A day in the strawberry fields seems like forever

For those of us interested in healthy and fresh food.  A back yard garden may be a heart-felt and hands-on response to the question of “where does our food come from?”  Outside of our garden fences, that simple question increasingly begets complex answers.   Anyone who pondered this question in the context of school lunch may have been surprised by the vegetable identification test that Jamie Oliver administered to a group of first graders (see,  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiShJt2XVdw), who seemed to believe that french fries came fully formed from restaurants.  Readers of Michael Pollen’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma (http://michaelpollan.com/books/the-omnivores-dilemma/), may be astounded by his accounts of large scale, industrialized, chemicals-dependent methods of food production that keep our super market shelves full.  Yet, few would mention the migrant farm workers who pick our nation’s fresh produce when explaining where our food comes from.  This is why we want to call attention to Hector Becerra’s article: A Day in the Strawberry Fields Seems Like Forever. (http://www.latimes.com/news/columnone/la-me-strawberry-pick-20130503-dto,0,2988343.htmlstory).

Becerra is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and the son of a migrant worker.  His article is based on recent experience spending a few days picking broccoli and strawberry in the vast agricultural estates of California.  Freed of sermons or diatribes, Becerra makes plenty clear that our food comes from the relentless, back breaking labor of farm workers.  More important, his article is sweet and poignant portrayal of these workers as individuals with skill (try sorting and packing just picked strawberry into clamshell containers while keeping pace with a moving machine), perseverance, extraordinary work ethics, kindness, humor and dreams.  At a time when our nation’s discourse on food policy focuses exclusively on the consumers and our political debate on immigration verges on demagoguery and demonization, we are grateful that Becerra’s article gave us the full humanity of those who help to put food on our tables.