Food

A Brief Geopolitical History of Your Dubai Chocolate

BYAines Mehdi

September 25, 2026

Dubai chocolate may be the most delicious piece of geopolitical camouflage ever invented. The internet sees a thick chocolate bar being snapped open to reveal an almost indecent amount of green pistachio cream and shredded kataifi. In many ways, it feels like Dubai distilled into dessert: excessive, unmistakably Middle Eastern, and decadent enough that it practically demands to be filmed before it is eaten.

And perhaps that is the peculiar thing about the pistachio. By the time it arrives on a dessert plate, almost every trace of where it came from vanishes, with both the geography and politics behind this much-coveted nut disappearing before your last bite.

Before it became the fashionable green of cafés, pastry counters, and supermarket shelves, it belonged to the dry agricultural landscapes of Iran, particularly around Rafsanjan in the province of Kerman. There, pistachio cultivation is not a recent luxury but an old agricultural tradition, shaped by heat, scarcity, and generations of knowledge about how to coax a valuable crop from an unforgiving climate. Its modern history however, is one of displacement, competition, and geopolitics.

In 1929, American botanist William E. Whitehouse traveled to Iran and returned with pistachio seeds. Amongst them, one variety that would later go on to be named Kerman became the backbone of California’s pistachio industry. And what began as botanical curiosity became an agricultural enterprise. Orchards expanded across the Central Valley, irrigation and processing infrastructure followed, and an unfamiliar crop was gradually absorbed into the machinery of American agrobusiness. Then Iran became difficult to trade with.

After the 1979 revolution and the hostage crisis, Washington imposed a harsh embargo on Iranian goods which meant that by the middle of the 1980s— when Iranian pistachios were again pressing against the American market— California’s industry was no longer simply experimental. It had become an economic interest with something bigger to defend.

In 1985, California pistachio growers and industry organizations petitioned the U.S. government against Iranian imports, alleging unfair pricing and subsidies. The resulting trade proceedings produced extraordinary duties, among them a combined rate of roughly 283% on Iranian raw pistachios and, in later proceedings, rates approaching 318% on roasted pistachios. Iranian imports into the United States fell from approximately 13,700 tons in 1985 to around 950 tons the following year. No conspiracy is required to understand the significance of that collapse. An entire market had basically been altered by government policy.

California did not become a pistachio empire simply because Iranian pistachios were excluded. Its success also depended on land, water, agricultural investment, mechanisation, processing and a uniquely developed American food-distribution system. But the disappearance of a major competitor created an extraordinary opening, and California was prepared to occupy it. Among those who would eventually turn that agricultural advantage into consumer culture were Stewart and Lynda Resnick.

Through The Wonderful Company, the couple did something particularly American with the pistachio: it gave the crop a brand, a voice, and eventually a celebrity cast. Wonderful Pistachios’ “Get Crackin’” campaign transformed a commodity into a recognizable consumer object. The nut no longer belonged only to orchards and processors, but to supermarkets, television, and the peculiar mythology of American wellness.

But the Resnicks’ relationship to power extends well beyond the supermarket aisle. On June 5, 2024, Stewart Resnick donated $100,000 to the Democratic Majority For Israel (DMFI); a lobbying group whose mission is as straightforward as it gets: elect pro-Israel Democrats and defeat Democratic candidates it considers anti-Israel.

Seen together, the connection is difficult to ignore. One of America’s most powerful pistachio fortunes, built around a crop whose modern American history is inseparable from the exclusion of Iranian imports, intersecting decades later with the political machinery surrounding America’s relationship with Israel and the greater Middle East.

Resnick did not file the 1985 pistachio trade petition, and there is no evidence that his political contributions had anything to do with his pistachio interests. In other words, the two may intersect, but that does not mean one caused, or was directly intended to influence, the other.

But the intersection is still worth examining. Because markets and geopolitics rarely exist in separate rooms. For more than four decades, Iran has existed under successive layers of American economic pressure, namely the sanctions imposed after the revolution, the restrictions that followed, the nuclear dispute, the 2015 agreement, America’s withdrawal from that agreement in 2018, and the subsequent maximum-pressure campaign. Meanwhile, Israel and Iran moved from a largely covert confrontation toward direct military exchanges, particularly during the regional escalation of 2024, before the United States and Israel launched direct strikes against Iran in early 2026.

None of this was caused by pistachios. But pistachios have always moved through the political world created by these relationships, and few places illustrate the complexity of that movement better than Dubai.

The UAE has long been one of Iran’s important commercial gateways, with Dubai functioning as a major regional hub for trade, finance, and re-export. It occupies an unusual position in the American-led Middle Eastern order: closely aligned with Washington, economically intertwined with the global luxury system, and geographically and commercially connected to Iran.

And this is perhaps why Dubai chocolate feels like such an appropriate ending to the story. Dubai has long occupied a fascinating position in the global movement of goods. It’s a city where commodities, capital, and cultures arrive from different directions and are frequently transformed into something capable of traveling much further. The world sees Dubai. It sees aspiration. It sees the violently green cross-section of a chocolate bar on its phone. It does not necessarily see Rafsanjan. It does not see the American trade case of 1985, the tariff schedules, the orchards planted in California, or the sanctions architecture that has helped determine where Iranian commodities can and cannot travel.

That is the peculiar power of a commodity. By the time something reaches the consumer, the politics that shaped its journey have usually been reduced to an ingredient list.

We like to imagine markets as neutral spaces in which supply meets demand. But before a pistachio becomes a latte, a snack or a dessert, governments have already helped determine whether it can cross a border or not; trade authorities have determined the conditions under which it can compete; farmers have decided whether it is worth planting; investors have decided whether it is worth financing; companies have decided how to sell it; and political institutions have helped construct the larger world in which all of those decisions occur.

An Iranian crop can become a Californian agricultural empire. A Californian billionaire can become a political donor. A Gulf city can become the stage on which an old regional ingredient is repackaged as a global luxury. None of these facts need to be secretly coordinated for them to coexist. From Kerman to California; from agricultural policy to political capital; from the history of sanctions to the fantasy of Dubai. And now, finally, into chocolate.

A Brief Geopolitical History of Your Dubai Chocolate

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