Why Picking Your Berries For $8,000 A Year Hurts A Lot
Why Picking Your Berries For $8,000 A Year Hurts A Lot
by Eliza Barclay
August 09, 201311:31 AM
As the supply chain that delivers our food to us gets longer and more complicated, many consumers want to understand — and control — where their food comes from.
But even if we meet farmers at the farmers market, urban consumers are still largely divorced from the people who grow, pick and package our food. And we may even willfully ignore their suffering, argues Seth Holmes, a medical anthropologist and professor of health and social behavior at the University of California, Berkeley, in his provocative new book, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies.
For two summers between 2003 and 2005, Holmes lived on a farm in the Skagit Valley of Washington state. The farm produces strawberries, apples, raspberries and blueberries to sell to berry companies like Driscoll and dairy companies like Häagen-Dazs. He traveled there with a group of Triqui Indians, across the border from their hometown of San Miguel in Oaxaca, Mexico. As Holmes soon learned, the Triquis make up the very bottom rung of the agricultural labor ladder and earn between $5,000 to $8,000 a year.
Holmes stayed in the camp with the other laborers, in a shack with a tin roof and no insulation. Over the winter, he traveled with the Triquis to Madera, Calif., to prune grapevines in a vineyard. In 2005, Holmes went back to medical school, but he has continued to visit the same workers nearly every year since.
On the berry farm, Holmes picked fruit once or twice a week; the Triqui workers picked seven days a week, rain or shine, without a day off. And that took a heavy toll on their bodies: back and knee pain, slipped disks, type 2 diabetes, premature births. As one Triqui worker he calls Abelino told him, "You pick with your hands bent over kneeling, your back hurts; you get knee pains and hip pains ... You suffer a lot."
More:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/08/07/209925420/why-picking-your-berries-for-8-000-a-year-hurts-a-lot?ft=1&f=1001
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