00:00There's another commodity that stands to benefit from the U.S. conflict with Iran, not oil, pistachios.
00:06Iranians, Persians, have been growing and eating the nuts for thousands of years
00:11and began exporting them to the U.S. in the 1800s.
00:15California farmers started growing pistachios commercially in the 1960s and 1970s,
00:20and hostile U.S. relations with Iran have been very, very good to them.
00:25First, there was the 1979 Iranian Revolution,
00:28the hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and a U.S. embargo on trade with Iran.
00:34The embargo has been lifted several times since, but always reinstated.
00:38Since 1986, there's also been a 241% tariff on Iranian pistachios, just in case.
00:46U.S. pistachio production passed Iran's in 2004, and last year was more than four times bigger.
00:52The U.S. is now way ahead of Iran in pistachio exports, too.
00:56The U.S. pistachio industry has gotten so big that it's not so much competing with Iran
01:01as creating new markets for pistachios around the world,
01:04helping fuel the pistachio-ification of everything.
01:07Here in the U.S., per capita consumption has tripled since California's wonderful company,
01:12the leading grower and marketer of pistachios,
01:15ran a series of attention-getting Super Bowl ads in the mid-2010s.
01:23That a couple of Beverly Hills billionaires have become the biggest farmers in California
01:28and the biggest water users rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
01:32But growing pistachios uses less water than the almond trees they often displace,
01:37and pistachios can survive with no water at all during a drought.
01:41In Iran, most pistachio orchards aren't irrigated at all.
01:45This results in nuts that are said to be more flavorful, but smaller and harder to open.
01:50It's also a reason why Iranian pistachio production hasn't increased at all this century,
01:55while irrigated California orchards produce more and more nuts that taste...
02:00pretty good.
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