Food for thought: Is “local food” really local?
My friend Vincenzo Pietropaolo has been documenting the hard lives of migrant farm workers since 1984. It is a thoughtful and poignant work that Vince has just published in the guise of his latest book, Harvest Pilgrims.
Like migratory birds, most of Canada’s 20,000 “guest” farm workers arrive in the spring and leave in the autumn. Hailing primarily from Mexico, Jamaica, and smaller countries of the Caribbean, these temporary workers have become entrenched in the Canadian labour force and are the mainstay of many traditional family farms in Canada. Many of them make the trip year after year after year.
In it—and so germane to the theme of Mixed Farmin’—Pietropaolo poses among other questions, the following:
If local food, which has been the fashionable darling of urban foodies these past few years, depends on workers flying here from the Caribbean and Latin America to harvest it for market (because they are the only ones willing to subject themselves to such labour for minimum wage) is it really local?
Good question!
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Web Site: http://petersibbald.com
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Find It
Focus
A fermentation (a.k.a. Compost) of media, technology, social justice, art and the environment as experienced on the ground through the eye of one Canadian photo documentarian, intended to help fertilize the zeitgeist and yield a mixed crop of new ideas surrounding civic engagement.
Origins
Out on the land seeking moments and light, I’m often reminded of the similarity between the life and livelihood of a visual journalist/artist and that of the farmer.
To Wit
“Well Ed, the Fishers had their auction last Saturday morning. I watched as the neighbourhood descended on the place and picked it clean. After it was over, and the Fishers had driven off to their new house in town, the auctioneer walked over the property with me. His name’s Freddy. Interesting chap, friendly and outgoing. Runs a beef and dairy herd on the farm next door, plants corn, grain, potatoes, turnips, does auction sales some blacksmithing, small auto repairs and real estate. What I believe is called mixed farming.”
Letters from Wingfield Farm, ©1989 Douglas Beattie. (Act 1) Wingfield Farm
Ongoing Investigations
• The Meaning of Land
• Rurality
• The Nexus of Technology,
Implimentation and Power in
Visual Communication
• Legacies of Colonialism
• Sustainability vs. Resilience in
Socio-Ecological Systems
