The most vulnerable – the children, immigrants, rural families – are worst affected by this epidemic. Despite evidence that hunger causes chronic disease development and impaired psychological and cognitive functioning in children, an estimated 13 million children are living in households that are forced to skip meals or eat less due to economic constraints. The worst affected are children of 6 million of America’s undocumented immigrants: on a daily basis they go without such necessities as milk and meat. Tulare County in California, the number two county in the nation for agricultural production, is one of the hungriest and poorest areas of California. Many of the county’s towns (Alpaugh, Earlimart, Plainview, Woodville, etc.) host mainly Hispanic farm-laborer families who have come to America for a better life, but have found that their employment to put cheap produce on America’s and the world’s tables has left them starving amidst the bounty. These families suffer from the worst economic and social injustices as they live in lean-tos made of plastic or cardboard, dilapidated trailers, wood shacks, caves and even parking lots and yet are surrounded by grape fields, orange and peach groves. (from commondreams.org)

I grew up in Tulare County. The numbers have changed over my lifetime, up and down, but the fact remains: my home land produces a significant fraction of the food you eat.

Tulare County is home to the Latin@s who came to this country hoping for a better life. Hoping to share in the abundance. The vast majority of them are Mexican@, but there were also immigrants from all over Central America. My area also had a large-ish (relative to the rest of the country) population of Armenians, Laotians (“boat people,” my mother called them) and others. You would see billboards printed in any of the above languages — I didn’t really realize the significance of that until I visited other areas of the country — and not only a few, either; if you passed ten billboards in a day at least two were in Spanish and depending on which areas of town you traveled, a good chance of seeing one in Asian characters.

There were, of course, smatterings of high-class white folk, but the majority of the rest of the population in the central San Joaquin Valley is lower-middle class and poor whites. So there was always struggle, tension, in my land. But at the same time there were some facts that were accepted without argument even by the lower-class whites who were supposed to be in opposition to the brown folk: the fact that their labor was necessary to the standard and cost of living the country enjoys, that the labor was heavy and burdensome, that it was not something middle class teenagers would be doing on their summer vacation if not for them il-legals, that it was their labor that put food on your table, no matter your socioeconomic class. There was not the haughty detachment that many whites experience; this labor is what these people live, and it is impossible to deny. It is, in a broad fashion, a part of your family.

(As an aside, following from that, most of the racism expressed by these lower-class whites was not “they’re taking our jobs” and such, it was instead that Mexicans were a dirty people, and they drive bad and they talk too fast, and if they speak in Spanish they must be talking about you, and so forth — it was employed against POC as people, not POC as transients, if that makes sense — white folk knew well that brown folk were here to stay, and had as much claim to this land as they did — they just struggled to assert their dominance over them, rather than trying to push them out. I point this out not as an excuse or to say one is worse than the other, but to try to make a distinction to point out the grand delusion that most American whites hold about undocumented laborers, how blind and stupid they are about the reality of life for these people and those around them. And, as an aside to this aside, how little these middle-high-class American whites know about the reality that lower-class whites live in, and how strange it is for the two to ally based purely on pigmentation.)

Anyway — you couldn’t step foot in the unincorporated county land (the land between the towns; the county was all agricultural space with dense areas of population about 10-15 minute drives away from one another) without seeing them — bent over in fields picking strawberries and grapes, gathered together in orchards harvesting apples and walnuts — with the only exception being the two months of winter, when the Tule fog sets in and nothing is gonna grow anyway. (Then January comes, along with the rain, and everything blossoms green again.)

These people work for corporations who know well what they are doing. They import workers — in many cases purposefully, as in the company itself pays someone to sneak people across the border so they can work for them — and take advantage of those who come on their own. They pay them shit wages, and work them many hours. I suppose I don’t need to say there is no such thing as sick leave, vacation time or health benefits. I went to the same low-income clinics these people went to when their children fell seriously ill. They didn’t go to the doctor for a cold. They went to the doctor when they feared they would die if they didn’t — and even then sometimes, many didn’t…

They lived by and large in shit conditions; there were some high-lower-class/lower-middle-class Latin@s who rented or owned their own homes in the city proper (there’s pretty much no such thing as an apartment, or second stories or attics or basements, in the Central Valley), but most of the “illegal” workers lived in far more questionable conditions, oftentimes outside the city, sharing space to save money, going the summer (which ranges 95 to 118 degrees) without any sort of cooling or air conditioner, and no such thing as a garbage disposal or dishwasher in their kitchens.

These are the people who enable you to fruit and vegetables — fresh or frozen, either or both. Without these people, living in these conditions, you would not have such access to these foods.

You are subsidizing slavery.

I consider it nothing less.

I’ll leave you with the words of BFP.

To this day, I avoid blueberries. And bananas make me sick. How much blood of the murdered flows through the flesh of bananas? How many years of lost childhood flow through the skin of poisoned blueberries/strawberries/tomatoes/grapes….?

Is a vegan lifestyle really a “cruelty free” lifestyle? Why is it so easy to prioritize cruelty inflicted on animals over cruelty inflicted on brown people? Why can people list a whole litany of wrongs committed against animals by the food industry–but at the same time those people “never really thought” about what happens to the workers?…