Broccoli. Yes, Broccoli.

I was going to blog today about Mayor Byron Brown's plan to increase the number of African Americans on the Buffalo Police Force, but the headline article in the Buffalo News caught my attention because it hits a little closer to home. Especially after I just finished food shopping.

“Broccoli a growing business and seeds planted here.” It painted a way too rosy picture of the situation.

Granted, I prefer to purchase locally grown produce for a wide variety of good reasons (strengthens the local economy, less greenhouse gases from transportation, etc.) - The story glossed over some issues that the News really needs to dig deeper into. Probably won't though.

First – The mentioning of the Latin music bothered me. Most of these workers are migrant workers. Latinos. Their “homes” - if they are to be called that, are RVs. converted buses, vans – are mobile. They go where the harvest is. They work 12 – 14 hour long days, sometimes longer, under conditions that I would not work under (and I worked on a farm when I grew up) to get the crop picked and to the market. Heat, rain, injuries, illness – things that I would like to avoid, they work in so that they can earn a “living” for their families. If what they do is called living.

Those seven inch knives. If I am injured at work, I can get workman's compensation. Easy. Not so easy, if at all,  for them, And they don't have health insurance to cover hospital bills. They don't have sick days if they are feeling under the weather. (No work, no money. Simple rule.) And if they mention the word “union,” they are most likely out of a job. Word gets around the farms fast. Especially in the age of cell phones.

And those fields – sprayed with chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Monsanto's Round-Up™ causes cancer according to European research. They have no protective clothing. Maybe leather gloves, hats, and sunglasses, if they buy them. Are these chemicals even safe to use? Read the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheets) on them. I have a MSDS for the glue that I use to fix library books. And by law I have to have access to it. Do these farm workers have access to the MSDS for the chemicals that were sprayed on the fields?

Can they even read English (or Spanish) fluently enough to understand what they are looking at? I have a friend that works in a Migrant Center – a place that migrant teens go to for education. How they get an education chasing the harvest is beyond me. She does her best, but I wonder how successful she is? When I discard a set of encyclopedias from my library because I don't want my students accessing outdated information, guess who gets it? And all my students all have laptops. The migrant center has a bank of computers. I'm not sure how old the computers are. She won't tell me. Yes they can access the NYS purchased databases that all libraries in NYS have access to – but I doubt anyone in the center has the time to teach them how to use them. That is their “school.”

The students learn out of workbooks. Not textbooks. Workbooks. And after “school” - and probably before school too – they go out to the fields to work. Labor laws sometimes get overlooked during harvest times. And bullets sometimes kill people.

Such as rosy article.

And then later in the paper it had an article about how doctors are being told to check children for “food insecurity.” That's double speak for “hunger.” (1984 lives!) The amount of food that is left to waste in the field because it doesn't look “perfect.” The broccoli was green and yellow because the summer was hot and people won't buy it. Give it to a family that is “food insecure” and I don't think that they will really care about the color. I buy it like that at farmers markets. Tastes just fine to me.

So food that doesn't look picture perfect is left to rot in the fields by exploited workers,  while poor people go hungry because they don't have money to buy food.

Right.

The article was about the business end of broccoli.

The Buffalo News needs to remember that most of its readers are not business owners. They are workers. They need to tell us that side of the story too.

Give me a Labor section in my paper.

Forgive my snarkiness, but chew on that for a while.