As organic, locally grown food has emerged as a cultural and - TopicsExpress

Anonymous London Ontario

As organic, locally grown food has emerged as a cultural and economic counterforce to industrialized agriculture, critics have claimed it is elitist and accessible only to those with the resources to pay more for their nourishment. Pollan and his allies have responded, in part, by drawing the publics attention to the low-wage workers who work in the field, behind the counter, and in the kitchen. In recent years Pollan has supported the efforts of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an organization dedicated to improving working conditions and wages for tomato pickers in Florida; in December 2013 he sided with fast food strikers and their demand for a $15 dollar per hour wage. In an email missive for MoveOn.org (received by 8 million subscribers), Pollan wrote: If we are ever to . . . produce food sustainably and justly and sell it at an honest price, we will first have to pay people a living wage so that they can afford to buy it. In his words, fair wages must be part of the push to democratize food. When you buy cheap food, the real costs have been externalized, Pollan continued. Those externalized costs have always included labor. It is only the decline over time of the minimum wage in real dollars thats made the fast food industry possible, along with feedlot agriculture, pharmaceuticals on the farm, pesticides and regulatory forbearance. All these things are part of the answer to the question: Why is that crap so cheap? Our food is dishonestly priced. One of the ways in which its dishonestly priced is the fact that people are not paid a living wage to process it, to serve it, to grow it, to slaughter it.

Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 14:32:10 +0000

As organic, locally grown food has emerged as a cultural and - TopicsExpress

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