Fresh fruit, broken bodies: The human cost of American agriculture
Sun Oct 20, 2013 at 05:00 PM PDT.
Fresh fruit, broken bodies: The human cost of American agriculture
by VL Baker Follow for Daily Kos.
At Civil Eats Tracie McMillan writes about Seth Holmes, an American physician and anthropologist who undertook a trip that few take for kicks: He migrated from the rural highlands of Oaxaca in southern Mexico to the deserts of Arizona alongside a band of indigenous migrants bound for American farm fields.
They were apprehended by the U.S. border patrol but that did not stop Holmes, who was determined to document the human cost of providing cheap food to Americans.
Holmes has compiled his studies into a new book, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (California Series in Public Anthropology), which was 10 years in the making. In his investigation he picked berries and pruned grapes; lived in labor camps and at times his car; and, by working alongside, got to know—and observe—his new neighbors and colleagues.
It was terrifying. I knew how many people died trying to cross the border each year, but doing it physically with my own body and my own mind and emotions and psyche was a much more intense than I had realized it would be. It was a long process and there were a lot of different ways that things could have gone worse than they did. We came across rattlesnakes and other people who we weren’t sure what their intentions were, if they were assailants or robbers or vigilantes or just other border crossers.
More:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/20/1245740/-Fresh-fruit-broken-bodies-The-human-cost-of-American-agriculture?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos%29
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What It's Like To Sneak Across the Border To Harvest Food
—By Tom Philpott
| Thu Oct. 31, 2013 3:00 AM PDT
For most anthropologists, "field work" means talking to and observing a particular group. But for Seth Holmes, a medical anthropologist at the University of California-Berkeley, it also literally means working in a field: toiling alongside farm workers from the Triqui indigenous group of Oaxaca, Mexico, in a vast Washington state berry patch. It also means visiting them in their tiny home village—and making the harrowing trek back to US farm fields through a militarized and increasingly perilous border.
Holmes recounts his year and a half among the people who harvest our food in his new book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. It's a work of academic anthropology, but written vividly and without jargon. In its unvarnished view into what our easy culinary bounty means for the people burdened with generating it, Fresh Fruit/Broken Bodies has earned its place on a short shelf alongside works like Tracie McMillan's The American Way of Eating, Barry Estabrook's Tomatoland, and Frank Bardacke's Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers.
I recently caught up with Holmes via phone about the view from the depths of our food system.
Mother Jones: What sparked your interest in farm workers—and how did you gain access to the workers you cover in the book?
Seth Holmes: I've always been interested in Latin America. My parents took me to southern Mexico as a kid, basically once or twice a year to volunteer at an orphanage there. I started looking into working with migrant farm workers in the Central Valley of California, and had a pretty hard time getting direct access to them—the farm owners weren't cooperative. Then I went up to Washington state to visit a social worker friend who was working with this group of indigenous farm workers from Mexico. He also introduced me to a Methodist pastor whose parishioners included the owners of the farm where the workers worked. And with those connections in place, I was able to get access both to the workers and the farm itself.
More:
http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2013/10/rough-passage-what-its-cross-border-harvest-your-food
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