Sustainable agriculture fans are excited about the appointment of Kathleen Merrigan, director of of the Agriculture, Food and Environment Program at Tufts University, to be the deputy secretary of the US Department of Agriculture. I haven't read up much on Merrigan, but I the Ethicurean calls her a "thrillingly unexpected pick," and I consider their endorsement golden.
Obama Foodarama has a slightly more expansive take on Merrigan's appointment, noting that she is both a "well known speaker and researcher on sustainable agriculture" and "credited with creating the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, which mandated national organic standards and a program of federal accreditation." Merrigan was also one of the "sustainable dozen"--a list of potential appointees compiled by the group Food Democracy Now!, which has urged President Obama to rethink the way agriculture is conducted in the United States. Chewswise, meanwhile, has called Merrigan "someone who has pursued the change mantra in agriculture for nearly two decades."
Interestingly, Obama Foodarama also notes that USDA director Tom Vilsack has vowed to increase the agency's focus on civil rights issues within the department, which has a long history of discriminating against women and non-white populations who receive its aid. They speculate, convincingly, that Merrigan's appointment may be a symbolic step in that direction.
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Tomatoes and Slavery
Photo by Flickr user fensterbme.Yet another reason to avoid those mushy, out-of-season, pale orbs grocery stores pass off as tomatoes: According to a story by Barry Eastabrook in this month's Gourmet (long may it live!), slavery is alive and well in Florida's tomato industry. Crew bosses routinely offer immigrants jobs picking tomatoes, then hold them against their will, often under horrific conditions. Eastabrook describes one case in which a tomato worker was locked in the bed of a box truck in a junk-strewn yard, beaten when he was unable to work, and charged exorbitant prices for "rent" ($20 a week to share the truck bed with two or three other workers) and cold showers from a garden hose ($5 a pop).
The worker's situation, Eastabrook reports, was hardly an isolated incident:
Since 1997, law-enforcement officials have freed more than 1,000 men and women in seven different cases. And those are only the instances that resulted in convictions. Frightened, undocumented, mistrustful of the police, and speaking little or no English, most slaves refuse to testify, which means their captors cannot be tried. “Unlike victims of other crimes, slaves don’t report themselves,” said Molloy, who was one of the prosecutors on the Navarrete case. “They hide from us in plain sight.”
And for what? Supermarket produce sections overflow with bins of perfect red-orange tomatoes even during the coldest months—never mind that they are all but tasteless. Large packers, which ship nearly $500 million worth of tomatoes annually to major restaurants and grocery retailers nationwide, own or lease the land upon which the workers toil. But the harvesting is often done by independent contractors called crew bosses, who bear responsibility for hiring and overseeing pickers. Said Reggie Brown, executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, "We abhor slavery and do everything we can to prevent it. We want to make sure that we always foster a work environment free from hazard, intimidation, harassment, and violence." Growers, he said, cooperated with law-enforcement officers in the Navarette case.
But when asked if it is reasonable to assume that an American who has eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store or food-service company during the winter has eaten fruit picked by the hand of a slave, Molloy said, “It is not an assumption. It is a fact.”
Although Eastabrook's conclusion--buy local in the summer, and avoid tomatoes from Mexico and Florida in the winter--doesn't go far enough for me, his story does provide yet another reason to think twice before throwing a rock-hard Florida tomato in the cart. However, I wish he'd taken it one step further and suggested that Gourmet readers (come on, we can take it!) avoid out-of-season produce altogether. We don't expect to go skiing in the summer or go to the beach in January--why should we demand summer produce in the dead of winter?
Monday, February 16, 2009
On Poverty Tourism
Didn't Barbara Ehrenreich teach us anything? The "Nickel and Dimed" author went undercover as a low-wage worker in several US cities to find out just how people survive on wages of $6 or $7 an hour. The trouble was, Ehrenreich didn't start from scratch--she had a private safety net consisting of rental cars, "just-in-case" credit cards, a college education, a savings account and--most importantly--the knowledge that she was just play-acting at being poor. You can't know what it's like to survive minimum wage until it's actually a matter of survival, any more than you can learn what it's like to be homeless by spending a night in a homeless shelter.
Well, here we are again: A CNN reporter named Sean Callebs (left) is attempting to live on a food stamp budget for a whole! month! Since he couldn't actually get food stamps (that would be fraud), he put $176 on a debit card--the maximum amount a single person can get for food stamps in Louisiana, where he lives.
His lessons so far:
Don't buy brand names.
Eating out is expensive.
No more bottled water, sob!
OK, I'm being a little unfair; he's also learned that it's actually really tough to get by on just over six bucks a day. And he's an empathetic guy, if not particularly self-aware (he really does seem baffled by the prospect of life without Diet Coke and bottled water, and he treats the news that he can buy stuff and freeze it like a major revelation).
But I can't help noticing that despite his painstaking efforts to describe every last meal ("peanut butter sandwiches, a banana, and some left over rice"), he neglects to mention the many little comforts and privileges that differentiate him from people who actually live on food stamps. I'm speculating, but here are a few things I'm guessing distinguish him from a typical food stamp recipient:
• Reliable transportation. I'm guessing Callebs doesn't get around on public transportation. In fact, I'm guessing he drives to the grocery store to get what he needs--and that he's able to comparison shop if his neighborhood supermarket doesn't have the best prices. That's not something you can do very easily on the bus, especially if you're working more than one job to make ends meet.
• A decent grocery store. In most cities, the number of grocery stores in a neighborhood correlates directly with income. In poor neighborhoods, the only option within easy walking or busing distance is often the local convenience store--where the markups are guaranteed to be high, and the food to be packaged and unhealthy. Callebs describes going to "health food stores" as well as a regular grocery store. Show me a health food store, and I'll show you a middle-class neighborhood with plenty of fresh, affordable options.
• A well-equipped kitchen and plenty of access to information about how to stretch a small food budget. Callebs repeatedly mentions having readers (and his mom) email him recipes, and he mentions making broth with chicken bones, a stir-fry, beans, and mac and cheese. Those are all great, thrifty ideas, but they assume a fair amount of culinary knowledge--or, in Callebs's case, the wherewithal to make up for lack of cooking skills with extensive research on the Internet. I'm not saying poor people can't look up recipes and make food from scratch, just that it's less likely they'll have the time, energy, Web access, and resources to do so.
• Most importantly: The knowledge that eating on a food-stamp budget is a temporary "lifestyle," not a way of life. At one point, Callebs mentions that he's on vacation--a luxury that, needless to say, isn't part of the typical food-stamp lifestyle. And he's only doing it for four weeks, not months, years, or a lifetime. That makes a big difference, both in terms of the day-to-day experience of eating on a budget (if peanut butter sandwiches get old after a month, imagine how they'd taste after several years?) and in terms of what it does to your long-term outlook. Knowing you're going to be able to eat out again on your CNN salary in two weeks is much different than not knowing whether you'll have enough money to make it to the end of next month.
Well, here we are again: A CNN reporter named Sean Callebs (left) is attempting to live on a food stamp budget for a whole! month! Since he couldn't actually get food stamps (that would be fraud), he put $176 on a debit card--the maximum amount a single person can get for food stamps in Louisiana, where he lives. His lessons so far:
Don't buy brand names.
Eating out is expensive.
No more bottled water, sob!
OK, I'm being a little unfair; he's also learned that it's actually really tough to get by on just over six bucks a day. And he's an empathetic guy, if not particularly self-aware (he really does seem baffled by the prospect of life without Diet Coke and bottled water, and he treats the news that he can buy stuff and freeze it like a major revelation).
But I can't help noticing that despite his painstaking efforts to describe every last meal ("peanut butter sandwiches, a banana, and some left over rice"), he neglects to mention the many little comforts and privileges that differentiate him from people who actually live on food stamps. I'm speculating, but here are a few things I'm guessing distinguish him from a typical food stamp recipient:
• Reliable transportation. I'm guessing Callebs doesn't get around on public transportation. In fact, I'm guessing he drives to the grocery store to get what he needs--and that he's able to comparison shop if his neighborhood supermarket doesn't have the best prices. That's not something you can do very easily on the bus, especially if you're working more than one job to make ends meet.
• A decent grocery store. In most cities, the number of grocery stores in a neighborhood correlates directly with income. In poor neighborhoods, the only option within easy walking or busing distance is often the local convenience store--where the markups are guaranteed to be high, and the food to be packaged and unhealthy. Callebs describes going to "health food stores" as well as a regular grocery store. Show me a health food store, and I'll show you a middle-class neighborhood with plenty of fresh, affordable options.
• A well-equipped kitchen and plenty of access to information about how to stretch a small food budget. Callebs repeatedly mentions having readers (and his mom) email him recipes, and he mentions making broth with chicken bones, a stir-fry, beans, and mac and cheese. Those are all great, thrifty ideas, but they assume a fair amount of culinary knowledge--or, in Callebs's case, the wherewithal to make up for lack of cooking skills with extensive research on the Internet. I'm not saying poor people can't look up recipes and make food from scratch, just that it's less likely they'll have the time, energy, Web access, and resources to do so.
• Most importantly: The knowledge that eating on a food-stamp budget is a temporary "lifestyle," not a way of life. At one point, Callebs mentions that he's on vacation--a luxury that, needless to say, isn't part of the typical food-stamp lifestyle. And he's only doing it for four weeks, not months, years, or a lifetime. That makes a big difference, both in terms of the day-to-day experience of eating on a budget (if peanut butter sandwiches get old after a month, imagine how they'd taste after several years?) and in terms of what it does to your long-term outlook. Knowing you're going to be able to eat out again on your CNN salary in two weeks is much different than not knowing whether you'll have enough money to make it to the end of next month.
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