Rethinking Work: farming as labor

As food consciousness hits Americans—and wealthy Global Northerners everywhere—it’s not just cooking that has seen a resurgence. Farming is experiencing a new cachet that it hasn’t seen in ages. Dirt is cool, rather like those ill-fitting thrift-store clothes—it proves that you don’t care about social status or glossy magazines… right?

Raising some tomatoes in the backyard isn’t exactly new—my mother did so when I was younger, and though she hardly kept us afloat through the fruits of her labor, it was nice to have fresh veggies on the table.

Peggy Orenstein had a piece this weekend in the New York Times Magazine, titled “The Femivore’s Dilemma.” She starts her article by talking about all her hip friends—cracking wise about “the Vatican of locavorism” and laughs, “Apparently it is no longer enough to know the name of the farm your eggs came from; now you need to know the name of the actual bird.”

Her feminist friends are now not just staying home to raise the kids, but finding liberation in raising chickens, growing food, and making other necessities. But her casting of backyard hobby gardening as fulfilling the holes in the lives of feminists who wanted to work, as is usual for middle-class feminists, leaves out the fact that fighting to get jobs was a goal of the privileged. Other women were already working, not for fulfillment, but for survival.

In the same way, backyard gardening, in Orenstein’s view, is a new way for feminists to find fulfillment, a way to do more work than just the housework but less work than a full-time job. Meanwhile, Warwick Sabin points out:

“It used to be that keeping a few free-range chickens, tending some grain-fed hogs, and raising a small vegetable garden was how people simply survived. Now these are often vanity projects for young hipsters and retired hedge-fund executives who have discovered the forgotten pleasures of “heirloom” tomatoes and artisanal sausage. Incredibly, we’ve reached a point in our society where things that humans have done for thousands of years—grow a vegetable, smoke or cure a piece of meat—now provide the grounds for smug satisfaction.”

My mother gave up her garden when she had to go back to work to really put food on the table. The backyard tomatoes weren’t going to keep my sister and I going, and my father’s income suddenly wasn’t enough for us. And there lies the problem, the tension between the hipness of foodie-gardening and the real work of producing food: gardening in your backyard is a hobby, not work that can pay your bills.

Amanda Marcotte responds:

”…for most organic gardeners, even those with chickens, the income you get from your hobby won’t even bring in as much as light part-time employment.

I had the uncomfortable image of Marie Antoinette playing peasant creep into my mind as I thought of wealthy, idle housewives starting a beehive and buying a couple chickens and thinking they were Farmer John, gaining real employment and fulfillment working the land while the actual income that comes into the house comes from the very modern world in which their husbands live.”

Real farming is backbreaking work. Barry Estabrook, in Gourmet, wrote about tomato pickers in Immokalee, Florida, who were held in virtual slavery, their wages taken from them, docked, and charged for such things as showers. He described the conditions:

”Tomato harvesting involves rummaging through staked vines until you have filled a bushel basket to the brim with hard, green fruits. You hoist the basket over your shoulder, trot across the field, and heave it overhead to a worker in an open trailer the size of the bed of a gravel truck. For every 32-pound basket you pick, you receive a token typically worth about 45 cents—almost the same rate you would have gotten 30 years ago. Working at breakneck speed, you might be able to pick a ton of tomatoes on a good day, netting about $50. But a lot can go wrong. If it rains, you can’t pick. If the dew is heavy, you sit and wait until it evaporates. If trucks aren’t available to transport the harvest, you’re out of luck. You receive neither overtime nor benefits. If you are injured (a common occurrence, given the pace of the job), you have to pay for your own medical care.”

Orenstein writes:

”Hayes pointed out that the original ‘problem that had no name’ was as much spiritual as economic: a malaise that overtook middle-class housewives trapped in a life of schlepping and shopping. A generation and many lawsuits later, some women found meaning and power through paid employment. Others merely found a new source of alienation.”

Alienation, of course, is a luxury for the Immokalee workers, who have to fight for a fair wage. It’s even a luxury for middle-class families struggling to keep the bills paid and maintain that middle-class lifestyle with increasingly squeezed finances. As I wrote when discussing cooking, these labors become the last thing on anyone’s mind when they have to rush from work to home, exhausted from a long day.

Recasting farming as work that is fulfilling and fun is not a bad thing—if growing tomatoes and raising chickens is work that upper-middle-class families do for enjoyment as much as for sustainability, this should raise the status of all farmworkers, right? Right? Sadly, the obsession with eating local doesn’t seem to be bringing any added attention to exploited farmworkers or hungry people the world over who can’t afford a spare chicken and don’t have a backyard to grow tomatoes.

Somewhere between hobby farming and $5 tomatoes at the farmer’s market and slave labor and fast food is a sustainable food system, one that pays people fairly for their work and treats them as human beings, one that respects the environment and the animals. But we will not achieve it by making expensive food a luxury, by applying guilt trips to those who do not cook, or by growing a few tomatoes and raising a chicken or two in the backyard.

We will get there by redefining our relationship to the work of food production—and while we’re there, to labor itself. After all, a society where people received a real living wage for all the work they might do, where the work is distributed evenly among people and everyone has more spare time would allow all of us to buy better food, or to grow it ourselves if we chose.

Socialism? Maybe. But it sounds better than where we’re at, that’s for sure.