18 MILLION RISING

The Rising Price of Sriracha Doesn’t Matter

youngist:

by Victor Casillas Valle

Sriracha chili sauce in production at Huy Fong Foods factory in Irwindale, California. – Photo by Cheryl A. Guerrero / Los Angeles Times

Recently, the city of Irwindale, CA filed a lawsuit against the Huy Fong Foods factory which makes the hot chili sauce Sriracha. Headlines from various news outlets, stretching from Al Jazeera to the Los Angeles Times, made comments such as “Sriracha Shortage Avoided!” or “Sriracha Forever! California Plant Will Stay Open, Despite Complaints.”

The overarching theme of most of the headlines? We are much more concerned with rising costs or a possible shortage of Sriracha than possible health concerns of Irwindale residents.

The situation goes as follows: Irwindale is a city east of Los Angeles that is predominantly filled with factories, but also has a small population of people of color and lower-incomes. The city of Irwindale, looking to fill a lot that had been empty for a large amount of time, gave Huy Fong Foods, a factory that was based in Rosemead, a $15 million finance to build their new factory on the empty, unusable, and contaminated land. Then, after the completion of the factory in 2012, complaints about the smell from the chili peppers used in the factory began to grow in numbers until Huy Fong Foods decided to install an insufficient filter to attempt to fix the smell.

Fast forward to now and the complaints have not ceased, leading to a lawsuit from the city of Irwindale vs. Huy Fong Foods.

However, on October 31st, the bid to shut down Huy Fong Foods until it could lessen or completely get rid of the odor was denied by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert O’Brien. In an attempt to rectify the problem, the South Coast Air Quality Management District simply drove through Irwindale and conducted simple “smell tests.”

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