Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
fornia at Davis for genotyping to be identified. There is also a financial imperative to their
experimentation. Even as the demand for Asian ingredients grows, small farmers find it
difficult to compete against larger operations in the United States and Mexico, so the Lao-
tian growers are constantly looking for an edge with niche products.
Most of the produce the Laotian farmers grow goes through normal distribution chan-
nels, but much of it also is sold at farmers' markets up and down the state. Fresno farmers
travel as far as San Diego and San Francisco - up to six hours each way - to sell their
crops. At wholesale a 30-pound case of eggplants might sell for $6. At the farmers' market
growers can get $1 a pound. This pays enough that one of the farmers has put three sons
through college on less than 25 acres of mostly jujubes (Chinese dates) and daikon.
A lot of this produce is so exotic that you probably won't find it at your local supermarket
or chain restaurant today, but who knows what tomorrow might bring? Baby bok choy
and daikon, which are everywhere today, were considered exotic only five years ago. Can
Chinese broccoli, yard-long beans and fuzzy melon be far behind? The mainstream de-
mand for these ingredients started with adventurous chefs looking for new things to play
with, but many of them have been picked up by chain restaurants such as Applebee's
and Bennigan's as they flirt with Americans' taste for Asian food. This quiet introduc-
tion of new ingredients is guerrilla marketing at its best. The specialty produce distributor
Frieda's, which introduced America to the kiwifruit, now has a list of more than thirty Asi-
an vegetables, including arrowroot and yu choy sum, a kind of flowering, mustardy green.
Mainstream acceptance is the Laotians' dream for tomorrow. For now, bouncing around
Fresno in his dusty 1983 Toyota, the air conditioner straining against the 106-degree heat,
Yang is focused on the present and helping other Laotians attain the success he enjoys.
After more than twenty years in this country, he says he has finally stopped having night-
mares about the jungle and his family's exodus. He turns down a dirt road between brand-
new residential developments and stops beside a verdant plot, not more than an acre and a
half. At the far end are fat stalks of sugarcane, elephant ear leaves of taro and what looks
like tall grass. That grass is rice, a specially prized variety traditionally grown in the Lao-
tian highlands. In another month it will be harvested and sold for a very good price at
one of the farmers' markets, or to a restaurant. Who knows? Maybe someday you'll even
be able to buy it at your neighborhood grocery. But now it sits baking in the Fresno sun,
giving off a heavenly aroma that smells to an outsider like the very best basmati. For a
Hmong farmer, the fragrance is like the past and the future combined. Yang stands at the
edge of the field, closes his eyes and breathes in, deeply, over and over again.
