On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, the WSJ visited the Brecht Forum, discovered THE Woman:
> Lisa Featherstone
and violated the first rule of publicity by spelling her name wrong. She's *Liza* Featherstone, of course.
Still, pretty nice profile (and pretty high-powered company, even if the reporter was oblivious to that fact). But I have a question about a recurrent Henwood/Featherstone theme:
> Josh, a graduate student, said that the lives of the protesters were
> shot through with what Marx referred to as the fetishism of commodities.
> Their love of organic food, he implied, was greater than their love of
> the oppressed who grow it. Ms. Featherstone conceded the point. She
> mentioned that organic farming might actually be "more exploitative"
> than large, mechanized farms, "because it requires more stooping."
I was wondering what the proper comparison point is here. I mean, clearly square tomatoes that can be picked with mechanical harvesters use less stoop labor than those picked by hand. But do organic tomatoes actually take any more stooping than, say, those Holland stem tomatoes you see everywhere? (Or their better but less famous equivalents?) Because then the division isn't really between organic/inorganic, but between people who feel they have to have fresh vegetables -- organic or inorganic being irrelevant -- and people who think frozen and canned vegetables are good enough.
In which case, there are more of us inadvertantly in favor of stoop labor than at first meets the eye. It's not just the organic foodies. It's all of us who selfishly care about the taste of our vegetables.
If anyone knows of someone who has seriously tried to answer the question of how different ways of raising vegetables affect the life of the people who pick them -- with which vegetables there is a tradeoff between mechanization and quality -- and whether fresh vegetables and decent labor conditions are simply incompatible -- I'd be interested in reading it.
Also I'd be interested in the farm labor situation in a country like France, which seems to have a lot more fresh produce and (subsidized) small farms. Has an army of exploited poor laborers silently blanketing the countryside always been necessary to make the miracle of French produce possible? Or is it self-exploited farmers who somehow think it's worht it when they own the place?
I emphasize that I ask these questions out of complete ignorance and curiousity.
Michael