FAT City: Are good food and cool events the cure for “brain drain?”

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This week I wrote about the must-try dishes of Fresno Greek Fest (starts today!). As is sometimes the case, there’s a quote from an interview that I couldn’t quite squeeze into the piece, but that I still found myself thinking about afterwards.

This was Peter Vallis, the chairman of Fresno Greek Fest:

“The Greek Community in Fresno is over 100 years old — quite an achievement, because we suffer, right or wrong, from a brain drain. Education has been a hallmark of the Greek culture for millennia. So generally speaking, the immigrants came in, they pushed their kids — ‘Hey, you got to go to college. But not just any college, you’re going to Stanford, kid.'”

“There’ve been people from Fresno that have gone on the big cities, gone to get educated, gone on to run major corporations, and often unless you’re in ag, you don’t come back. That’s kind of been the history of the Greek community here: The Greeks come here and educate the kids, and then a lot of the kids don’t come back.”

He went onto say that the Greek Church and broader community has been able to replace some of those who’ve left with other immigrants from the larger Orthodox world — people from Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and the Middle East — that the Greek community has been happy to absorb and embrace, and vice versa.

I wanted to fit it into the article because I thought he might be building towards another hook for Fresno Greek Fest: that Fresno being able to host cool events (like the biggest Greek Fest in the state) might one day be able to mitigate this kind of “brain drain.”

In the end, I cut it, because I don’t believe he was attempting to make so bold a claim. Still, it stuck with me.

At least in part because the same day it was published, there was a study by Maxwell that all the news aggregators seemed to pick up, naming Fresno as the “second-least intellectual” city of the 50 metro areas examined, just ahead of Riverside and behind (!!) Las Vegas.

Those two news bits (the quote and the study) stuck with me, I suppose, in part because I was once part of that brain drain — leaving for college and grad school and bigger cities when I was 18, and not returning for another 18 or so years. Plenty of the Fresnoland staff, and probably a fair number of our readers, have had similar experiences.

To create their rankings, the study measured things like “museums, libraries, graduate degrees, universities, adult education, and bookstores,” and found Fresno lacking.

I’d never heard of this Maxwell before (and probably most people never read beyond the headline to discover who was actually doing the study) — partly for good reason. They describe themselves as “a members’ club and event venue in a historic Tribeca brownstone, built around dinner parties, conversation, and rooms organized around ideas rather than transactions.“

Another of their findings was allegedly that “most adults would trade a night of drinking for a night of ideas.”

Which sounds like a leading question from a party with a vested interest if I’ve ever heard one. Hold the phone, you mean to tell me your study found that a majority of adults desire the exact thing you’re selling? Gee whiz!

Still, my point here is not to smear the messenger. I have found Fresno’s “intellectual life” lacking at times myself. Moving to Fresno was what finally got me to switch from doing the NY Times crossword on paper to online. I couldn’t find a paper copy.

But I do find the study’s pitting of “a night of drinking” and “a night of ideas” against each other to be very strange. I think I have a decent grasp of what intellectuals want, and when they (fine, we) leave a place or avoid returning to one, certainly one of the factors is the perception that there isn’t enough to do there.

“Not enough museums” is one way to measure that, but kind of a schoolmarmish and overly literal one. “Cool places to eat, drink, and gather” seems much closer to the bone. Is it the “stuff” that makes a place “intellectual,” or the people?

In that sense, things like Greek Fest, the things we write about in FAT City (yes, I have a vested interest here too), bars and social life, absolutely do matter when it comes to brain drain — of which “intellectual life” is partly a knock-on effect.

This all put me in mind of another quote that also stuck with me enough to put in this newsletter: “boomerangs have a special mission.”

That was what Moses McQueen‘s co-owner Miguel Arambula told me about why he’d opened his restaurant/bar downtown. Which is to say, that when you’ve been part of Fresno’s brain drain and then returned (a “boomerang”), you feel like you’re part of a broader mission. A mission to make Fresno cool enough that people might not feel the need to leave, or would be more apt to return to.

Part of that means being vocal about the cool stuff we do have here — celebrating it, telling each other about it, doing our best to support it — and acknowledging the things that make this place unique. I’d like to think, and I hope, that FAT City and Fresnoland Food are part of that mission.

Apologies if all that sounds overly earnest or naive or just circuitous (guilty), but it’s how I feel. If you skipped all that blah blah blah to get to the food news, I won’t be too offended.

— Vince Mancini, Contributing Editor, Food

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