by Charity Shumway
Thanks to the local food movement, more people than ever are asking questions about how their food is grown and raised. But there’s one consideration that is almost always forgotten, says Margaret Gray, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science in the College of Arts and Sciences. “The locavore movement at its heart promotes a food ethic,” Dr. Gray continues, “but labor needs to be included in that equation.”
Part of the reason for this is a false dichotomy, says Dr. Gray. “We have this idea of ‘corporate industrial monoculture’: bad, ‘local mom and pop’: good. But there’s no inherent good or bad depending on the scale of the farm. Local is just geography. The same issues that we’re concerned about on large corporate farms, we should be concerned about on local farms, too, and consumers should be aware that the labor practices on small farms mirror the labor practices on large industrial farms.”
Dr. Gray’s research focuses on the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, one of the major sites of the local food movement in the United States. Starting in 2000, she began interviewing farmers, farm workers, advocates, legislators and lobbyists regarding labor practices on farms in the area.
“The vast majority of the industry workforce are noncitizen immigrants,” says Dr. Gray. “They are an extremely vulnerable workforce, and much of what I explore is how that vulnerability is related to the labor conditions and how their reluctance and fear change their situations.”
For example, Dr. Gray explains, farm workers in New York State do not share the same rights as other workers. “They have no right to overtime pay, no collective bargaining protections, no right to a day of rest.”
While there are campaigns at work to change this, Dr. Gray hopes her research, which will be published by the University of California Press in a forthcoming book entitled Labor and the Locavore, can also play a role in creating change. “I want to raise awareness,” she says. “When we’re buying food in farmers markets or at their CSA [community-supported agriculture program], we need to ask questions about labor conditions the same way we ask about pesticide usage and the way animals are treated.”
Read an updated feature on Adelphi’s Dr. Maggie Gray; she also appeared on WNYC radio on the Brian Leher Show Friday, April 18, 2014. This piece appeared in the Erudition 2013 edition.
