Tomatoes, Farmworker Rights & Food Insecurity
My roommate and I have found ourselves in a perpetual war. We get along quite well, to be clear. We cannot, however, come to an agreement on where to store our tomatoes. It doesn’t help that tomatoes are our top food purchase; we collectively decided, at the beginning of the year, as a roommate rule, that we would never let ourselves run out of cherry tomatoes (or chocolate). It was one of our few rules (the others: always make enough tea for two, a song can be played on repeat when necessary, no paper towels or measuring cups allowed in the kitchen). But it wasn’t until over halfway through our year in apartment #3 that we finally held a serious sit-down talk about our tomatoes’ habit of relocating themselves behind our backs. We gleaned, from this intervention, that part of the reason for their migration from pantry shelf to fridge and back was an inconsistency in labeling. Some containers explicitly expressed a need for the little red guys to be refrigerated, while others ordered in all caps “DO NOT REFRIGERATE.” We were, inevitably, confused. Throughout the course of our first and last Sit-Down Roommate Talk, we also discussed our family’s refrigeration habits, which could too explain the transient tomatoes. We stumbled upon irreconcilable differences in the items that we had historically been taught belonged in the refrigerator, versus the window, as opposed to the cupboard. Neither of us had questioned our longstanding and unspoken family norms guiding proper produce location until now.
How does it come to be, the author of Tomatoland posits, that a third of America’s tomatoes are grown in a locale that is perhaps least conducive to their growth? Florida’s soil is effectively sand, its climate is prone to pests, its land devoid of nitrogen and ill-equipped to hold water. The state is occasionally besieged by hurricanes and often faces temperature swings. Yet one out of three of our tomatoes comes from Florida, the very same site where tomato pickers campaign against slave wages and slave conditions. Florida’s weather is right on the cusp of tomato survival temperatures in the winter, and because of both the unique climactic make-up of this region and Americans’ insistence upon accessing tomatoes year-round, farmworkers in the tomato industry find themselves in a tragically ironic situation: they face seasonal precariousness in their labor and continual food inadequacy in their diets so that the broader American public does not experience seasonal lack. Succinctly concludes Barry Estabrook,
“The American supermarket tomato is a case study in tragedy.”
The Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers began as a direct protest of these working conditions, an aggregation of tomato pickers seeking to leverage their employers in spite of the statewide ban against unions. The group has had success drawing attention to their debased, slave-like plight, and success pressuring major corporations to raise the prices of the tomatoes they sell and cook with by a mere cent. Their Campaign for Fair Food has targeted well-known fast food chains like Taco Bell and large grocery stores like Whole Foods. The tomato pickers demand an added cent profit per tomato, having calculated the sizable effect this minute increase will have on their wages. A documentary following their activism bears the provocative title Food Chains, again cementing the idea that ties between slavery and farm work have not yet been severed.
Beyond Florida, farmworkers across the country experience deficiencies in the related arenas of food and pay. The bulk of America’s agricultural laborers live in California, many having immigrated there. A large share of California’s farmworkers were previously dispossessed of communal farmlands in Mexico, left jobless in their home country following the enactment of NAFTA. These migrants, driven to the U.S., only found further dispossession, forced into the position of landless worker. Despite the fact that many were small-scale farmers, or campesinos, in Mexico, their new jobs in the field fail to capitalize on their embodied agricultural knowledge (with common know-how related to cooking, gardening, and farming).
The word campesino actually has broader connotations besides merely referencing small farmers; it can encompass a multiplicity of identities: “peasants, small- and medium-sized producers, landless, rural women, indigenous people, rural youth and agricultural workers.” This word has been taken to new heights with the International Peasant Movement, or La Via Campesina, a name that hearkens back to labor protests. The International Peasant Movement, much like the CIW, represents a group of people actively fighting for dignity for migrants and waged workers, among other issues they’ve identified within the agricultural sector.
And although the agricultural sector reaps more and more profit, with California’s produce sales increasing 32% between 2002 and 2007, farmworkers’ wages are undergoing opposite trends, their labor continually devalued. It is unsurprising, then, that while Fresno, CA is the most productive farm county in the U.S., a fifth of its residents live below the poverty line. The manager of a food bank in a nearby county synthesizes this ironic state of affairs when he says:
“This is the salad bowl of the nation and people are starving.”
According to one survey, about half of farmworkers in this country don’t have enough food, a statistic starkly disproportionate to the general population’s relationship with food. Furthermore, farmworkers who have migrated to the U.S. have been found to be more food-insecure than those who haven’t, and, within this category, undocumented immigrants suffer from even higher levels of food insecurity than documented farmworkers. A whopping 82% of households along the U.S.-Mexico border are food-insecure, reports a study performed in conjunction with the Migrant Border Health Initiative.
Causes for this elevated state of food insecurity are multifarious, yet all structural in nature. Posits Anne Minkoff-Zern in “Hunger amidst plenty: farmworker food insecurity and coping strategies in California,” farmworker food insecurity is systemically constructed. Our food system has been built to benefit agribusiness, and to concurrently disenfranchise the laborer. Global trade networks, immigration politics, cultural devaluation of farm labor, and anti-immigrant sentiment are all at fault. Scholars Sandy Brown and Andrew Getz concur, writing “food security is more than an individual or household condition to be scientifically measured, but rather a lens through which to consider the highly unequal, uneven dynamics of global agricultural production, trade, and consumption.” Says one of their interviewees of the systemic nature of the issue,
“Something is wrong in the system. We are farmworkers, harvesting all day produce for others, and we get home and our family doesn’t have enough food to eat.”
The primary barrier to produce consumption is cost, exemplified by the fact that one farming household views fresh fruit as a luxury. Since poverty is at the core of this issue, wages represent a logical choice for tomato pickers’ anti-system campaigns.
