A tour through any supermarket yields rich anthropological information: who lives nearby, what they like to eat, how they clean their bathtubs. Much has changed in American supermarkets since 1965, when the Hart-Cellar Act lifted harsh regulations on Asian immigration. Most have added an “Asian” or “Oriental” section, with products like sesame oil and soy sauce for shoppers who wish to begin experimenting “outside their lane” (literally). But what about the neighboring aisles? How have Asian American farmers and retailers transformed so-called American food, as well as our understanding of it? Beyond supermarkets are Asian restaurants identifiable with virtually every region that are now ubiquitous in any American mall or downtown area. But again, how have Asian American food pioneers influenced what is served at non-Asian restaurants? For answers, we must dig below the place of consumption and look at the role of Asian Americans at other points in the food system.1
This chapter is a broad overview of the ways in which Asian American contributions to agriculture and food retail have altered the trajectory of American food. It examines how Asian Americans stimulated market innovation and increased the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables. While Asian immigrants to the United States and their descendants have participated in the entire range of American economic activity, their consistent participation in these earlier stages of the food system is notable and deserves a closer look as we write the ever evolving story of American food culture.
The term “food system” is commonly defined as the entirety of steps required to feed a population, including farming and livestock husbandry, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, consuming, and disposing.2 What Marion Nestle calls the “vast ‘food-and-fiber’ system” is estimated to generate a trillion dollars or more in sales every year in the United States and employs about 17 percent of the country’s labor force.3 Many agricultural economists and environmentalists favor the beginning-to-end perspective of food system analysis, which seeks to reintegrate elements of food production into the understanding and, ultimately, the price of a table-ready home or restaurant meal.4
Taking into account the entire food system enables the recognition of negative externalities, such as the cost of pesticides or water pollution, as well as the effects of government intervention and changes in the labor market. On the West Coast, where Asian immigration has historically concentrated, Asian American contributions to all aspects of this food system were pivotal. For example, before their incarceration during World War II, Japanese Americans in California not only dominated the strawberry industry but also had a significant stake in the production of lettuce, tomatoes, celery, spinach, peas, onions, garlic, and snap beans. In other words, they grew or sold many of the “mainstream” crops sold to the “mainstream” market. These Japanese Americans cleared land, enriched soil, and did backbreaking work alongside Sikhs, Punjabis, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, Chicanos, and European Americans. Production was so high that after Executive Order 9066 was issued, authorizing the removal of Japanese Americans, local media and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials fretted whether the wartime food supply could survive the sudden absence of Japanese American farmers.5 To prepare for the economic fallout from this disturbance, the government conducted a detailed survey and appraisal of Japanese American–owned properties and farms.6
Asian Americans were pioneering farmers, literally building soil that to this day forms the fertile foundation of farms that still exist. California’s agricultural industry is now the most profitable in the country, with $43.5 billion in revenue in 2011.7 Nearly half of all fruits, nuts, and vegetables grown in the United States are produced in California. During the twentieth century, Americans slowly increased their consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables, and while Asian Americans sought to capitalize on this by investing in farming and food retail at rates disproportionate to their numbers, they also drove the change.8 But the Asian American contribution was not limited to the fields; the birth of “California cuisine” is another example of how Asian American farmers and retailers transformed America’s food system.
Alice Waters came of age during the postwar explosion of mass-manufactured foods that Harvey Levenstein, author of Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, calls the “Golden Age of Food Processing.”9 Brand names were replacing family recipes, and despite consumers’ excitement over the mass availability of cheap processed foods, for Waters and her middle-class white contemporaries, something was amiss.10 The food they had grown up with felt denatured, anonymous, and remote. Improved logistics chains favored efficiency over locality, and grower-packer-shipper operations were becoming larger and more powerful. Because terroir did not have a cultural value, the identity of individual farmers and the distinctive story of their unique growing practices, water, and seeds were becoming irrelevant and unimportant to the everyday consumer.
During a study abroad trip, Waters fell in love with the aesthetic pleasures of French cuisine. Back home, as she made plans to open a restaurant, she and her team began considering how to recreate the French food culture, notably its freshness, seasonality, and tangible relationship between producers and consumers. While East Coast high-end restaurants continued to shape themselves in the European mold, Waters wanted to know what a California apple really tasted like and how to best serve it to her customers. She wanted to highlight local ingredients.
This proved difficult. The food available from wholesale suppliers at the time was increasingly frozen, processed, or simply old after being shipped across logistics lines that were evolving into the world’s most advanced food delivery system. Neighborhood food specialty shops were giving way to larger and larger supermarkets. The subsequent concentration of power in the American food industry among fewer and fewer large manufacturers and retailers meant less variety and fewer options for customers and shorter profit margins for farmers.11
Waters found a solution to her problem in Asian American farms, fishmongers, and retailers, who maintained the “Old World” emphasis on freshness and flavor over shelf life and convenience. “The Chinese markets were crowded and chaotic, but they had chickens that tasted like chicken,” notes biographer Thomas McNamee, author of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution, referring to either the San Francisco or the Oakland Chinatown.12 Waters learned to navigate Chinese American markets from the Chinese food maven Cecilia Chiang, herself a renowned chef and restaurateur. The first meal at Chez Panisse, the restaurant founded by Waters in 1971, featured duck from San Francisco’s Chinatown and fruits and vegetables likely sourced from a Japanese American produce market in Berkeley called U-Save. “When it’s seasonal, it’s cheaper. When it’s seasonal, it’s the best,” says Bill Fujimoto, a local produce buyer and an early sourcer for Chez Panisse.
Figure 14.1. Nectarines at Kozuki Farms, Parlier, California, 2011. Photograph by the author.
When ingredients are king, a buyer with good contacts is a kingmaker. Waters knew she needed a more reliable way of getting raw ingredients beyond trips to Chinatown, so she solicited Fujimoto, a third-generation Japanese American. His family store was less than a mile from Chez Panisse, in an area that came to be called the “Gourmet Ghetto” for its concentration of innovative food shops and restaurants. Fujimoto and his staff played a pivotal role in shaping the culinary future of the fledgling restaurant. As Waters recalls,
All during the first years of Chez Panisse, [Fujimoto] was like the Shell Answer Man: “Where can I get the best oranges?” “Oh, well I think I can get them up at this farm, I’ll get you a box and you see what you think.” … Many of the people we buy from now are people we were introduced to by Bill, many, many years ago. We fell in love with what he was selling, and then we just followed that through and ended up getting connected with this beautiful group of local organic farmers.13
Many of Fujimoto’s picks enjoyed star treatment on the plates of Chez Panisse when the restaurant menu began identifying the source of the ingredients. Although now common practice in gastronomically ambitious American restaurants, the practice of crediting farms by name on the menu was considered an oddity at the time. Among the first farms to gain prominence in this manner was the Japanese American Chino Farms, near San Diego, which, according to McNamee, produced “some of the most delicious fruits and vegetables Alice had ever tasted, in stupendous variety.”14 In a rare departure from Waters’s local-only rule, products from Chino Farms were flown directly from the field to the restaurant. A new job title was born at Chez Panisse: “professional forager.” For many of these modern-day foragers, entering an Asian American market in California—be it Chinese, Japanese, or Southeast Asian—was to be awed. It also was a learning experience, which gave rise to more expansive and inventive menus for the restaurant.
Fujimoto approached his role as a purveyor of produce with equal parts of salesmanship and mentorship. He nurtured farmers with an eye to their shared success, taking risks that others would not and beseeching restaurateurs like Waters to join the risk taking. The idiosyncrasies of second-generation Chicano farmworkers and now farm owners, of Japanese Americans resurrecting prewar orchards, and of idealistic white hippies and back-to-the-landers Fuji-moto treated as assets and gave them an open door when large chain grocery stores would not. He, Waters, and the sourcers who later worked for the restaurant agreed on what is now considered essential to this new California cuisine: the interdependence of flavor, freshness, and source verification. In other words, they were unified in the fundamental belief that integrity in growing practices leads directly to higher-quality products that would ultimately be discerned by the patrons of Chez Panisse.
Meanwhile, Asian American retailers on the East Coast were also beginning to take advantage of new ingredients, sourcing, and techniques. As Pyong Gap Min, author of Ethnic Solidarity for Economic Survival: Korean Greengrocers in New York City, explains, the Korean corner grocery stores that have proliferated in New York City since the 1980s played a significant role in providing fresh, visually pleasing produce to urban centers.15 Because they were often excluded from the tight-knit Italian and Jewish wholesale markets, Korean grocers were forced to source independently. This meant forging relationships with farms that were not only smaller but also closer. The Korean grocers paid close attention to the detailed trimming, packaging, and presentation of fruits and vegetables, which led to a greater demand for them. Innovations like the addition of salad bars to neighborhood delis, the introduction of Asian fruits and vegetables, and greater attention to the appearance of produce helped solidify New York City’s transition from Italian and Jewish greengroceries to those operated by Korean Americans.16 Directly benefiting from this rise of New York City’s Korean-run greengrocers were the East Coast Asian American farmers and retailers, who previously had had a much smaller customer base of multiethnic immigrant consumers. Moreover, their proximity to New York City and emerging relationship with Korean greengrocers meant that they now had access to a more affluent consumer base in a concentrated media market.17
Figure 14.2. Golden Bowl Supermarket, Fresno, California, 2012. Photograph by the author.
Another East Coast city that directly benefited from Asian American farmers and sourcers was Boston, where two immigrants from Japan, Michio and Aveline Kushi, founded the pioneering natural foods distributor Erewhon in 1966.18 Just a little more than two decades earlier, “Japs Not Welcome” signs were ubiquitous on the West Coast, where Japanese Americans struggled with the fallout of World War II. Here, on the other side of the country, thanks to the Kushis, northeasterners were having their first tentative tastes of brown rice, seaweed, and soy sauce. The Kushis were instrumental in training a generation of natural foods distributors. Eventually, many of those they trained began to sell their own house brands by replicating the Kushis’ model of contracting directly with organic producers. One of these emulators was Paul Hawken, a “green business” guru and the cofounder of the garden supply chain Smith & Hawken. Hawken cut his teeth in the business working as the second manager of the Kushis’ store.
From the Kushis and the genre of store they spawned, Americans learned about fermented soybean paste and the ancient curdled soybean squares invented by the Chinese.19 These newly available health food stores—often located in college towns like Boulder and Ann Arbor—supplemented stores found in traditional Asian American ethnic enclaves. Together, they brought a wider variety and greater understanding of Asian foods to the general American public. They also helped validate traditional Asian health principles with regard to food, by translating and making them more accessible to English-speaking audiences. Companies like Eden Foods and Hain Celestial are direct beneficiaries of this legacy. Today, the natural food industry is a multibillion-dollar business, with many of the smaller companies started by Erewhon affiliates being bought out by multinational food companies like General Mills and Kraft Foods.20
Fred Lee is a third-generation Chinese American vegetable grower. His family farm, Sang Lee Farms in Long Island, New York, began by selling exclusively Chinese vegetables to the wholesale Chinese restaurant market.21 Eyeing market consolidation and other factors driving down the prices of wholesale sales, Sang Lee Farms successfully morphed into an all-retail business selling both American and Chinese vegetables to a mixed clientele. Fred and his wife, Karen, invented various techniques to bring their products to a changing market, including “stir-fry packs,” premixed bags of Asian vegetables packaged with appropriate sauces. The Lees’ efforts demystified Cantonese mainstays like gai lan and bok choy for the mostly non-Chinese clientele that came to their farm stand and farmers’ markets. Later, through partnerships with inner-city community groups, they taught the art of stir-fry to food stamp recipients in New York City.22
At one time, Fred Lee’s father maintained a second farm in southern Florida to serve the northeast winter market. He belongs to a long tradition of Chinese American growers and retailers in Florida. Lue Gim Gong, the “Citrus Wizard of Florida,” pioneered the hybridization of frost-resistant oranges in 1911 and was later recognized for his successful—and profitable—hybridizations of citrus, apples, tomatoes, and peaches. Today, Florida has the third-largest number of Asian American–owned farms. Numbering more than six hundred, Florida trails only California and Hawai‘i.23
Although Sang Lee Farms is relatively well known, it is just one of the thousands of Chinese American food businesses whose culinary and agricultural roots can be traced to southern China. Known as the “vegetable basket” of China, with its abundant seafood and temperate weather, this area has been instrumental to the diversification of U.S. farming, by sending migrants like Fred Lee’s grandparents, and through its food traditions. Southern China has contributed to the food diversity of the United States by helping increase not only the amount but also the types of vegetables consumed by the general population. According to wok expert and Chinese cooking teacher Grace Young, before the spread of stir-fry cooking in the United States, “Most Americans were not accustomed to eating such minimally cooked vegetables. Especially vegetables tasting like vegetables.24 Through farming and marketing innovations, this hallmark of Cantonese cooking is now commonplace in the American diet.
A wide swath of the American population has struggled over the years to adhere to the government’s recommendation to eat more plant products. Asian Americans have consistently consumed a comparatively higher proportion of fruits and vegetables, and they have also helped provide them to the general public. Before his death in 1926, Japanese American George Shima (born Kinji Ushijima) built a multimillion-dollar fortune in potato farming and distribution. Although he pleaded with California Governor Hiram Johnson to reject the anti-Asian hysteria of the time, his entreaties were ignored. The 1913 Alien Land Law sought to derail farmers, like Shima, who had bought and reclaimed inexpensive marsh, swamp, and other low-quality fields and turned them into highly profitable farmland.25 It is these Asian American farmers who literally prepared the ground for later migrants, where the story usually begins. For example, according to Mark Bittman, the author of Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, “The [Central] valley became widely known in the 1920s and 1930s, when farmers arrived from Virginia or Armenia or Italy or (like Tom Joad) Oklahoma and wrote home about the clean air, plentiful water and cheap land.”26 Yet the first Japanese farmworkers arrived to the valley in the 1890s, and according to California Japantowns, “By 1910, the Japanese population in Fresno County was 2,233, with 122 businesses and 9 organizations; and doubled in size by 1920 to 5,732 residents with 187 businesses.”27 There was significant Asian American farming presence in the valley before and through the period Bittman describes. Harvey Levenstein calls the internment of Japanese Americans a major blow to the availability of fresh vegetables in wartime, a period during which fresh vegetables were not rationed but sugar, meat, butter, and canned foods were. He credits the revival of the Victory Gardens program as filling in the gaps.28 Today, 63 percent of all farms operated by Asian Americans produce “specialty crops”—a category that includes fruits, nuts, vegetables, nursery, and greenhouse operations—compared with 9 percent of non–Asian American farms.29
The Census of Agriculture, a data-gathering device for farming administered by the federal government, first began to record national numbers for Asian Americans in 2002, without disaggregating by ethnic group or country of origin.30 A separate framework counts, calculates, explains, and supports “alternative farming,” an umbrella term that includes organic, biodiverse, agro-ecological, and other agricultural techniques in the ideological minority of American farming. Despite their long experience in many different types of farming in both Asia and the Americas, Asian American farmers rarely appear in either framework. Just one Asian American farmer was profiled in a USDA national roundup of organic farmers, and few Asian Americans are leaders of influential groups like the National Organic Standards Board or the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.31
Many of the early generations of Asian American farmers have either moved out of agriculture or expanded their operations into larger, more profitable, and more established businesses. Success stories include Tanimura & Antle, a network of fresh vegetable farms in California and Arizona, which was formed by a partnership between a Japanese American family farm and a packing company owned by Dust Bowl émigrés. It is now one of the largest lettuce companies in the United States, selling internationally about half a billion dollars a year in romaine, iceberg, and specialty lettuces. In 2003, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger named A. G. Kawamura, a third-generation Japanese American fruit and vegetable grower, as California’s secretary of agriculture. Kawamura’s family’s trajectory is similar to the Tanimuras’: Once sharecroppers, they moved into fertilizer sales, then a growing and shipping company, then their current company, Orange County Produce. His family was one of the lucky ones, able to hold on to land and property through incarceration, and prosper as California’s property values skyrocketed. Histories of early Asian American farming are full of families that were not as lucky, however. One farmer named Katsuko Hirata despaired at her double challenge of wringing life from the land and respect from her neighbors:
Figure 14.3. Boxes and storage shed at Kozuki Farms, Parlier, California, 2011. Photograph by the author.
A wasted grassland
Turned to fertile fields by sweat
Of cultivation:
But I, made dry and fallow by
tolerating insults32
Asian American farmworkers today are more likely to be Hmong, Mien, Lao, Chinese, Filipino, or Vietnamese, and live in the Upper Midwest, Deep South, or anywhere along the rich growing area of the West Coast. Between 2002 and 2007, Minnesota saw a fourfold increase in Asian American farmers, and their products now dominate at many farmers’ markets in Minnesota and Wisconsin.33 While some have received aid from the U.S. government for their role in the Vietnam War, their continuing struggles echo earlier generations of Asian American farmers, prompting the USDA in 2012 to fund outreach and training programs to Asian American and Pacific Islander farmers in Arkansas, Ohio, California, and Hawai‘i.34 But these new Asian American farmers lack access to land and capital and are often excluded from profitable marketing channels. They are sometimes stymied by American business practices and are the most vulnerable to wild price fluctuations due to industry consolidation and market speculation. Whether or not they will choose to remain in farming is an open question.
The story of American food is one of macrotrends like economics, trade flows, and women entering the workforce and deciding they liked it. Farmers already are planning for the large-scale environmental impacts of climate change and water scarcity. But our ways of eating also are affected by the mundane details of everyday life: where we live, whom we talk to, what we learn in school. At key points in the development of our collective concept of “American food,” a process still deeply in flux, Asian Americans have made significant contributions that have altered both our eating habits and the common story of that eating.
Why, then, are significant landmarks like California cuisine, Florida citrus, or the common green bean not seen as Asian American milestones? It may be due to accidental oversight, intentional exclusion, or self-exemption. Even after decades in business and a devoted consumer base, the tendency toward modesty does not escape many Asian American food entrepreneurs. When contacted by the New York Times in 2005 for an article on the store he built and championed, Glenn Yasuda, cofounder of the Berkeley Bowl Market and another partner in the California cuisine movement, could barely muster words for the reporter. “All the markets are pretty good. We do the same thing,” he said before insisting that he had work to attend to and abruptly ending the interview.35
This modesty may also pertain to a universal challenge of telling the history of food: history’s farmers, grocers, butchers, and waiters were often poor and lacked the political power to tell the story of their contributions. Many moved out of food work entirely as soon as their children gained citizenship and access to American education and the white-collar economy. But a new generation of immigrants and their children still use food production as survival: The latest Census of Agriculture counted 20,417 Asian American farm operators, with Asian Americans entering the profession at higher rates than any other racial group besides Native Americans.36 As in the past, Asian American farmers continue to focus on diversified fruit and vegetable cultivation, the higher-margin “specialty crops” that allow their farms to be smaller and more labor intensive, yet reap higher profits.37 Asian American retailers continue to source unique products and devise creative ways of selling them, influencing both the production stream before them and the tastes of consumers. They are writing the American food story of the future and probably will not ask for credit. But they deserve it. Thanks to them, American food and farming is stronger, healthier, and better able to provide something of enduring value to the American diet.
Figure 14.4. California Department of Labor safety poster written in Hmong. Fresno, California, 2012. Photograph by the author.
1. Mitchell Davis, “Eating Out, Eating American: New York Restaurant Dining and Identity,” in Gastropolis: Food & New York City, ed. Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 304.
2. One version is Cornell University’s “Discovering the Food System Glossary,” available at http://www.discoverfoodsys.cornell.edu/glossary.html.
3. Marion Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 11.
4. This includes, among others, the Prince of Wales, who began the Accounting for Sustainability Project and lectures on the role of proper pricing of agricultural and other goods to reflect environmental and other externalities.
5. Editorial, “Jap Eviction Brings Threat of Crop Losses,” San Francisco News, March 28, 1942.
6. “List of Evacuee-Owned Properties, March 12, 1943.” National Archives and Records Administration, Western Region.
7. California Department of Food and Agriculture statistic.
8. From 1987 to 1997, there was a per-capita increase of consumption of fresh fruits (10 percent) and vegetables (14 percent); this, however, is under government recommended levels. See Phil R. Kaufman et al., “Understanding the Dynamics of Produce Markets: Consumption and Consolidation Grow,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Information Bulletin no. 758, August 2000.
9. Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
10. See Sallie Tisdale, Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food (New York: Riverhead Books, 2001).
11. Raj Patel, Stuffed & Starved: From Farm to Fork, the Hidden Battle for the World Food System (London: Portobello Books, 2007), 13. The hourglass diagrams illustrate the pinching of food distribution systems caused by retail and manufacturing consolidation.
12. Thomas McNamee, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2007), 32.
13. “Eat at Bill’s: Life in the Monterey Market,” DVD recording, Churchill Orchard / Tangerine Man Films, 2008.
14. McNamee, Alice Waters, 192.
15. Pyong Gap Min, Ethnic Solidarity for Economic Survival: Korean Greengrocers in New York City (New York: Russell Sage, 2008), 54–55.
16. Sam Dolnick, “A New York Staple, Korean Grocers Are Dwindling,” New York Times, June 1, 2011.
17. Davis, “Eating Out, Eating American,” 302. Davis, vice president of the James Beard Foundation, compares New York with “Paris vis-à-vis France before anything that could be called French cuisine had coalesced,” for its power in defining the national taste.
18. William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, History of Erewhon-Natural Foods Pioneer in the United States, 1966-2011 (Lafayette, CA: Soyinfo Center: 2011), 12.
19. I believe that it was because of the Kushis that the Japanese term was adopted in the United States for many items that also have Chinese and Korean provenance, such as miso, tofu, and nori. That said, Pancho Villa Taqueria in San Francisco’s Mission District aims for neutrality with a menu reference to its Soy Bean Cake Burrito.
20. See Samuel Fromartz, Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006).
21. Nanette Maxim, “Grown in the USA,” Gourmet, September 2000.
22. Fred and Karen Lee, interview with Nina F. Ichikawa, October 10, 2010.
23. 2007 Census of Agriculture—State Data. U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service.
24. Grace Young, interview with Nina F. Ichikawa, December 21, 2011.
25. Don and Nadine Hata, “George Shima: The Potato King of California,” Journal of the West 25, no. 1 (1986): 55–63.
26. Mark Bittman, “Everyone Eats There: California’s Central Valley Is Our Greatest Food Resource. So Why Are We Treating It So Badly?” New York Times Magazine, October 14, 2012.
27. From California Japantowns, an online history project of the California Japanese American Community Leadership Council, available at http://www.californiajapantowns.org/fresno.html.
28. Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, 85.
29. 2007 Census of Agriculture—Asian Farmers Factsheet, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 3.
30. The Census of Agriculture has come under repeated scrutiny by farming equity groups for its failure to accurately count farmers of color. See Rural Coalition/Coalicion Rural and Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund, “A Time to Change: A Report by the Assessment Conversations Team,” ACT Report (Washington, DC: Rural Coalition and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, 2010), 14.
31. Deborah Wechsler, “Lon Inaba and Family, Inaba Produce Farms,” in The New American Farmer: Profiles of Agricultural Innovation, ed. Valerie Berton, 2nd ed. (Beltsville, MD: Sustainable Agriculture Network, 2005), 175. The Inaba family profiled in this government-funded publication chose to emphasize to the interviewer that owing to the history of discrimination their family faced as former farmworkers, they placed a priority on fair wages and decent housing for their mostly Latino workforce.
32. From the Japanese American National Museum’s permanent exhibit. Other first-person examples are The Issei of the Salinas Valley: Japanese Pioneer Families, published in 2010 by the Salinas Valley Japanese American Citizens League and available from the National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, CA.
33. Mark Steil, “Ag Census Shows Number of Minnesota Farms Holds Stable,” Minnesota Public Radio, February 4, 2009.
34. “USDA Announces Assistance for Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers,” New Release no. 0266.12, August 8, 2012.
35. Sharon Waxman, “You Think You’ve Got Tomatoes,” New York Times, August 3, 2005.
36. U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agriculture Statistics Service, 2007 Census of Agriculture: Demographics Factsheet. Note: The 88 percent increase in Native American operators is largely due to a change in counting methods by the USDA. Asian American operators have increased by 40 percent, while the national average is a 7 percent increase.
37. U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, “2007 Census of Agriculture: Asian Farmers Factsheet.”
