The Brief

Nothing says summertime like children selling lemonade outside their homes. A paper cup of the sweetly tart concoction can be so refreshing on a sweltering summer day. And in Los Angeles, there is often an added bonus — the lemons are most likely local, picked from trees in the children’s own yards.

Lemons are so plentiful today that it's not uncommon to see baskets full of Lisbons, Meyers and Eurekas being offered for free in front of houses.

People unload them on their neighbors, having used as many as they can in lemon curd, lemon bars, lemon pies, homemade limoncello, and of course, lemonade.

But the lemon, and its big sister the orange, are much more than just fun fruits for home gardeners. The course of the citrus industry in California has dramatically shaped the state's economic fortunes and brought it worldwide acclaim as a bountiful Eden of health and happiness.

Mediterranean climate

A family picking lemons in 1928

Orange and lemon seeds were first brought to California by Spanish missionaries colonizing the area in the late 18th century.

The Spanish soon discovered that the area’s Mediterranean climate, its mild winters and plentiful sunshine (most California lemons are harvested in winter and early spring), made it the ideal place to grow citrus. The Mission San Gabriel and Mission San Fernando had the most luscious groves, and its fruits were used to feed acolytes and keep illnesses like scurvy at bay.

However, from the start, the growth of citrus in California had an exploitative underbelly. “The Spanish may have brought the seeds and whatnot, but they made the Native Americans, whom they press-ganged into doing labor, actually plant and harvest and tend to the crops,” says Benjamin Jenkins, associate professor at the University of La Verne and author of Octopus’s Garden: How Railroads and Citrus Transformed Southern California.

 The commercialization of citrus began in 1831, when an enterprising French immigrant named Jean-Louis Vignes bought 104 acres of land just outside the original Pueblo de Los Angeles (now the Arts District) on the Los Angeles River. On his sprawling ranch, named El Aliso, he grew grapes to make his famed wines, as well as orange and lemon trees.

He soon had competition in the form of his neighbor, a former Kentucky fur trapper and cowboy named William Wolfskill. On his equally sprawling ranch, he grew grapes, oranges (he helped develop the famed Valencia orange) and lemons, and by the 1840s he had the largest citrus grove in North America.

Horse-drawn float of the Cahuenga Valley Lemon Association in a parade in Hollywood

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Los Angeles Public Library/Security Pacific National Bank Photo Collection

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The enormous volume and consistent quality of California citrus, and the fortune that could be made growing the fruits, soon caught the attention of visitors.

In much of the country lemons and oranges were a rare luxury, but here they were so plentiful their unmistakable scent filled the air. In 1870, an Eastern visitor to Los Angeles wrote an essay extolling the city in the Los Angeles Daily News:

Its climate cool, from the sea breezes, it is the most agreeable in the world, its soil productions beyond parallel. Immense vineyards, orange and lemon groves, give beauty to the landscape; and I can only say that if I had my life to begin, and had the talent… I should not hesitate to place myself there at once.

A lemon grove in Altadena

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Los Angeles Public Library/Security Pacific National Bank Photo Collection

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New varieties

Southern Californians also began to experiment with citrus, creating their own unique varieties. While the Lisbon lemon, a variety originally from Portugal, continued to grow in abundance, it was soon matched in popularity by the Eureka lemon, a thornless, everbearing and hearty variant propagated by Los Angeles nurseryman Thomas Garey in 1877.

So profitable was the citrus industry, according to Jenkins, that its produce was one of the main reasons that the major rail companies began to extend their lines to Los Angeles in the late 1800s.

And when they did, they chose to build their terminals and rail yards directly around the Wolfskill and Vignes’ properties, a logistics’ gold mine in terms of exporting citrus across the country. Soon, the area was swallowed up by the railroads, and citrus moved into open land elsewhere.

“California didn't invent the citrus industry in the United States,” Jenkins says. “But it definitely dominated by the time the railroads came in about the 1880s and 1890s.”

Women working in a lemon packing house, part of the California Fruit Growers Exchange

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Los Angeles Public Library/Security Pacific National Bank Photo Collection

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Boosters in Southern California saw the orange and lemon as powerful PR tools to entice sickly, wealthy Midwesterners and Eastern settlers in search of health and rejuvenation. Sanitariums, where you could recover from tuberculosis and other ailments in the sunshine and clear California air, began to open, and many of the patients, once healed, never left the state.

“If you were to look at newspaper accounts from Victorian California, from the Gilded Age advertisements, and correspondence people are sending back east, they’re absolutely thinking of California as a paradise, where in particular a lot of invalids come to try to heal themselves of consumption or tuberculosis or other lung problems,” Jenkins says.

“And part of the prescription that many of their doctors would tell them is that you spend some time in your sanitarium, but then you buy a little plot of land in California, you plant some oranges, and you get hopped up on vitamin C from maybe the lemonade that you're growing as well.”

The Cahuenga Suburban newspaper from 1896

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Los Angeles Public Library/Security Pacific National Bank collection

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The rise of Sunkist

In 1893, the Southern California Fruit Exchange, which is now known as Sunkist, was formed by a co-op of growers to help protect their assets and to lobby for California grown citrus. The powerful group (now based in Valencia) became a powerhouse in PR, placing advertising in paper and magazines across the country, promoting orange juice and lemonade as all-American staples.

“They promoted the idea that you should not only drink lemonade, but make sure that it's Sunkist made from lemons in California,” Jenkins says. “In The Saturday Evening Post or Ladies Home Journal they would have lavish illustrations showing a huge pitcher of lemonade with maybe a couple of lemons sitting next to it, touting the benefits of vitamin C and how it's like drinking a little bit of California sunshine.”

The campaigns were a brilliant success, and the consumption of lemonade across America spiked dramatically. The number of lemon trees also grew from 62,000 lemon bearing trees in 1882 to 800,000 trees by 1901.

The same year Sunkist formed, Limoneria, one of the first agribusinesses to tout the lemon as its primary crop, was founded in the Ventura town of Santa Paula. By 1908, it was known as “the greatest lemon ranch in the world.” That year, the Ventura Free Press reported:

A further increase in the size of the largest lemon plantation in the world...will be the result of planting this season at the Limoneira Ranch. There are now...27,000 bearing lemon trees on the property, and this year trees will be on 300 acres more. The crop last year was the largest since the planting has begun. Bigness is not the chief end kept in view by the management of the ranch. The growth of the enterprise, in fact, has come from never flagging efforts to maintain and improve the quality of the product.

But while many were making their fortune in the citrus business, the people who did the actual work in the groves were primarily poorly paid immigrants.

“The people who worked in these fields were primarily Chinese immigrants who had formerly worked for the railroads,” Jenkins says. “The Chinese were often made to live in railroad box cars because those were the houses that were available.”

As restrictions on Chinese immigration were passed, Korean, Japanese and European immigrants increasingly worked backbreaking days in the blazing sun, cultivating California’s dream fruits for the masses.

Photograph from the Valley Times dated December 22, 1962 shows Mrs. Ernest Ortega, from Reseda, holding a large lemon from her tree

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Los Angeles Public Library (Valley Times collection)

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Hollywood lemon groves

Citrus soon found a new booster when a director named Cecil B. DeMille came west in 1913 and leased a lemon grove in the small hamlet of Hollywood. There, his company shot The Squaw Man, the first feature-length movie filmed in Los Angeles, amongst the lemon trees.

According to Taschen’s beautiful new book The Gourmand’s Lemon: A Collection of Stories and Recipes, DeMille was not the only Hollywood pioneer to stake his claims on a citrus ranch.

In 1918, Charlie Chaplin opened his first studio in a lemon grove on Sunset and La Brea. “The silent star kept a few of the trees on his lot,” The Gourmand notes, “as evidenced by a goofy snippet of footage that shows him picking a lemon and pulling faces as he tries to eat it, skin and all.”

Even the lemon industry would be fodder for on screen hijinks. According to The Gourmand’s Lemon, in a 1923 short, entitled Oranges and Lemons, comedian Stan Laurel played a citrus worker trying to pack a citrus crate, while constantly being foiled by a wayward conveyer belt.

By the 1930s, California’s two most famous exports were films and citrus. They collided at the San Bernardino National Orange Show in 1939. According to Douglas Cazaux Sackman, author of the fascinating Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden, visitors to the expo were greeted by “manikins of Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich lolling in the lawn chairs among garden paths laid out with lemons and lolling in orange chairs among garden paths laid out with lemons and grapefruit, and pretty-boy Clark Gable in neat white flannels and open throat shirt under a fake orange tree glistening with two large golden globes.”

Movie stars also found that lemons, still plentiful though the major groves were long gone, aided them in their strict beauty regimens. “Tinseltown’s Golden Age sirens enjoyed their lemons off screen,” The Gourmand’s Lemon notes. “Rita Hayworth rinsed her hair with lemon juice, Joan Crawford rubbed elbows with it, Katharine Hepburn scrubbed her face with sugar and lemon, and Marlene Dietrich sucked on lemon wedges between takes, believing it would keep her facial muscles perfectly taut for the camera.”

Workers rights

In 1942, the Bracero agreement was reached, which permitted Mexican citizens to come to America as temporary workers in agriculture, and they began to dominate the citrus groves. “For a majority of these men working in the grove, they had to leave their families behind to live and work here,” says Jose Cabello, state interpreter at the California Citrus State Historic Park in Riverside. “Their homes were pretty dismal, hastily made and set up in fairgrounds, old warehouses, prison barracks, and sometimes even along the Santa Ana River.”

After WWII, urban sprawl, industrialization and a decline in the citrus industry pushed most of the remaining commercial groves out of Los Angeles and Orange County and into the Central Valley, where they remain to this day. But Sunkist would not be daunted and continued to promote California citrus products across the world, increasingly encouraging people to use lemons in new and novel ways.

“A lemon is not one product but a group of totally different products,” said Don Francisco, the marketing genius of Sunkist. “A lemon may be classed as a pie, a hair rinse, a cool drink, a hot drink, a garnish, a mouthwash, a vinegar or a skin bleach. The toilet and medicinal value of the lemon are alone sufficient to bring it fame.”

By the 1960s, the fight for farm workers’ rights spearheaded by the Agriculture Workers Association had begun to open Californian’s eyes to the inequity of Big-Ag. The lemon, once a symbol of youth and promise, began to be seen in a more sour, cynical light. In her 1966 essay Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, Joan Didion wrote of a lemon grove that was “too lush, unsettlingly glossy, the greenery of nightmare.”

Today, the history of citrus in California can be best experienced at the California Citrus State Historic Park in Riverside. The lush, fragrant living museum is home to thousands of citrus trees and offers tours and educational programs documenting the history of citrus in the state, and the memories of those who worked in the field.

“We grow about 70 different types of citrus,” Cabello says. “And among those 70, about 12 of those are lemons.”

His favorite lemon in the park is the variegated pink Eureka lemon, created right here in California. “It's a very unique kind of lemon because as its name suggests, the fruity flesh on the inside is a pink color,” he says. “The lemons, as they're forming, theylook like little watermelons because the fruit has green stripes on it that you would expect a normal watermelon to have. So, this specific lemon is pretty sour. You would expect it to be. But I find them really delicious.”

Although most Angelenos now only see lemon trees in backyards and parks, California produced a 50-year high of 1.06 million tons in 2022-2023. So, next time you squeeze a lemon into your iced tea or over your hair for some natural summer highlights, remember — you are holding a bit of California history in your hands.

As online classes proliferate, community college professors have found a hack — repackaging similar courses for hundreds of students at a time and teaching more than a dozen classes in a single semester.

Professor Thien-Huong Ninh Villarreal has at least two tenured, full-time community college jobs, plus recurring part-time gigs over the past 12 months at UC Berkeley, Cal State Sacramento and seven other community colleges. This fall, she’s teaching 30 sociology, ethnic studies and business classes to about 1,100 students.

In 2024, with roughly the same courseload, she made nearly $800,000, according to public payroll records. CalMatters reached out to her three times for comment, but she never responded.

Community college professors are expected to evaluate student progress and provide direct support without the help of teaching assistants, though that’s nearly impossible at such a scale, said Sarah Thompson, president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges. “Obviously no one has enough time in a week to teach 30 classes and do a good job, so that’s very problematic.”

However Chris Ferguson, an executive vice chancellor at the office overseeing California’s community colleges, said having multiple teaching jobs is not, by itself, evidence of poor instruction. In an emailed statement to CalMatters, Ferguson, who leads finance and strategic initiatives for the office, said multiple jobs would be a problem if the “faculty member’s workload is preventing the required level of engagement, feedback, assessment, or student support.” In that case, he said the college district — not the statewide college system — should be accountable.

CalMatters analyzed public payroll records from the non-profit Transparent California and corroborated those records with college course data. The analysis found at least 70 adjuncts, or part-time professors, who were paid by five or more community college districts, California State University or University of California campuses in the same year, including many who taught more than 10 classes in a semester.

Some of these professors were among the highest paid employees across California’s 116 community colleges. Ninh Villarreal made more than every community college administrator in 2024, even more than Sonya Christian, the chancellor of the state’s community college system, according to CalMatters’ analysis.

Most of the 70-plus professors did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Others asked CalMatters not to publish the data, which is publicly available, for fear of how it might affect their employment.

These professors aren’t breaking any rules. In fact, there are no rules that prevent community college adjuncts from teaching at more than one district.

Andrew Vanden Heuvel, an adjunct astronomy professor, told CalMatters he teaches roughly 50 online classes and labs from the office above his garage in a small town on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Almost all of his lectures are pre-recorded, and students can listen at any time. It’s called asynchronous instruction. At the UC, Cal State and especially at the state’s community colleges, these kinds of online classes are popular and widespread, a major shift since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vanden Heuvel said he has taught as many as 1,000 students a semester across the country, including in Santa Monica, Salinas, San Jose and Visalia, plus schools in New Mexico, Michigan, Washington and Florida. He said the classes use different iterations of the same, largely introductory content about stars, galaxies and the solar system. Students read information online, interact with online astronomical simulations, watch videos or submit labs.

“In its current form, I am not grading anything (by hand),” said Vanden Heuvel. All quizzes are multiple choice and computer-graded — a common feature among many online classes, not just Vanden Heuvel’s. Some students also submit written assignments, which he said he usually grades using an algorithm that only checks whether the work was submitted or not.

About 20% of his course load is in California, he said. “In California, I can get paid as much as eight times as much as I can in Florida.” In 2024, California schools paid him a total of about $320,000, according to the CalMatters analysis. Nationally, he made much more, he said. “Looking over my records, I can tell you that 2024 was the high water mark.” He said he made $758,485.12 that year.

Full-time professors cash in 

By law, adjunct faculty are generally limited to teaching three classes per semester at a single community college district, with each district setting its own rules. Most part-time jobs are precarious, with no healthcare, no guarantee of employment and all work assigned on a contract basis. Colleges can strip adjuncts of their classes — and their wages — with little notice.

For union and faculty leaders, who have long said adjuncts are underpaid and overworked, the workload of professors like Ninh Villarreal and Vanden Heuvel comes as a shock. “I don’t know how you can earn that much money, how you can have that many assignments. I mean that’s pretty wild,” said Jim Mahler, the president of the community college council for the California Federation of Teachers. He said he suspects some professors are simply recording their lectures and “just hitting play.”

To make more than $400,000, many of California’s highest earning adjuncts had full-time tenure or tenure-track positions too, the records show. For example:

• Bobby Seals, an ethnic studies professor, has a full-time position at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose. He also teaches 14 more courses across four other community college districts, plus San Jose State — a total of about 930 students this semester. 
• Faramarz Mortezaie is the chair of the computer science department at Mission College in Santa Clara. Part time, he also teaches 11 classes at other campuses, including San Jose State. 
• Nicholas Nardi, a full-time psychology professor at Santa Ana College, is teaching 11 more classes at six other schools, including Cal State Los Angeles.
• Timothy Durfield, a full-time business professor at Citrus College, teaches an additional 10 classes at four other community college districts. 
• Walter Meyer, a full-time art history professor at Santa Monica College, teaches 10 additional online classes to students in Los Angeles and Kern counties.

None of these professors responded to requests for comment.

Ninh Villarreal, the top earner, has often had at least two full-time jobs, according to college officials and public records. She’s been a tenured professor at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento since 2016. In 2023, she got a second full-time job at Reedley College near Fresno, though she returned to part-time status less than a year later. In 2025, she got tenure at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, and the same year, official college documents show she was the inaugural tenure-track faculty in the ethnic studies department at West Valley College in Saratoga near San Jose. Cade Story-Yetto, a spokesperson for the district encompassing West Valley College, said Ninh Villarreal is no longer employed there and refused to answer other questions.

CalMatters reached out to nearly every one of the state’s 73 community college districts, seeking feedback on our methodology before publication. Transparent California, part of a nonpartisan think tank advocating for limited government, obtained payroll information directly from the college districts. CalMatters then used that data to compile a list of professors who taught at five or more community college districts, Cal State or UC campuses in 2024, which is the most recent data. The data was corroborated using course catalogs, faculty directories and college hiring documents.

While some of the professors taught a few in-person classes, usually at Cal State or UC campuses, CalMatters’ analysis found that many of those who taught at five or more college districts relied heavily on online, asynchronous instruction.

No one is tracking it 

Universities treat online courses the same as in-person classes: students get the same amount of credit, and teachers are generally paid the same amount. As online courses have become more common, the UC, Cal State and community college systems have spent millions in state funding to ensure they have the same rigor as in-person courses.

Community colleges evaluate the quality of all courses, but they have no way of knowing what a professor’s workload really is. California’s community college districts are independently governed, and no one tracks who teaches across districts or how many classes they teach.

The Cal State and UC systems, which are smaller and more centralized than the community colleges, track employment and limit the number of courses each professor can teach. If the instructor is also teaching at a community college, however, they may have no way of knowing.

Vanden Heuvel, the astronomy professor, said he believes his students are getting an excellent education. “I teach at a certain number of schools because that portfolio gives me the stability I need as an adjunct to survive and thrive,” he said, pointing to his three kids, his wife, who is an elementary school teacher, and the need to be present with his family instead of driving from campus to campus each day. “Now, did I push it further than some people think is morally conscionable? I don't think so.”

Researchers say it’s not clear whether online courses are worse, or better, than traditional in-person education. Students, especially working adults who predominate the community college system, praise online courses for their convenience, but there are known drawbacks. Asynchronous classes in particular have historically offered students less interaction with their professors, which research has found is detrimental to student success.

How to teach 50 classes in a semester

Vanden Heuvel posts much of his course material on YouTube, where his channels collectively have nearly 5 million views, spread out over more than 300 videos. In his videos, he’s charismatic and personable, taking students into his car, even posting videos while on vacation at Disney World. His location isn’t a secret, he said — he has always been open about where he lives, both with California’s colleges and his students.

In fact, the first lesson in one of his classes is a video in which he introduces himself and takes students to his favorite place, Lake Michigan, where he first developed a love of astronomy.

State and federal laws require professors to interact with their students, especially in asynchronous online courses. Interaction could include fostering engagement in the classroom or monitoring students’ academic performance, wrote Ferguson, the finance vice chancellor, in his emailed statement. “These requirements apply to every course, regardless of how many colleges or districts employ the instructor.” The federal government has strengthened its own rules for online classes over the past few years.

Vanden Heuvel said he gives out his personal cell phone to all students and gets as many as 30 emails a day from them, mostly asking to extend assignment deadlines. He said he answers every email.

It would be very easy for students to cheat using AI, he said, especially because quizzes are multiple choice and most written assignments are graded only on completion. “The logic is the equivalent of the Scantron (a multiple-choice grading machine) at the large lecture hall. It’s a defensible instructional practice to assess that way. It’s how lots of assessments are run, be that the GRE or LSAT. I don’t love it.”

The promise of online education is to reach students at scale and lower the cost-per-student of education, he said — and that’s exactly what he’s doing by teaching 50 online classes and labs to as many as 1,000 students across the country. In some schools, especially in rural areas, Vanden Heuvel is the only astronomy professor.

He said his large-scale teaching practices represent his “most successful” experiment, though he acknowledged that many faculty won’t look so favorably upon it.

‘I’m not a factory of education like that’ 

Part-time faculty, who are cheaper to employ, outnumber tenure-track professors at every one of California’s 73 community college districts, in some cases by more than 5-1. The same imbalance is evident at many Cal State campuses, though their adjuncts, known as lecturers, can work full time and receive benefits. The UC, with a focus on research, has faculty categories that don’t exist at the Cal State or community college system, making comparisons tricky.

It’s well-known that adjuncts teach at multiple districts, but unions often say that they do it out of necessity. Tina Leonard, who teaches American Sign Language, is a perfect example. In 2024, she made just over $84,000 teaching at five community college districts.

“I am Deaf,” she wrote in an email, “and it is very difficult and competitive for a Deaf educator to get a full-time tenure-track position in ASL.” She said she took additional teaching jobs in 2024 to cover the cost of her taxes. “Each college withholds as if it is your only job, so when you add them all together, you can end up owing.”

K. Frindell, the president of a federation of faculty unions, the California Community College Independents, said she wasn’t surprised to see many faculty teaching in multiple districts, even some who are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars. “A loophole has been created,” she said — one that allows districts to cut costs by hiring adjuncts and allows adjuncts to teach at multiple districts.

In fact, the total number of community college adjuncts in California is unknown because statewide tallies do not account for professors who teach at multiple districts, said Ferguson. The Cal State system has the same data problem.

Adjuncts are often hired for the academic year and then rehired each fall. Numerous legislative proposals have tried but failed to give adjuncts opportunities for additional pay, benefits or full-time employment. In 2022, legislators tried to increase benefits for community college adjuncts, sending $200 million to districts that would then reimburse part-time faculty for health insurance. In the 2024-25 academic year, nearly 7,000 adjuncts used the program, very few of whom were teaching at multiple districts. Many districts chose not to participate, and most of the money remains unspent.

Noah Thomas, a community college art professor, said he looked into the new healthcare benefits but found them lacking. “It’s such a convoluted system and the subsidies are kind of pretty low,” he said. “The coverage only applies to me and not to any of my dependents and it’s only for 10 months out of the year because my contract is only 10 months.”

Thomas made just over $100,000 in 2024 by commuting among five community college districts in Orange and Los Angeles counties, where he taught in-person studio arts classes. Sometimes, the drives are so long, and the days so jam-packed that he eats lunch in his car, he said. “Financially I’d love to teach as many classes as I could. $800,000 sounds amazing. But I’m not a factory of education like that. I really love teaching students one-on-one and showing them how to actually cut out a piece of cardboard and use a band saw.”

The moral dilemma 

Frindell, who represents the independent community college unions, said the solution is not to focus on the professors who teach multiple online classes and earn high six-figure salaries. She wants to see an end to the low pay, precarious employment, and restrictive laws that force adjuncts to teach at multiple districts in the first place.

CalMatters asked higher education leaders in the state Assembly and Senate about adjuncts who are teaching at multiple schools. Alhambra Democratic Assemblymember Mike Fong, San Diego Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio and Riverside Democratic Sen. Sabrina Cervantes did not respond.

Because of state and federal rules that require professors to engage with their students, Vanden Heuvel redesigned some of his courses, adding new types of assignments. At times, he said the rules seem like they were “invented to prevent people from doing what I’m doing,” though he added that they are often ineffective if so. “What it feels like in practice is an administrative checked box that is not really connected to meaningful student experience.”

Still, he said he has sought reassurance from other educators about the moral implications of teaching so many students in so many classes, even if legally he is within bounds. “What they say to me, whether they're just being nice or not, is this sense that adjunct faculty are systematically taken advantage of by higher education, and if you have built a system that allows you to thrive while still providing excellent education, then more power to you.”

At the end of each semester, Vanden Heuvel said he asks his students to evaluate the course and that they consistently say it’s far above average in quality and knowledge gained and about average in difficulty. “There's always the sense of like, ‘Is what I'm doing OK or not OK? Am I pushing it a little too far or not?’”

He self-published a 600-page book that collects student reflections, mostly about how their relationship with planets, stars and galaxies changed because of his class. He said the book sits in his office, right near his desk.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Heading north up the coast from L.A. soon? Plan to stop in wine country’s Santa Maria Valley to try something different: the region’s own BBQ style.

Order a plate at restaurants like Shaw’s Famous Steakhouse in Santa Maria, or the Hitching Post in Casmalia, and it will arrive with red-oak grilled top sirloin or tri-tip, pinquito beans (a miniature cousin of the pink bean, grown only in the Santa Maria Valley), macaroni and cheese, a green salad, toasted French bread and salsa. And there's no barbecue sauce. It’s dry rub all the way.

It’s so specific to the region that “Santa Maria Barbecue” has been trademarked by the Santa Maria Valley Chamber of Commerce to stop nearby imitators.

The defining feature is the pit that's used. The grate lifts and lowers on a crank or pulley, so the cook controls heat by changing the distance from the red oak coals: closer to sear, higher to cook through. There’s no lid. Local pitmaster Nicholas Priedite calls it neither grilling nor smoking, but something in between.

How it became a style 

In the 1830s and ’40s, what's now California belonged to Mexico. The government granted settlers huge cattle ranches (ranchos) and gave away even more land when it broke up the missions in 1833.

Ranchers raised cattle mainly for hides and tallow, so beef was plentiful. According to Santa Maria Style Barbecue by R.H. Tesene, at roundups and fiestas, cooks dug pits and filled them with local red oak, which grows abundantly in the coastal climate and has a mellow smoke. Once the fire burned down to hot coals, the beef was strung on willow branches and hung to cook.

A crank-operated grill at the Santa Maria BBQ & Music Fest. Cooks raise and lower the grate over the coals, a method one pitmaster described as neither grilling nor smoking but something in between.

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Wylie Withers

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Courtesy Santa Maria BBQ & Music Fest

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By the 1920s, locals had made the method their own: beef strung on skewers over red oak coals had become a common sight at community gatherings. In 1920, Ed Craig, a founder of the Santa Maria Club, a social club for local businessmen, built a large pit to serve similarly sized groups, according to Tesene. In 1931, the club began a monthly stag barbecue, serving plates for $1.25 plus tax.

Prime rib was originally the preferred beef, followed by thick top sirloin suited to skewers and rods. According to Lompoc butcher Bruce Nix, the style began shifting toward tri-tip in the late 1960s, when cooks moved to metal screens and a smaller, cheaper cut took off.

A new generation

Though the technique is more than 150 years old, a new generation of pitmasters is carrying the technique forward today. At the Santa Maria BBQ Festival in September, I tried plates from local pitmasters, each with their own spin. Angel Ibarra of Santa Maria Grill Masters leads a group of longtime friends who have competed in local barbecue contests for 20 years. He uses a family recipe — a dry rub of garlic, pepper, onion and salt — and lets the fire do the rest.

Tri-tip cooks on a raised grate above an oak fire at the Santa Maria BBQ & Music Fest.

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Wylie Withers

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Courtesy Santa Maria BBQ & Music Fest

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For Jesse Carlon of Oakie Smokie BBQ in Santa Maria, the key to tender meat is keeping the temperature consistent through the cook. He runs a microenterprise home kitchen operation, or MEHKO, where he serves thinly sliced tri-tip in a Philly cheesesteak-style sandwich.

Priedite runs Priedite Barbecue out of a truck in Los Alamos, where the menu is brisket, pork shoulder and ribs with pinquito beans on the side. For him, cooking Santa Maria-style keeps local tradition alive.

“I feel like I can help carry the culture a little bit,” Priedite said.

Federal officials on Thursday announced new funding to explore the medical potential of ibogaine, a controversial psychedelic drug championed by veterans, conservative lawmakers and podcasters aligned with President Donald Trump.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his department is awarding up to $4.9 million to prepare for the first U.S. studies of ibogaine for post-traumatic stress disorder, a hard-to-treat condition linked to higher suicide and substance abuse rates among veterans.

The money will not go directly to patient research, Kennedy said, but to lay the groundwork needed to manufacture, dose and design studies of the drug.

Ibogaine is made from a shrub native to West Africa. It can cause intense hallucinations, nausea, vomiting, tremors and sometimes deadly irregular heart rhythms. Ibogaine is currently illegal, in the same ultra-restrictive class as LSD, ecstasy and most other psychedelic drugs.

Veterans organizations and psychedelic advocates contend that ibogaine has great promise for intractable conditions such as PTSD, severe depression and opioid addiction. U.S. research on the drug has essentially been frozen for decades due to ibogaine’s restricted status.

Kennedy said the government will receive data and treatment guidance from Beond Inc., a Texas-based company that has treated more than 3,000 patients with ibogaine in Mexico, where the drug is not illegal.

“That is going to allow us to dramatically accelerate the clinical trial process,” Kennedy said. “We’re going to have, I think, a record drug approval process.”

Additional funding awards may explore ibogaine’s use for addiction, he said.

Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins, who joined Kennedy for the announcement, said the collaborative effort would focus first on safety and “best-in-class research.”

“For veterans living with PTSD, we owe them both urgency and the best science we can produce,” Collins said.

Kennedy and Collins have previously voiced support for the potential of psychedelics, citing the experiences of veterans who have traveled abroad for therapy with ibogaine and other mind-altering substances.

Thursday’s announcement was previewed in April, when Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to speed up review and research of psychedelics that could help with mental health conditions.

Three applications for psychedelics are pending review at the Food and Drug Administration. They include the first potential medicines made from psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, and MDMA, also called ecstasy. Decisions on those drugs could come within weeks or months.

Because of its safety risks, ibogaine research has moved more slowly.

The little data currently available mostly comes from patients who have traveled to Mexico or other countries where ibogaine is not heavily regulated. Ibogaine clinics typically charge $10,000 to $20,000 for one course of treatment, which often involves monitoring of a patient’s heart readings while emergency medical workers are on standby.

Trump’s order on psychedelics came after podcaster Joe Rogan said he texted Trump about ibogaine, which he repeatedly has discussed on his show. According to Rogan, the president quickly responded: “Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it.”

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