On a recent Saturday, I took a trip out to rural Oregon with about 20 other Slow Food Portland members. We woke early and drove through the dreary morning rain, leaving behind the streets of Portland for the vast agricultural fields of nearby Marion County. We were seeking the origins of our food.
I helped organize the event, which was billed as an opportunity to “Share a Meal With the People Who Feed Us.” The idea was to meet with migrant farmworkers and to learn more about the different places they live: either in housing provided by their employers, or in housing created by a local nonprofit, the Farmworker Housing Development Corporation (FHDC). FHDC staff agreed to take us on a tour of the farms and of their development in Woodburn, after which we would share a potluck lunch with the residents there.
The day was inspired largely by Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food, who insists that our food be “Good, Clean, and Fair.” By this he means that our food should be fresh and healthy, it shouldn’t depend on chemicals that destroy the environment, and the people who grow it should be compensated well for their work.
His ethics, I think, are admirable. They are simple and elegant. But they can be quite difficult to put into practice.
Many of us know that the ways in which we typically grow, process, distribute, and consume food in this country are harmful to our health and the environment. As a nation, we are coming to understand that the production and consumption of a “conventional” tomato, for example, means degraded soils, polluted waterways, poisoned air, and toxins in our bodies. Given the state of our health-care system, as well as the threat of global climate change, this conventional tomato affects us in ways that are increasingly difficult to ignore.
It’s no wonder, then, that the “good” and “clean” elements of Petrini’s ethic have become major preoccupations in the American mind. And because of our increased awareness, I think, we’ve already developed some relatively good ways to address our concerns; on the West Coast, at least, it’s easy to find fresh and locally grown organic produce almost any time of year.
The problem is that this doesn’t necessarily account for how “fair” the food is.
Long hours and low pay are the industry standard, even for many organic and small-scale farms. In the worst cases, farmworkers are held against their will and forced to labor as indentured servants — continually paying off debts to their employers — in a system legally defined as slavery. In Florida, for example, a state that one federal prosecutor recently called “ground zero for modern-day slavery,” at least five operations involving more than 1,000 workers have been prosecuted for violation of anti-slavery statutes since 1997.
It’s unclear how pervasive these conditions are, or where exactly they exist. It is clear, however, that they’re far more common than we’d like to admit. They represent an egregious extreme of abuse, but they are also part of a continuum: the mistreatment of agricultural workers is a deeply entrenched problem in this country, and has been for a long time. In 1972, for example, the average life expectancy for a farmworker was 47 years; in 2008, it was 49.
According to FHDC staff, rates of cancer, asthma, birth defects, and tuberculosis for farmworkers all hover somewhere around 25 percent above national averages. In general, hard work, toxic chemicals, and poor nutrition degrade workers’ immune systems; unsanitary and crowded housing exposes them to disease; and low pay makes decent medical treatment extremely difficult to find. The few laws that prohibit these scenarios are rarely enforced, and the undocumented-immigrant status of many workers prevents them from reporting abuses or advocating for their rights.
A large proportion of migrant laborers live on the borders of the fields where they work, typically paying their employers about $50 per week to stay in run-down shacks and trailers. The statistics on just how many people live this way don’t exist, because the studies haven’t been conducted; as a rule, these farms hide the housing far from view and guard it with private security forces. Entry onto the property is illegal, even for union organizers, unless a worker has given them an explicit invitation to enter. Such invitations are virtually impossible to receive, of course, since it would mean instant dismissal and deportation for whomever made it.
Our tour
The harvest season in Marion County won’t start for another few weeks, so the farms we visited on Saturday were empty; they were also unguarded, however, which gave us the rare opportunity to see housing facilities up close.
Even with a fresh coat of paint on their exteriors, the buildings were obviously dilapidated. Inside, concrete walls were stained with black mold and rust. Bedrooms were crammed with bunk beds, and the mattresses were nothing more than wooden planks or sheets of carpeting. The air was dank and sickly. The floor was smeared with a brown layer of bacterial mud.
At both farms we visited, it looked as though someone might’ve made a recent effort to clean. The dirt was smudged, and the stains had been scrubbed. In both cases, however, the years of accumulated grime remained. Set against a bright blue-and-white sky, nestled near a blossoming field of tulips, these conditions seemed particularly horrendous.
Fire extinguishers were mounted in every doorway at the first farm we saw, and a sign was posted in the kitchen at the second, imploring workers to clean up after themselves — as though safety and sanitation were genuine concerns.
Who built these hovels, and how could they charge rent to the people who live here? Is it simply a matter of farmers trying to meet the bottom line? Are the economics of agriculture really so dire?
And what do these conditions say about us, the people who pay money to support them? What does it mean that we feed ourselves with food grown from filth and suffering?
The people who live here
On Saturday, we weren’t able to meet anyone currently living on the farms, but we did meet many who had lived on farms like these recently, or whose parents had.
During lunch at the FHDC development, which is called Nuevo Amanecer, or “New Dawn,” I spoke with a woman who had moved from a farm in eastern Oregon, where she had shared a single trailer with 10 other workers. “Oh, and with their children,” she added as an afterthought, as though it hardly made a difference. “There must have been four or five children, too.”
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