The Food on This Table
THIS THANKSGIVING, like every other day, we should keep in mind the agricultural system that brings food to our tables. It is a system of people, after all. Let us give thanks to the low-wage workers, many of them immigrant and refugee, who make it possible to have such feasts.
WHO BRINGS IT TO YOU?
The turkeys piled into supermarket freezers carry their own stories. Raised primarily in massive confinement buildings by low-paid growers under contract to corporate food giants, they are genetically designed for plentiful breast meat to grace our Thanksgiving platters. They are then trucked to a processing plant, where they meet their demise.
Reflecting the racial structure of the nation’s entire food system, turkey processing relies largely on the hard labor of low-wage workers of color. On plant floors across the country, a predominantly black, Latino and Asian work force kills, guts, cleans, processes and packages the Thanksgiving centerpiece along fast-moving production lines.
Injuries are commonplace. Thousands of individual repetitive motions every shift raise the probability of chronic pain for line workers.
Federal safety inspectors are spread thin, and when they do arrive it is not unusual for supervisors to silence workers. At a recent meeting of Somali immigrants with an Occupational Safety and Health Administration representative, workers were shocked to learn that they had the right to speak when an inspector came to their workplace.
Every day of the year, and especially on Thanksgiving, no one in this country eats without the labor of immigrants, refugees and other workers of color. This is not a new reality.
Give thanks.
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Related:
• The Story of a CAFO Survivor
• We Grow Fat Upon the Fruits of Their Labor
Tags: Agrictultural System, CAFO, Food, immigrants, Labor, People of Color, Thanksgiving, Workers
Posted in Palabras
I remember working in the fields when I was little. The oppressive heat, there’s nowhere to go to escape it. Not even the shade provides any relief. We didn’t even know there were laws in place to protect us against this, it was common to see children in the fields, heck whole families. We knew that if we didn’t turn enough trays or pick enough grapes, we wouldn’t eat.
We worked for hours with no water or bathroom facilities provided, under the watchful eye of the mayordomos and duenos. Funny how shocked people are when I tell them that, but I forget we are all lazy and undeserving of basic human rights.
I remember when we would drive from southest Texas (where I grew up) down to Corpus (south, where my Dad grew up) we would pass through cotton fields and my Dad would tell how the whole family would pick cotton during the summers. I must have been about 8, and I wanted to get out and pick some cotton. So we stopped, I picked a bud, and then, innocently, rubbed my eye. It was the most violent eye burn I have ever had. It burned like evil chemical wildfire. This was the 80’s, and I have no idea how long they have been using these chemicals on the plants, but it could not have been healthy for my whole family to have been exposed to this stuff regularly. Several of my aunts and uncles and my own father, have gotten cancer. I wonder if there is a connection.