Seminar Week 4

Kat Thompson
Seminar Paper Week 4

658 Words

Triggering Passages:

Cisneros looked up and saw one of the company’s white Toyota pickup trucks racing toward them. Althought roads ran around the field’s periphery, the driver roared straight across the newly plascic-covered raised rows, his truck bouncing into the air. He humped from the truck, helped his associate out of the water, and laid him in the back of the truck before speeding off in the direction of town. “and here we were all being told, ‘it’s ok. If you get dissy, get some air, walk around a bit.’ This man knew what he was spraying, and this was his reaction. (Estabrook 62)

Such attempts at structural change will have little traction, however, unless these demands come from a very powerful social movement. Structural change requires a strong and united movement that is capable of organizing and mobilizing at the state and national level, and that ultimately aims to produce the conditions required for food sovereignty. This includes the restraint of corporate influence in the public sphere, just access to food, health equity, fair and living wages, land access, fair immigration policy, non-exploitative farm labor conditions, environmental well-being, and more. Such a movement would therefore need to encompass grassroots and advocacy organizations that are anti-racist, anti-capitalist and feminist, and that are oriented toward a new economy of and for environmental justice, labor rights, immigration rights, food justice, climate justice and human rights. (Elsheikh 6)

He grew up on a dairy farm, got his doctorate in veterinary medicine from the University of Georgia and has had an ownership stake in fertilizer businesses, grain elevators and in an agricultural trucking company. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/04/24/sonny-perdue-confirmed-senate-next-agriculture-secretary/100851620/)

Reflection

The first passage was really triggering to me. I felt sick to my stomach reading much of this book. I have been blessed/cursed with the ability to feel things very strongly. I have not bought a tomato since reading this book. The thought of what has happened to the people who are working in the fields is as much of a turn off to me as the knowledge of the dangerous chemicals that the growers would like for me to ingest.

When we eat something I feel we eat more than just the actual physical material. Just as we have epigenetic memory, I believe that plants also remember. I believe this memory brings forward not only the dna for building the next generation of cells. I believe that the energetic memory of the people involved in the plants inception, growth, harvest, and transport can be implanted on the foods we eat. It is my opinion that the fruit from this field contains not only the fear, anger and pain of the migrant workers. I think that it also contains the fear, desperation, greed, and guilt of the owners.

Somewhere along the line the idealist in me believes that the people making unhealthy decisions for workers, food, and land will or have already felt guilt surrounding their profession. I can’t imagine being the kind of person that can knowingly poison another person. Eventually as humanity awakens to our oneness I think that people will not be able to act with such dangerous disregard.

It will take a large an coordinated social movement to put pressure on those who are not endowed with a reasonable amount of empathy and integrity. This is not impossible though. The real need here is connection. Just like the second passage relates there is a need for grass roots movement. That is small groups, orginizations, towns coming together in solidarity. This passage gave me hope. It lay out like a road map to how we can fix things.

The third triggering passage snatched some of that newfound hope. When reading about the newly appointed Sec. of Agriculture, I was not surprised that he is invested in a fertilizer business. Our new Secretary of agriculture actually stands to profit of continuing the deadly process of high chemical farming.