>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.
I got this piece of info years ago from an O'Connor student at UC-Santa Cruz, who was studying the organic industry of Northern California. My point in flogging it is to trouble upper-middle-class enviros, who think they're helping the earth with their sensitive lifestyle choices, but not bothering to notice the human labor involved. Recycling, too, produces lots of awful jobs sorting trash for low pay. Which isn't to say that organic produce isn't better or that recycling is bad. It is to say that styles of consumption can't change much, and can make some things worse, unless production arrangements are revised.
And who knows what could happen if agro-science research were modified so that better taste and better treatment of workers and the earth were the goals, rather than maximizing sales and profits?
Doug