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At last week’s Old Capitol Farmers’
Market, one question was on everyone’s lips: “Isn’t this
weather great?”
Everyone was just happy that it wasn’t raining. I smiled but had to
reply, “Truthfully, it was nicer where I was last week.”
I’d been in sunny, glorious California. My
daughter Ashley and I had flown out for a friend’s wedding in Pismo
Beach, halfway between San Francisco and LA. Once we escaped LA’s
sprawl, driving up the scenic coast, I remembered how much I liked
California’s Central Coast. During the ’90s, my husband and I
were frequently in the San Francisco area for his dental meetings;
we’d often driven south for a couple of days afterward. Now Ashley
and I were heading north along that same route. The flowers were lushly
beautiful and the scenery spectacularly gorgeous. The temperature was in
the seventies; it was breezy, without a cloud in sight. Flocks of pelicans
cruised alongside us against a background of sun-sparkled Pacific waves.
Even the car-rental gods had been generous: We were driving a brand-new
(odometer reading: 30 miles) black Mustang convertible, top down. All that
was missing was the Beach Boys on the radio.
As we approached Santa Maria, endless green fields
appeared on our right. We smelled something delicious: strawberries! Sure
enough, flashes of red peeped from beneath the green carpet. Minutes later,
we saw a far less attractive strawberry field. Not an inch of earth was
visible; the entire field was swathed in plastic, from which tiny plants
emerged. It was then that I thought of the book; remembering it cast a
shadow on our idyllic journey. Reefer Madness is by Eric
Schlosser, who also authored Fast Food Nation. In Reefer Madness, Schlosser examines three of the largest American
black-market businesses: marijuana (hence the title), pornography, and the
commercial strawberry industry. Why does Schlosser lump strawberries with marijuana
and pornography? When he wrote the book, in 2003, most commercial
strawberry fields were sealed in plastic and then injected with methyl
bromide. The plastic was removed, irrigation hoses installed, and new
plastic laid down, after which plants were inserted through it. Methyl
bromide chemically sterilizes soil. Not only is it highly toxic, but its
ozone-destroying properties are 20 times worse than those of Freon. The
Montreal Protocol, designed to phase out ozone-depleting substances, called
for the use of methyl bromide to be eliminated by 2000. Most of the
protocol’s signatories complied — some even earlier — but
the U.S. dragged its feet; it was 2005 before methyl bromide was banned
here. Attempts to introduce organic alternatives to fields that had been
treated with methyl bromide largely failed because the chemical had worked
so well: The soil was dead. These days the chemical Telone has replaced
methyl bromide, and the planting protocol is virtually the same. It’s
just as toxic (The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’
National Toxicology Program reports “clear evidence” that
it’s carcinogenic), but Telone doesn’t deplete the ozone. Scary as that is, it doesn’t qualify commercial
strawberry growing as a black-market industry. What does, according to
Schlosser, is the industry’s reliance on illegal immigrants for cheap
labor.
Commercial strawberry farms are hardly the only
agricultural operations to use illegals. Even though farming has become
mechanized, as Schlosser says, “Nearly every fruit and vegetable
found in the diet of health-conscious, often high-minded consumers is still
picked by hand: every head of lettuce, every bunch of grapes, every
avocado, peach, and plum. As the demand for these foods has risen, so has
the number of workers necessary to harvest them. It’s impossible to
gauge the size of the migrant workforce because so much of it is composed
of illegal immigrants.” However, illegals are estimated to make up as
much as 60 percent of migrant labor.
Schlosser chose to focus on commercial strawberry
production because it’s huge. Since the 1970s demand for fresh
strawberries has doubled. U.S. farmers make more money from strawberries
than any other fruit except apples. In 2003, sales of California
strawberries, which account for 80 percent of the U.S. market, were around
$840 million. The other reason, according to Schlosser:
“Strawberry pickers are not only the poorest migrants, but also the
ones most likely to be illegal immigrants.”
Strawberry farming can be highly profitable, but
it’s also highly risky. The market can fluctuate wildly. Strawberries
are delicate, especially susceptible to pests and even more so to weather.
They’re fragile and highly perishable and must be precisely picked
and arranged in boxes to avoid bruising; it can take weeks to learn to pick
strawberries correctly. In fact, migrants have long called strawberries la fruita del diablo —
the devil’s fruit, because picking them is the most difficult, lowest
paid, and consequently least desirable farm work. Cultivating strawberries
is also labor intensive — 25 times as intensive as broccoli, which is
why strawberry fields in the Central Coast now employ more workers than all
other produce fields combined.
Mexican migrant workers have always been a part of
California’s agricultural scene. Until 1929, there was no restriction
of movement between Mexico and California. At the time it was estimated
that 70 to 80 percent of migrant farm workers were Mexican. Even after
illegal immigration became a misdemeanor, it remained an accepted part of
California agriculture. That’s why, according to Schlosser, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service used to wait until immediately after
harvest to round up and deport illegal immigrants. “By relying on poor migrants from Mexico,
growers established a wage structure that discouraged Americans from
seeking farm work,” says Schlosser. “The wages . . . were too
low to sustain [an American family], but were up to 10 times as high as
Mexican peasants could earn in their native villages. A system evolved in
which the cheap labor of Mexican migrants subsidized California
agriculture, while remittances from that farm work preserved [Mexican]
rural communities that might otherwise have collapsed.”
Working and living conditions for most migrant
workers are heart-rending. Many live in cardboard shanties, in the open,
and even in caves. Still, Schlosser points the finger at the system rather
than at any specific group — not even growers. It’s a situation
without any easy solutions.
“This system did not arise because growers are
innately mean and heartless,” Schlosser says. “Harvests are
unpredictable from beginning to end.” Growers are also under intense
pressure to keep prices low; if they don’t, they risk being undercut
by imports from countries with even lower wages (and environmental
standards). Because labor is their biggest expense (50 to 70 percent),
growers rely on the thriving black labor market — if they
don’t, some face losing their farms.
Schlosser also cites growers, such as Driscoll
Associates and Coastal Berry, that “play by the rules and treat their
workers well. Indeed, strawberry pickers aspire to jobs at [such] farms . .
. where the fields are immaculate and the wages are the highest in the
industry.”
Back at the Springfield’s farmers’
market, I joined the long queue waiting for the first local strawberries. I
didn’t mind the wait, because I knew I’d be eating them without
worry or guilt about how they were grown or the lives of those who’d
picked them.
Contact Julianne Glatz at realcuisine.jg@gmail.com.
This article appears in Jun 12-18, 2008.
