Here are some more articles on food that I think some of you will find interesting — these aren’t reading assignments, but I’d love to hear what you think, if you read them!
Last fall, tighter controls on the US-Mexican border meant that there were fewer migrant workers to pick crops in California. An article in the NYTimes detailed the complicated results — many farmers lost their crops because they couldn’t get the fruit picked fast enough. Although there is a “seasonal guest-worker” program that growers can apply to, to legally hire foreign workers, growers find the bureaucracy hard to deal with.
My friend Susan Mernit wrote recently about several projects in the San Franciso Bay area — you can follow her links for more information on local food justice projects there. She and her peers are doing a lot of education around community gardens, home gardens, and urban gardening in general.
Here’s a great article about “Brooklyn’s New Culinary Movement” — I enjoyed reading it, and I loved hearing about how the people involved are taking “Pre-industrial revolution tactics with food” and they’ve all read Michael Pollan and they hate red tape. But when I look at the photo that leads the article, I can’t help but see what a friend of mine would call “their shining white faces” — and furthermore, the people involved in this movement all seem to be between about 25 and 40 years old, and to have time and money to spend on incredibly complicated efforts. Does this imply that paying attention to food is something that only privileged people can do? Susan’s Bay-Area projects hope that’s not true. What do you all think?
Large tech companies, like Microsoft, go to Washington to petition Congress to allow for more work visas to bring foreigners to work in their companies. The people they want to recruit are suppose to the best and brightest in the world, so these companies want to have them work for their company. There are no Americans who can do what the foreigners can do. There are high legal and government processing fees the companies need to pay to bring in the foreign workers. Sponsoring workers is still hard for big profitable companies like Microsoft. But they have the funds and experienced legal departments to maneuver within the system and sponsor workers. But for these farmers, this process seems much more difficult. The government needs to realize that it’s not just the big fancy corporations that need foreign workers but farmers as well and make a program just for the farmers. National security issues are important and food production should be considered part of national security. There are violent protests in countries because of lack of food, so Congress needs to take this issues more seriously
As a person who was always told growing up that food shouldn’t be taken for granted. Nevertheless let it go to waste. It is awful to know that these farm owners had to literally stand there and watch thousands of pounds of their crops rot because there wasn’t enough pickers to accomplish the job. This government is beyond ridiculous. I acknowledge the fact that not every plan is perfect but there should be some type of compromise for these farmers. Situations in this country get proritized once it is in a state of disaster.