Sustainable Systems, pt. 3

"The way we eat determines, to a large extent, the way the world is used." -Wendell Berry-

Food in the States is cheap. That's partly due to those subsidies I talked about, but it's also because an estimated 80% of the agricultural workers are undocumented. They're underpaid and overworked at difficult and dangerous jobs. They're doing jobs that most of us don't want to do. If you balk at that claim, maybe you haven't heard about the United Farm Workers campaign to put good, hard-working Americans in those jobs instead of undocumented migrants. They have an easy sign-up form for you to become a farm worker on their website, TakeOurJobs.org, but very few people have taken the challenge.
I'm not saying that undocumented entry to the States is excusable. I am saying that if we want to change the systems that push people to cross the border without papers, we need to look deeper at our own national economic policies. We need to look at the people who do make the decision to cross, and see them as human beings whose lives extend beyond the five minutes it took them to climb the border fence or the two weeks they wandered in the desert. We need to look closer at our household purchases, too. Sounds overwhelming, doesn't it? I promise, it's not so bad. The first two of these issues warrant further conversation, but here are a few suggestions for what you can do at home:

• Cook fresh food instead of packaged. Processed food has a lot of preservatives, extra salt, and fillers that just aren't healthy. Prepare your own meals and make sure you like everything you're eating.
• Think of buying well, not cheap. One of the simplest ways we can vote on a daily basis is by changing our buying habits. We might not be able to vote Dole out of business, but we can certainly tell them that we'd rather have cleaner, safer food, and better working conditions for the people who grow it. Buying locally and organically is an investment in your health and global economic justice.
• Do you know where your food comes from? One of the non-migration effects of big-business agriculture is the breakdown of personal connections with our food. To me, it makes me wonder what I'm really eating. Local Harvest has a great tool for finding farmers markets and CSAs near you.
• Organic farms don't use chemicals. Even when you wash your produce, some of the chemicals used in food production are actually inside the cells of the food. Some of those chemicals are perfectly safe, some of them not, and some of them... well, we just don't know yet. I don't know about you, but I'd rather spend 20cents more on green beans that are just plain ole green beans. Even if you don't have access to a farmer's market, fresh, canned, and frozen produce are increasingly available at your everyday grocery store.
• Grow your own food! Not all of us have the space for a full garden, or the energy to manage one, but tomatoes can be grown on your front porch without much fuss. Herbs on your window sill. Lettuces need a little more space, but they're also really easy. 
• Sign the AgJobs Pledge, indicating your support of a bipartisan piece of legislation to improve working conditions for farm workers.

Additional reading, in case you're interested:
Food Politics Blog
Civil Eats
ObamaFoodORama

Thanks to Susana at BorderLinks for these statistics and action steps, and for the work she does with the Sustainable Foods project there.