Category Archives: Uncategorized

Racism in the Food System

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I’m taking the liberty to focus on the food system and farm workers in Washington State. COVID-19 has served to peel back the layers of an incredibly unjust system. Farm workers, who are largely foreign and undocumented, have now been deemed ‘essential’ employees yet are not afforded basic safety measures. Currently, labor advocacy groups Familias Unidas por la Justicia and the United Farm Workers of America are filing a lawsuit against Washington State’s Health and Labor departments demanding regulated support for these farm workers who are too scared to speak for themselves because doing so could result in their H2-A visas being revoked and/or their information being given to ICE. Washington Health was reported issuing guidance that temporary worker housing facilities with a single room “should assign sick occupants to one side and occupants without symptoms to the opposite side.”

Speaking of housing, simply getting a roof over their heads is a challenge for many foreign farm workers. Not all farms are required to provide housing for their employees depending on the visas issued, and as Benton City has demonstrated, many local residents in farming areas push back hard against supplying farmworker housing. Residents of Benton City were recorded stating that they did not want Benton City to become like Mabton, a mostly Latino community. That was during complaints directed to the US Department of Justice in 2002. To this day residents are fighting against farm worker housing.

Perhaps one of the most telling cases of foreign farm worker discrimination was during the infamous 2018 Sumas Berry Farm case. The farm manager was quoted saying about the foreign farm workers: “They came here to suffer,” and that they were expected to work every day of the week “unless they were on their deathbed.” Despite H2-A visas not having a production quota in WA State, workers on this farm were expected to harvest two boxes of berries every hour or face deportation and paying their own way home. The conditions that brought on the allegations w

Sumas Berry Farm Protests

ere 12 hour shifts in hot, wildfire smokey conditions that led to severe heat stress, poor quality or portioned food, not enough water, expired visas that had yet to be renewed, and the death of a coworker, suspected from aforementioned conditions, which caused 70 employees to go on a one day strike and subsequently get fired. The farm was expected to pay a lawsuit settlement of $149,800, but a judge later cut that settlement cost in half.

These are just three examples of severe injustice and racism faced by foreign farm workers in the US food system, but it’s a systemic problem that infects every part of the country. Until we can strictly enforce basic human rights and regulations in the farming system, these injustices won’t stop. It’s one of the real costs of cheap food.

The People United Can Never Be Divided

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I know that this is not directly related to the content of this class, but what I write about speaks louder to me than the food system in this moment. So, I wanted to share my thoughts on the Black Lives Matter movement with you all. Thank you for reading. 

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Distress, aguish, disappointment with US institutions, grief, sadness. These are all emotions I have been overwhelmed with lately, with everything that is going on. The institutional racism, injustices, and many deaths that we have been battling with the Black Lives Matter movement brings up feelings of sadness yet hope. Over the past few days, I have felt a sense of unity among protestors and social media that I have been participating in. As we march through the streets of Seattle, chanting “black lives matter,” “no justice, no peace,” “don’t shoot,” the names of black lives that have been brutally taken, and many other chants, I feel connected to those around me, fighting for equity.

Tuesday, June 2nd, at the East Precinct in Capitol Hill, Seattle. Protesting out past curfew.

Taking to the streets of Seattle, chanting, “out of your homes and into the street

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We live in a society that lacks a true democracy that fails to hold politicians and institutions accountable. This cannot go on. I believe that was collective action and a strong force of solidarity, something bit will come of this. I know that this sounds cliche, but history repeats itself, and there are many lessons we can learn from it. From a protest at a police precinct the other night, one of the organizers shared to the crowd, “right now, the analysis is that this is what happens before the government gets overthrown.” Parallel to the Civil Rights movement, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.,  week of protesting, rallying, and movements went on all over the country before the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed under Lyndon B. Johnson. Legislation that upholds the rights of the oppressed could come of the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, similar to the Civil Rights Movement.

 

What we are demanding today is defunding of the police, investment in minority communities, accountability for politicians and police officers, justice for the lives lost from police brutality and systemic racism, and the dismantling and abolition of the white supremacist systems that are being upheld. If we want to make a dent of progress in these demands, we must be united. Our collective action and unity is working thus far, our voices are being heard. Just in Seattle, the curfew was lifted to allow protests to commence, the consent decree is no longer under attack, Mayor Jenny Durkan spoke with us at City Hall, no state sanctioned violence occurred in Capitol Hill, Seattle on June 3rd, and the masses continue to organize both in the streets and online. 

In solidarity at City Hall in Seattle.

Listen to our voices, listen to our stories. The youth is the truth! Words cannot describe the anger, confusion, and sense of smallness and overwhelmed I continue to feel as we fight for basic human rights. But the past few days, I have felt overwhelmed by unity. We are reaching a leverage point to intervene with these racist and unjust systems that enable suffering and oppression. I am hopeful that we can achieve liberation.

Proudly supporting this sign at protests in Seattle. Reads, “Filipinos for Black Lives Matter.”

-Reily S.

 

Sources:

https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=592919&p=4172702

The Root Cause of Our Mistreatment of Immigrants

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This is a response to Sydney’s post “Migrant Workers Have Always Been Essential, So We Should Be Treating Them Like It” found here: https://sites.uw.edu/pols385/2020/05/19/migrant-workers-have-always-been-essential-so-we-should-be-treating-them-like-it/

While I agree with Sydney’s point that migrants have served in essential roles throughout our nation’s history, I would like to challenge the idea that the migrant workers themselves are essential to those roles. Let me be clear: I completely disagree with the notion that immigrants are “stealing our jobs.” Most Americans are unwilling to fill those positions as they currently operate, and we absolutely should not blame the immigrants for seeking a better life. But I believe that calling immigrant labor itself “essential” only serves to excuse our luxury-obsessed culture and the costs it imposes on immigrant workers.

As Sydney points out, immigrant labor is used because they are one of our most vulnerable populations so they will accept dangerous conditions at low wages. The key point there is the low wages: agricultural work is not the most dangerous job out there, but it is certainly one of the lowest paying dangerous jobs. Looking at other, more dangerous jobs like garbage collectors or construction workers, their average salaries are considerably higher than agricultural work and they subsequently have much lower undocumented immigrant participation.

Source: USDA, Pew Research Center
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/illegal-immigrants-us-jobs-economy-farm-workers-taxes/

It is not that Americans are entirely unwilling to do the work; they are simply unwilling to do the work below a certain salary. The way I see it, our agricultural industry has convinced us that immigrant labor is essential to our food system in order to keep payroll artificially deflated and dissuade investigation of poor working conditions. They are basically using slave labor to keep food prices low and profits high. 

As available undocumented labor goes down, wages must go up to attract legal citizens.

I worry that the discourse around this topic can easily become confused and subsequently counter-productive. Agricultural work is undeniably essential; without our food industry, we (along with many other parts of the world) would starve to death. And our immigrant labor force is essential in order to keep food prices low. But are low food prices essential? They are not only inessential but inherently detrimental, as argued by Michael Carolan in The Real Cost of Cheap Food. Thus, by calling immigrant labor essential in and of it itself, we perpetuate the idea that our food should be cheap and, to a certain degree, excuse the poor treatment of immigrants as a necessary evil to reach those ends.

Sydney calls on the agriculture industry to improve wages and working conditions for undocumented workers. In my opinion, this represents individualization of responsibility to a degree: it fails to address the larger systemic reasons for those wages and conditions, which include America’s love of ultra-cheap food, a difficult-to-navigate legal immigration system, and our willingness to look the other way when our industries abuse desperate populations. Solving this problem will require deep systemic changes to our immigration systems, law enforcement, the agriculture industry, and, most importantly, the way Americans relate to food. We will need to accept spending much more of our income on food, which will require far less discretionary spending: smaller houses, less luxurious vehicles, and significantly less entertainment consumption. We will need to fundamentally alter the typical American lifestyle.

Systemic thinking shows us just how complex the situation is, and reminds us that we cannot just expect the food industry to make things right on its own. We must act as consumers and citizens, as individuals and communities, as social and political entities, in order to institute the massive changes necessary to protect vulnerable immigrant communities and move towards a more ethical and sustainable food system. 

Our Long Distance Relationship… with Food

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 Arisb’s post “Exotic…and I’m not talking about Joe” discusses contemplative practices in the sense of the intentional consumption of exotic food. Arisb makes a good point in the wide variety of food available to us in US grocery stores allows us to maintain cultural connections via food, because food isn’t locally sourced. For example you could buy a mango or watermelon year round at a Seattle grocery store even though it may not be the fruit’s season and fruit is definitely not grown in Washington. On one hand, this is a great power: we get to eat whatever we want whenever we want it as long as we can afford it, but on the other hand, it’s bred a culture of food ignorance. People, myself included, blindly consume with no thought to the source. 

Covid-19 may be the first time that many Americans are thinking about where their food comes from, as shelves at groceries stores are intermittently barren and it’s become impossible to find staples like yeast and flour (as the nation has become obsessed with baking bread), as well as many kinds of meat. News sources warn us of upcoming food shortages. However, the images of barren shelves are juxtaposed with images of farmers dumping their dairy and burying their vegetables.

Empty Meat Aisles at a Grocery Store (Image from Eater)

Dairy Farmer Dumping Milk (Image from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

It also makes me think about the section in the course, “Stuffed and Starved”, where we read an article that explained how Coronavirus could double the number of people going hungry due to major disruptions in the supply chain. However, simultaneously, some Americans have never been more stuffed due to their new lifestyle of working from home and boredom eating. Personally, I feel like I’m eating more than ever because of my long hours in front of the screen and little stimulation in my daily life. It makes me feel guilty to think of the countless snacks I’ve consumed in my cushy quarantine lifestyle as food may become increasingly hard for people to source globally. Why do we have so much excess when others starve? Tonight, I ate a grapefruit, and then I ate a Melona bar, and ate yogurt covered pretzels, and drank some sparkling water. Florida, South Korea, Washington, Georgia… Thousands of miles were spanned just so I could have a Monday night snack. Now that’s some food for thought. 

A Response: The Time to get to Know What’s in My Cup

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A response to: “The time to get to know what’s in my cup” by grahamms

As a fellow coffee drinker, @grahamms’ reflection resonated with me. Not only do I regularly consume large amounts of coffee but it’s also my way of connecting with friends and family. Interestingly enough, the thing that connects me to people is the one thing I’ve never considered myself connected to. What I mean by this is that I never give it a second thought. Coffee makes me feel good, therefore, I drink it. And that is that. @grahamms brought up an interesting point in his post- the introduction of coffee pods. We no longer see the coffee we’re drinking! We’re consuming a product that hugely impacts our environment and we don’t even see it anymore.

I like contemplative practices because they allow us to open up a dialogue with ourselves and others. It puts us in a space where we can question the process of things and the role we play in it. That is why when @grahamms voiced my own feeling of impotence as he mentioned his lack of control over the issues of coffee trade; it led me to wonder- what can we do? Would decreasing or completely stopping our consumption of coffee help alleviate this environmental problem? 

I thought back to Richard Robbins’s essay on the consumption of beef and sugar from a few weeks back. Although Robbins considers reduction, he notes that there are a couple of inconveniences tied to it; not only would the size of the reduction have to be extremely large to see real change, but it would also cause severe economic disruptions. He concludes that it’d be difficult to change our consumption behavior because it’s such a central and necessary part of our culture. 

Although this didn’t leave me with any concrete answers, it did get me to think about the problem and all of the interdependent systems involved. And that is what contemplative practices are all about.

Thoughts on Food Waste and Inequality

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I was reading through Sydney’s post “Tons of Hungry People and Tons of Wasted Food.” about the high amount of food waste being produced by American farms. I wanted to add to the discussion on food waste and food insecurity introduced by Sydney by discussing the inequality present in our current international food system. While America sees about 40% of the food it produces going to waste (63 million tons), there are growing concerns from the chief of the UN’s food relief agency that the world could be facing a widespread famine of “biblical proportions.” Reports indicate that 30 nations, all from the developing world, are under threat of undergoing widespread famine, with 10 of these nations already having more than 1 million people on the brink of starvation. 

Map of areas where food insecurity is a concern, darker colors indictating the severity of the threat of famine.

This inequality when it comes to access and availability of food has been discussed in Clapp’s paper “Agricultural Trade Liberalization.” Clapp notes that trade policies employed by wealthy nations such as export subsidies and pressuring developing nations to lower tariffs on goods have led to producers in these more prosperous nations receiving better access to economic markets and, therefore, profit. This has led to an adverse effect on the economic and agricultural sectors of developing nations as these developing nations lose economic tools like tariffs and export taxes to strengthen their agricultural sector. At the same time due to export subsidies employed by wealthier nations, products from these richer nations have pushed out domestic agricultural producers leading to poverty and growing threats of hunger and famine as people in these developing nations are unable to pay for food due to their source of income being taken away due to import surges. 

Sydney’s article illustrates the luxury of food production and food waste in America and richer nations, which stands in stark contrast to the fears of food insecurity in the developing world. Due to economic factors and fear of angering domestic producers, it is unlikely that richer nations will take the necessary steps to address the inequality in trade and politics between them and developing nations. Yet, could these richer nations not take steps to help alleviate the threat of famine by shipping excess production and “food waste” to these developing nations? 

In Response to ”What Contemplative Practices Have Taught Me About Problem Solving”

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What I found most intriguing about Sydney’s analysis of contemplative practices was the relationship between her argument and the concept of individualization as a whole. Indeed, her conclusion that “finding solutions to a complex problem first requires an analysis of one’s relationship to it” brought me straight back to Michael Pollan and Michael Maniates. In this way, I will agree with Sydney’s thesis and further a brief argument that reflecting on contemplative practices works against the pitfalls of individualization.

What power does the individual have in influencing a system larger than itself? How should this answer change how we approach problem solving?
Image courtesy of www.ruzivodigitallearning.co.zw

A chilling case-study of individualization can be found in reviewing Pollan’s New York Times Magazine article “Unhappy Meals”. In Pollan’s universe, problems like industrialization of agriculture can be addressed by eating carrots rather than chips. Pollan fails Sydney’s test because no aspect of his argument attempts to analyze the power of the individual in relation to the power of the existing structures that he claims must be changed. This is to say that Pollan’s solutions cannot be comprehensive for want of self-reflection.

In contrast to Pollan, Maniates’ article “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” (abstract) embraces Sydney’s thesis in its recognition that the power of the individual relative to the system they seek to change determines the feasibility of making a difference at all. Maniates’ solutions to climate change are thus comprehensive to the extent that they recognize power limits inherent to an individual.

Examining Sydney’s thesis is how I’ve come to understand the relationship between contemplative practices which force integrative thinking and the validity of the solutions furthered by the authors we read for this course. Though I agree that the utility derived from these practices is contingent on my mood, going through them shows me which authors have considered their relationship to the structures they study and which haven’t.

For further reading, and to address Sydney’s point that finding the correct headspace is necessary to reap the benefits of contemplative practices, I suggest this article on learning to meditate which proved quite helpful in teaching me how to approach these contemplative practices after a number of admitted failures.

Thoughts on hunger after contemplative practice

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The most inspiring contemplative practice topic for me is hunger. I’m now feeling hungry. My belly is feeling empty and is urging me to eat some food. The feeling of emptiness is compressing my stomach and makes me feel stressful. But when I close my eyes and try to control my inflation, the feeling of compression is minimized to be unimportant and becomes part of my body. 

    When we think about why we feel hungry, we notice that it’s a natural inner force that help us preserve ourselves. It is not necessarily a desire, but can be rather, a need of energy. We need energy as it is the basic factor of survival. If we cannot feel hungry, we cannot feel the importance of basic resources for humans, and we cannot experience the same feeling our ancestors or some people in the world are experiencing.

Farmers are dumping milk during pandemic.

     As we look at the one week’s food of families around the world, we realize the big gaps between individuals and consider whether we really need that much food or not. A Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp spends $1.23 on their food weekly while a Melander family of Bargteheide spends $500.07 (Menzel, 2008). Why does this happen? Food shortages and climate change comes up into our mind. The droughts and flood destroy harvests and lead to regional lack of food. But when we look at our refrigerator and bins, there might be plenty of food inside. Why can’t we allocate the food fairly? Power disparities, originated from human beings’ greedy nature, lead to the economical imbalance. Nowadays, people not only eat because of hunger, but also because of stress and boredom. Even if we have already fulfill our basic needs, we never stop. The overflow of desire of some people cut the resource available for other people and lead to the economic inequality and hunger.

Reference

Peter Menzel’s and Faith D`Aluisio. Hungry Planet: What the World Eats. Tricycle Press, 2008.

Leighton Schneider. Dairy farmers dumping milk amid COVID-19: Pandemic’s impact on the dairy industry. ABC news, 2020. 

I hold my breath and count to ten

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Like I am on a roller coaster going around the loop, I hold my breath and count to ten. In a flash, the ten seconds are over, and I open my eyes to see myself intact. Fresh air floods my lungs, my body regains the energy lost as I sink into the chair. Guilt, anger, and sadness. These were the feelings I had while participating in the fifth contemplative practice: tracing breakfast. Except unlike the gasp of air that so quickly returned to my body, hunger does not afford its hosts with this luxury.

I admit, I was skeptical at first that these practices aided my ability to learn but as my breath became deeper, my stomach started rumbling, and my heart racing, I am brought to a not so distant land of hunger. I lay in bed with closed eyes and my world becomes filled with a dark void which allows my mind to run free. I think about all of the children who starve, all of the families living off rations, and the men and women who work tirelessly to supply food for their families. A ball begins to form in the pit of my stomach as I think about my own food waste, my privilege. I ask myself, am I to blame? Or is it out of my reach? Does blame need to be projected on someone?

Questions I may not know the answers to quite yet, I do know however that a single breath will not ease my mind this time. Thinking about world issues like hunger in an unorthodox way such as a contemplative practice allows me to become grounded in my situation and aware of others. We are interconnected and dependent beings, hunger is just one of many we share.

 

References:

Photo #1: https://www.thesun.co.uk/travel/9430128/tallest-double-inversion-rollercoaster-six-flags/

Photo #2: https://nypost.com/2018/12/06/one-in-six-children-throughout-america-live-in-fear-of-hunger/

2018 World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statistics

https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/11-09-2018-global-hunger-continues-to-rise—new-un-report-says

Africa hunger crisis: Facts, FAQs, how to help