service to the productivity of wage-labor” (Moore, 2017: 94). Capitalism’s dual need is for “cheap nature” as both input (e.g., cheap fertilizer) and output (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions) (Foster, 2000). Public school procurement functions within this same frontier logic, absorbing commodities (including migrant workers who flee) produced in militarized ecological sacrifice zones.
The case of Wonderful Citrus, a supplier to San Diego Unified and many other school districts, exemplifies this nexus. Owned by billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the company benefits from a guaranteed school market. At the 2024 International Fresh Produce Association, Nancy Johnston, Senior Director of Foodservice Sales at Wonderful Citrus, stated: “Kids are next generation consumers, but they’re also today’s consumer. And with schools serving such a large number of students on a consistent basis, we want to ensure they know about our great tasting mandarins, and then also tell their parents to look for Halos the next time they’re at the supermarket.” She further revealed the strategic necessity of this market when she said: “Working with the K-12 sector isn’t always easy, but it’s a market we can’t afford to ignore.” (“IFPA Meetings Connect K-12 School Menu Planners with Growers, Processors,” 2024).
Wonderful’s empire is bolstered by state and military support. For instance, the Port of Los Angeles signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the City of Shafter, California, and The Wonderful Company to promote more efficient trade connections with the Central Valley, focusing on boosting U.S. exports.(The Port of L.A., 2025) This agreement illustrates how public infrastructure subsidizes agribusiness expansion. The Resnick’s are major donors to politicians like Governor Gavin Newsom (his wife Jennifer Newsom serves as co-chair of the California Farm to School Working Group) and Representative Jim Costa (who maintains the milk lobby), leveraging influence to advance an economic agenda spanning from Californian schools to Western Asia. They also support Republican Representative David Valadao, who has advocated for policies to “make the Middle East even less stable and increase the likelihood of war in the region.” (Todd, 2022) The Resnick’s support aims to protect their lucrative pistachio monopoly from international competition, particularly from Iran. Valadao also has “...commended President Trump for taking decisive action” against Iran, in the 2026 attacks. Furthermore, they have funded think tanks lobbying for aggressive foreign policy, including supporting Israel’s genocide in Palestine on Palestinians and favouring hostile sanctions and opposition to any Iran nuclear deal. (Blumenthal, 2018) Thus, a corporation supplying school lunches actively profits from and promotes militarism to secure its markets, normalizing genocide and war as a backdrop to student life.
Lastly, The Resnick’s control 57% of the Kern Water Bank, one of California’s largest underground water storage facilities designed to manage droughts. Their philanthropic branding – such as the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Student Union at California State University Fresno – obscures a reality where educational institutions are clients of a corporation willing to promote genocide and risk war for market dominance. This imperial logic extends to other major vendors, such as HMC Farms, whose owner Harold McClartney champions exports to “food-insecure” nations like sanction-ravaged Cuba, viewing them not through solidarity but as opportunities for market penetration within an unequal global trade system. McClarty said that “....the more markets we have available, the more legs we add to the stool that supports us,” (Rodriguez, 2015) which also echoes McClartey’s logic to “introducing good-tasting, crunchy and sweet grapes to kids is a priority, starting with grammar school exposure.” (Prevor, 2022)
6.2 Dole: Plantation legacies and structural adjustment
Promotional material from school districts reveals a reliance on corporate vendors and the frontier logic of appropriation. An Instagram post from @sandicoastcafe (SDUSD’s nutrition account), using the hashtag “farm to school”, showcases its relationship with Dole and Wonderful Citrus. Dole, headquartered in Ireland for tax advantages, grows bananas in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, and the Philippines. The U.S. Bureau of International Labor Affairs has reported forced and child labor in the banana sectors of some of these countries. This practice continues Dole’s historical legacy of plantation colonialism, notably in Hawaii, where it suppressed Indigenous populations (Fujii, 2025), and Sanford Dole became the first president of the Hawaiian Republic. Countries like Costa Rica became victims of SAPs, “hit hard by debt payments and was one of the first countries in the region to default on its loans” (Ferreira et al. 2018). The same script followed: devalued currency followed by a wave of privatizations with foreign transnationals eager to capitalize on “cheap” agricultural commodities.
“The Costa Rican government launched a number of initiatives with the help of the United States Agency for International Development and other international actors (the WTO) to further develop infrastructure (transportation, processing plants, etc.) and reduce domestic barriers to trade for transnational agricultural firms.”
Furthermore,
“[T]hrough structural adjustment, international financial institutions obligated the Costa Rican state to adopt policies that favored firms like Del Monte and Dole, such as tax exonerations for foreign entities, financing for farming organizations, incentives for agricultural research, and exemptions from environmental health laws” (Brown, Flint, & LaMay, 2020) (Vagneron et al. 2009).
These lax laws have made Costa Rica a leading global user of pesticides, with application rates as high as 34.45 kg per hectare annually (Vargas Castro, 2022). Within this arrangement, “wages in the banana industry have remained stagnant for years, keeping workers impoverished.”(Link, 2025) The Farm to School program is thus built upon a plantation model, feeding what can be termed a ‘plantation mentality.’
6.3 Hormel/Applegate: The “Non-Local” Frontier
Some “non-local” vendors like Hormel Foods in Nebraska (owner of Applegate farms, a vendor to SDUSD), also reliant on migrant labor, exemplify a plantation regime with its focus on quantity and speed. A worker testimony from a Hormel plant in 2018 describes the brutal reality:
“[T]he speed of the line had jumped recently – from 1,000 pigs per hour to more than 1,100 – and Lopez was having trouble keeping up…As her co-worker reached for another shoulder, Lopez rushed to clear the cutting area, and her fingers slipped toward the saw blade...Her index finger dangled by a flap of skin, the bone cut clean through. She screamed as blood spurted out” (Genoways, 2014)
As students rush to the lunch line – a daily ritual marketed by SDUSD’s nutrition instagram account – the centrality of food to school operations is clear. Lopez’s experience reveals how the school not only depends on but actively supports and enables this violent, unequal exchange. (Bacon, 2018) An analysis of procurement contracts and public reporting for major vendors, including Wonderful Citrus, HMC Farms, Stehly Farms, Pitman Family Farms, reveals a consistent pattern of labor violations, reliance on exploited migrant labor, and documented hazardous working conditions. This directly links the school lunch program to imperial supply chains.