Organic Food's Class Problem

Caitlin Donohue's got a point when she writes in the San Francisco Bay Guardian that the organic food movement "has yet to really confront its class issues." The problem is not just a matter of low-income people being unable to afford heirloom tomatoes. It's also a question of not allowing for the reality of how the happy-healthy food we worship is produced.

The organic food movement's obsession with the idea of small, quaint, family farms is in part rational attachment to a wholesome ideal and in part pie-eyed nostalgia for times gone by, when life was supposedly simpler and happier. Many of us let that nostalgia cloud our rationality, believing vaguely that we can somehow escape the economic realities of a 21st century globalized economy just by believing in our sacred vision of ma and pa milking Bessie at dawn and digging up carrots at dusk.

"In reality," writes Donohue, "a lot of the people who plant, tend, and harvest produce are poorly paid Latino immigrants." Among the 900,000 workers estimated to be toiling on California's farms the average annual salary hovers around $8,500, which falls short of the federal poverty line by over $2,000. A 2006 study by the California Institute for Rural Studies found that only 36 percent of organic farms in California gave their workers health insurance, a figure shamefully outstripped by conventional farms' 46 percent.

What kind of a progressive movement is it that encourages better treatment of its vegetables than the people who pick them?

Photo courtesy of ellievanhoutte via flickr