Essential Workers: Food Systems and “Dependency Relationships” (Scott)
Sociological Meanderings Towards Collective Well-Being
What exactly do sociologists study? We are exploring a few themes in this class, such as:
- Understanding how social structures are organized in the United States, connecting the historical dynamics of the 17th-20th Centuries to the present day, 2021 context.
- Explore how food systems shape that social structure.
- To connect food systems and the climate crisis to historical and present-day systemic/institutional racism.
In both the lectures and the weekly reflections we’ve been talking about how institutional racism plays a role in constructing our society. Another theme that’s emerged is that if we don’t eat, we can’t survive, biologically or socially.
Previously, we explored how food systems and human populations are reciprocally related, and further, that as population sizes increase, the institutions we need to organize those people become more complex. Hence the historical transformation we have seen humans move through: from consensus-organized, Indigenous hunter-gatherer societies to (post)Industrial societies organized through complex bureaucracies. Once human’s develop agriculture, and start living in settled towns and cities, the need for more complex organization emerges. This is why historians and sociologists argue that the state emerged as a result of the development of agriculture (Wallerstein).
As Michael Pollan reminds us, the government does in fact play a role in our decisions to eat either a Twinkie or Broccoli:
In the large Industrial Agricultural system, government subsidies shape what crops are grown and under what conditions. Pollan (above) explores Twinkies and corn farming, while Guptill et. al. explores milk and meat.
In this historical legacy you have complex paradoxes:
- The co-mingling of white supremacy (in the institutional forms of colonization and slavery) and the institutionaliztion of freedom and equality and suffrage in the constitution (for white men).
- The British both colonizing and slaughtering Native Americans and depending on Native American’s knowledge of the land for survival (e.g. eating!).
- The New Deal bringing a social safety net and aiming for economic equality after the Great Depression, but excluding domestic workers and farm workers, jobs disproportionately occupied by women and people of color.
All of these paradoxes highlight the sociological concerns with inequality: Our social institutions are hurting the very people and the very land that we are all dependent upon in order to survive. Now, do we have to specifically eat bananas in order to survive? No. But are they a regular part of the American diet? Yes. Along with: coffee, tea, chocolate, avocados, etc… All things that are now produced through the large corporate machinery of industrial agriculture (Guptill et al…) and governed by policies such as NAFTA (Galvez).
And yet, we only eat these things because of colonization (both historical and ongoing). For further exploration (and critical thinking), check out this podcast, that connects the “extraction” of the “materials economy” (Leonard) to our current eating habits:
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/07/794302086/there-will-be-bananas
This also connects to the material regarding (neo)colonization.
But, the “dependency relationships” (Scott) that shape our eating make it clear that we are brutalizing people we are dependent upon: a “dangerous dependency” that produces privileges for some (white, Western societies) and oppresses others (in the case of bananas, farm workers, Central Americans, migrants to the U.S.). While Juliet Schor and Leonard talked about “externalized costs,” we can see that while many of us get the benefits of “cheap bananas,” those who live and work on the banana plantations suffer in poor working conditions; these poor working conditions are the “externalized costs.” Those of us buying the bananas don’t pay enough money for those workers to receive higher wages. The U.S.’s valuation for cheap goods causes harm. Leonard also explores other ways in which the “materials economy” (Leonard) is a “dangerous dependency” (Scott): toxins that wind up in our breast milk, sleeping on toxic pillow cases, napping on toxic couches, throwing away toxic electronic goods, and on.
At the same time, it’s important to point out all the really important activism of Indigenous communities, of farm workers, of those now deemed “essential workers” during the on-going COVID crisis. This designation — essential workers — highlights the importance of food-related labor. And there’s lots of activism, historically and presently, that aims to improve the working conditions of these “essential workers.”
Have you heard of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers and the Grape Boycotts of the 1960’s?
Have you heard of Delores Huerta, whose campaign slogan during the Boycott of the 1960s — SI SE PUEDE — was the inspiration for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan (Yes We Can)?
The above article is a few years old now, and Delores Huerta is now 91, and still working to fight for farm workers rights, for women’s rights, for Indigenous rights. You can even see her on the news advocating in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Her activism, along with that of many other Americans, largely driven by communities of color, has been urging us to shift our structure and culture away from “the aspiration gap” (Schor) and towards economic equality, so that we can abolish the dangers and build healthy “dependency relationships.”
As Delores Huerta herself argued, and made famous: SI SE PUEDE. YES WE CAN.
And on that note, I want to encourage you to take care of yourselves, and each other, and let me know how I can support your continued learning.
Dr. Monica
