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1. Growing and Producing Food
- The MIT Press
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1 Growing and Producing Food Slavery in the Fields On Thanksgiving Day, 1960, Edward R. Murrow introduced his CBS Reports program with these famous words: This scene is not taking place in the Congo. It has nothing to do with Johannesburg or Cape Town. It is not Nyasaland or Nigeria. This is Florida. These are citizens of the United States, 1960. This is a shape-up for migrant workers. The hawkers are chanting the going piece rate at the various fields. This is the way the humans who harvest the food for the best-fed people in the world get hired. One farmer looked at this and said, “We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them.” Murrow’s documentary, “Harvest of Shame,” was talking about migrant farmworkers, primarily African Americans working in the fields of Florida and eventually making their way through the food belt up and down the southern tier of the United States. It aired at a time when the general public was becoming more aware of how food was grown and produced in the United States. Contaminated cranberries, huge fish and bird kills from unrestricted pesticide spraying, chemical food additives identified as possible carcinogens—each generated concern and calls for action. With the Murrow documentary, the horrific working conditions, substandard pay, and health hazards experienced by migrant farmworkers joined the list of concerns. Poverty and hunger were also about to be rediscovered: among the poorest of the poor were the farmworkers. Subject to myriad employer abuses, exploitation, racial profiling, and a history of policies toward immigrant labor that placed them in a kind of no-man’s-land and without rights, farmworkers were a core part of a food system whose harvest of plenty masked a harvest of shame.1 14 An Unjust Food System By the mid- to late 1960s, issues regarding farmworkers had reemerged as a new cause. Thanks to Cesar Chavez and the organizing efforts of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, farmworkers were seen as food justice champions fighting the poor working conditions in the fields. With their antipesticide campaigns, demands to include protections against pesticides in their labor contracts, and participation in a groundbreaking lawsuit against the use of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), the UFW and farmworkers were also drawing attention to the environmental hazards of food production. UFW’s slogan Sí, se puede (Yes, it can be done) inspired a Latino ethnic identity that energized immigrant and nonimmigrant communities alike. When Robert Kennedy joined Chavez in 1968 (just prior to Kennedy’s announcement that he was running for president) during Chavez’s twenty-five-day fast to bring attention to the farmworkers’ bitter struggle with grape owners, it appeared that the struggle for farmworkers’ rights had entered a new stage in the United States. As UFW and Chavez biographer Randy Shaw put it, the photograph of Chavez and Kennedy together on the day Chavez ended his fast became “a lasting image of the 1960s.”2 In 1970, two years after the Kennedy-Chavez meeting and ten years after the broadcast of “Harvest of Shame,” NBC aired another documentary , entitled “Migrant,” about farm labor abuses in Florida’s citrus groves. Touted by NBC as a sequel to “Harvest of Shame,” the documentary focused in part on abuses related to Minute Maid, a division of Coca-Cola since 1960. Because of the continuing attention focused on farmworker issues, Coca-Cola first sought to have the documentary changed, but was unsuccessful. Then the company shifted gears to try to overcome the negative press about the role of Minute Maid and its parent company. Coca-Cola chairman Paul Austin, in a Senate hearing on farmworker abuses, proclaimed that the company found the Minute Maid workers’ conditions “deplorable” and that he intended to convert the migrant workers from part-time to full-time status with a pay raise and adequate health care, as well as more sanitary dormitories. Austin also asserted that the company would create a national alliance of agribusiness to provide a new approach to migrant worker conditions. With the press now applauding the Coca-Cola chairman (Time magazine headlined Austin’s speech “The Candor That Refreshes”), the company was able to secure an award for business citizenship from Business Week, [54.166.141.52] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:54 GMT) Growing and Producing Food 15 even though Austin’s promised alliance never materialized. Moreover, the conditions on the ground changed only two years later, when the UFW...