From Guest Blogger and Office Intern: Stefan Koester
Reflections from Food Week
As someone who considers himself both a conscientiousness consumer and an environmentalist, I have always taken the effort to learn about the effects of my buying habits. Do the grapes I enjoy come from hundreds or thousands of miles away? Was my coffee sprayed with pesticides or did it cause untold environmental damage to the local ecosystem where it was harvested? Do the dollars I spend go towards promoting socially responsible or local businesses that I support? I take pride in being a consumer and citizen who tries to understand how and where my decisions affect the world around me.
Yet there was one glaring omission in my perspective around our food system. Who was actually responsible for getting the produce from the field to my plate? You have probably seen the bumper stickers around Charleston that read “Eat Today? Thank a Farmer”. While farmers certainly deserve our continued respect and support a more appropriate bumper sticker would read “Eat Today? Thank a Migrant Farm Laborer”. That’s because more than 60% of the produce picked in the United States is picked by a migrant farm laborer who makes, on average, less than $11,000 annually. They come from economically and socially precarious places and work long, dangerous hours without the rights and regulations that any other laborer has come to enjoy in the US.
For the past 2 years Green CofC has hosted an annual Food Week each October. Each year we focus on the role that food plays in our social, environmental, and cultural life. Last year our focus was around local food and cultural preservation in the Lowcountry. This year we decided to focus on a facet of our food system that is continuously neglected, farm worker’s labor rights. With the help of an ESPC grant Green CofC was able to bring in a keynote speaker from Student Action with Farmworkers, an organization based in North Carolina that works with farm workers throughout the southeast. Atlee Webber, an alumni of the University of Virginia, came and spoke with us about both the history and situation of farm laborers as well as her personal experience with migrant labor camps in the Charleston area. Her talk was incredibly informative and provided a good opportunity for those who might not have been aware of the situation that many farm workers are in.
In addition to Atlee’s speech, Green CofC hosted a Green Bag lunch panel as well as a benefit dinner that raised almost $300 for the East Coast Migrant Head Start Project, a local organization that provides education, health care, and family services to the most vulnerable and least empowered members of our society.
I thought I was an informed consumer. I thought that I had the power to influence important issues with my dollar. However, now I realize that there is a whole sector of the agricultural industry that I was neglecting. I know about the dangers of processed foods, pesticides, meat consumption and the need to buy organic and local, but I never once thought about those who picked, packaged, and delivered that food from the fields to my fork. What we can do as individual consumers is sadly limited. This issue will take more than switching from one farm to another. It is a wide and systemic social and economic issue that will take a political movement along the lines of what Cesar Chavez did in the 1960s for farm workers in California. We can enjoy the delicious fruits of the field without the human suffering that comes with it today. The first step is to educate yourself and spread the word.