The Politics of Food

Millions of Americans are at the grocery store buying Thanksgiving dinner supplies, and I bet only a teensy fraction of them have farmworkers on their mind. While news outlets are broadcasting plenty of stories about what we consume tomorrow, what’s missing are stories about how we are able to consume it.

Here is an excerpt from an editorial in today’s Florida Sun Sentinal:

“The hands of a farm worker in Florida must pick two tons of tomatoes in a day to earn $50. At a rate of about 1.3 cents per pound, farm workers fill 32-pound buckets, run to the truck, hoist the buckets above their shoulders into the truck, and receive a token worth about 45 cents. To make the minimum wage, they must do that 15 times per hour, or one bucket every four minutes…”

Translated into simpler math, that means to earn $50 a day, you would have to lift a total of 3,840 pounds. If you had to work this hard even for Thanksgiving dinner, let alone to support your family, would you do it? Could you do it?

The United Farmworkers joined Writers Guild picketers last week in Los Angeles. Marching side by side with Hollywood writers were laborers paid pitiful wages who advocate for not only labor conditions but also food safety, such as banning harmful pesticides and dangerous food additives. I have had the honor of standing with Dolores Huerta and other labor leaders on a host of progressive issues, from women’s equality to gay rights to access to reproductive health care.

The same week when the UFW and the writers were holding picket signs, Presidential candidates and the Governor of New York decided that standing up for immigrant access to drivers licenses was too politically cumbersome. It was also the same week that the Agriculture Department quietly changed the rules for recruiting farmworkers, further easing requirements for farmers to find domestic labor. And to top off the week: rumors began circulating about the Presidential ambitions of anti-immigrant crusader Lou Dobbs.

The AP reports that about 2.5 million people are employed as farm workers in the United States; about 70% of those are undocumented. The 750,000 who are citizens or legal residents often migrate to accommodate their jobs.

Farmworkers - whether they be legal migrant workers or undocumented laborers - seem to be both the backbone of our agricultural economy and the vilified target of our politicians. But no consumer in the United States is too poor or too outcast to be targeted by marketers. Earlier this year I attended a seminar featuring a major beverage manufacturer, who shared their success story of convincing immigrant laborers to buy power drinks instead of water. While water is a better and cheaper health option, the corporation made a hefty profit off of creating a new niche market.

When I give thanks tomorrow for my annual Thanksgiving meal, I will think about not only what food is on my table, but how it got there. And for those of us who can be even more proactive than that, the UFW has a Thanksgiving fundraising drive on their website.