Carrots in three colors, potatoes in four, onions in two, kale in three or more…brussel sprouts, three types of squash, homemade cheese, yogurt, apple cider…
I don’t want to add up how much I spent (the potatoes were an especially big purchase), but I just did all my Thanksgiving vegetable shopping at the Farmer’s Market. The vegetables are all fresh, organic, and grown by people who love what they are doing with their lives – or at least they seem to.
A young man named Ben (maybe 17?) helped me at the one stand where I bought most of my stuff, growing increasingly incredulous as I added to my order. When I asked him if he lived on the farm where all this food was grown, he told me his life story in a charmingly un-self-conscious, juvenile way…he lived on another farm, but they weren’t running it as a farm any more “because it didn’t work very well,” and so his dad went back to what he was working at before living on a farm, but he, Ben, worked for the people who owned the farm selling the produce, which was near where he lived in Vermont. A sweet country boy who liked being outdoors and getting his hands dirty – and, unfortunately, like for so many small-scale farmers, his farm ‘didn’t work very well,’ which probably means they weren’t able to earn a living wage by growing food that is actually enjoyable to eat.
Small farms produce many benefits large farms can’t produce. The food can be grown without chemicals, and the land tends to be more productive. The small farms can experiment with exotic strains, like the purple carrots I bought to add color to my root veggie dish or the heirloom rice varieties grown in Bangladesh, and therefore help to preserve genetic diversity. The closer the food source to your table, the more nutritious and tasty the vegetables, and it also saves on the fossil fuels necessary to preserve and ship the food.
But, the deck is stacked against them. Machinery and mortgages are expensive, and family farms are often not eligible for the subsidies given to large, corporate farms. It’s not easy to distribute your produce to stores when corporations have deep pockets to pay for marketing budgets, and it can be difficult to find people who are willing to work on a family farm, or to find the money to pay them. Because you can grow all your own food, it can be cheap to live, and family members are the most viable workforce – as it has been for as long as humans have been engaging in agriculture. I’ve learned that there are still farm boys (and, presumably girls), who are kept out of school for long periods of time, engaging in varying balances of ‘homeschooling’ and working on the farm, growing into adults with varying degrees of marketable skills that will allow them to choose their own life, rather than following in their parent’s footsteps because they have no other options.
Farming is like some other occupations that can be enjoyable, but aren’t when the compensation for them are so low compared to the demads, and there is neither enough money nor enough people who have enough help doing the job – nursing, teaching children, caring for small children, and I would say also many trade like being an auto mechanic (of course, some of these are more highly compensated than others). This translates into an important question that needs to be answered in every economic system – how do we get people to do work they don’t want to do, how do we solve the ‘labor discipline’ problem? Since the people with the money aren’t willing to use high wages as incentives for most of these positions, they resort to other means. Slavery and racism, and restrictions on women’s access education and the professions are two of the most unjust ways of solving this – by setting aside categories of people who have no opportunities but to do the type of work set aside for them. Structuring the institutions such that farmers and other working poor are on the edge of survival, and do not have the resources to invest highly in their children’s education – but instead need to rely on their children to contribute economically to the family as well – is another way, because it perpetuates the economic roles of the parents through generations, onto their children.
Everyone invovled, parent and child, could be making rational decisions, doing the best they can, and yet the children of the poor tend to be poor and the children of the rich tend to be rich…there is a threshold, when parents enter the lower-middle-class income range, where their children become more likely to have more education than they did, and will therefore experience upward economic mobility. The problem is that we need farmers, auto mechanics, and other skilled and unskilled laborers – if the current group of poor experience mobility out of certain categories of labor, other people will be found to fill it – for example, as black women in this country stopped working as domestic servants, they started to be replaced by women who were illegal Latina immigrants.
Multigenerational poverty is not due to a culture of poverty where the poor engage in behaviors that get them caught in a trap across generations – it is due to a global culture of inequality where the labor discipline problem is solved by restricting the ability of certain groups of people to access the resources that will open up new economic opportunities to them. The choices individual poor people make, and the choices their parents made for them, have a role to play, and people should be held responsible for their choices – but, not for the context within which those choices are made.
), and then did some last minute grocery shopping which basically involved wandering around the grocery store checking off whatever was left on my list. We stayed up until 3am talking, comfortably getting into discussions (some might call arguments) without ever getting angry at each other about everything from the relative values of quantitative and qualitative research to what the word “flirting” means and how you can tell if someone is doing it. Hanging out with him reminds me so much of my first year of graduate school, when he and I were very close and decided we would be each other’s brother and sister. I learned this weekend that he had taken that pronouncement as seriously as I did – it feels very nice to have such a brother. He spoke to me in Spanish (at least when I begged him to 