Vegan vs. "What about Farm Workers?"
03 February 2016 [link youtube]
If you're vegan you've probably heard the question, "Well, what about the human rights of farm workers?", and the question is --more often than not-- just an excuse for eating meat. But it's still a legitimate question: what about labor conditions on the farms that produce vegetables, fruit and so on?
However, it is a false assumption that workers on fruit-farms are in a condition of exploitation equivalent to cows awaiting slaughter, and, "therefore" that you should eliminate strawberries from your diet by the same logic that you would eliminate beef and dairy:
http://vegan-mind-tricks.tumblr.com/post/55548055982/picking-strawberries-is-an-honest-living-cutting
The documentary film mentioned here is, "China Blue": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478116/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl
Youtube Automatic Transcription
yo it up you know I try to talk about
issues on this channel in a way that will still be meaningful five years from now if someone randomly clicks on this video and doesn't know the context for the discussion I'm having and I think that still five years in the future we're gonna have an issue where vegans react negatively to this question of what about farm laborers what about you know the human rights of people who are picking vegetables where people react to that a negative and defensive way because it is thrown in the faces of vegans as an excuse not with sincere interests not really as a sincere question at all it's thrown at vegans in the same way that what about lions it's yeah well what about lions do you want to have a conversation to the Lions you want to talk about habitat conservation for lions you want to talk about natural parks and the diets of lions and how to keep lying and that's okay yeah all right I'm vegan but I can I can talk to you about lions no problem maybe we can have a real interesting conference what do you know about lions well I owns an important part of your life I remember growing up with the sound of lions growling on the horizon um look man uh this is a strangely jocular way to start the video but my point here is what about lions could be a meaningful conversation could be the beginning of an important set of questions but we as vegans normally just encounter it as a kind of hostile contemptuous and dismissive thing likewise the question of well where does your fruit come from where do your vegetables come from that does link to a whole bunch of really important and meaningful questions but most vegans are apprehensive and respond negatively because they're only used to hearing that as a kind of dismissive distraction as an excuse for why people eat meat anyway so coming from a perspective of meat-eaters who say well if you can't be a hundred percent morally pure why should I try to even be ten percent or 50 percent morally pure if somebody is going to get exploited by something anyway then why shouldn't I just continue to eat hamburgers now not everyone can be interested in everything I personally I am someone who's interested in how our food is produced how where rice comes from where vegetables and fruit come from we'll come back to that interest in a second but I understand not everyone can be for a sort of parallel set of questions I think it is really interesting to look at where clothing comes from now obviously vegans refuse to wear leather for moral reasons vegans also refused to wear wool for ethical reasons if that really makes my life difficult because here in Canada men's clothing is it's all made out of wool it's a huge problem for me it's really difficult for me to find remotely respectable-looking clothing uh but someone could say quite correctly well what about factories that make clothing out of cotton what about human rights what about the conditions of workers what about and this is a meaningful question this can be a meaningful question but if people are asking it just in a dismissive way of saying well conditions in clothing factor that this shirt is just caught and obviously everything I'm wearing is vegan but still what about the human rights of people who make these these clothes in this kind of context um there's a really good documentary called China out blue it's just two words China blue I could put a link in the description I think you can see that online for like $0.99 I remember I paid for it I saw it legitimately but it was either 99 cents or a dollar 99 so it's almost free and that's a really memorable portrait of what factory conditions are like not in the worst Factory in China by any means it's really not it's not remotely the worst if anything at that point in time it might have been an above-average Factory in terms of quality of life for people there in many ways in many ways it's a good Factory and that's why the the owners of the factory allowed the documentary to be made but nevertheless you look at the kind of crummy difficult terrifying life the people in that factory are living in many ways you get the kind of human story of it and now you got questions now um I had okay so say a little bit more about me and my interest in this field yes I was interested in migrant workers and farm conditions back when I lived in Toronto Ontario Canada and I was a political science student the time was a much younger man and you know we had this bizarre situation in southern Ontario where our farm parties was being picked by Nicaraguans and as I looked into this you might think these Nicaraguans would cross the border just once and then stay in Canada for a long time no even though they were illegal immigrants these Nicaraguans were almost universally they were returning to their hometown once a year so they were going by land and illegally crossing those borders annually and of course twice because you got to go one direction turn around and come back so going from Canada into the u.s. from the US into Mexico and then from Mexico down to Nicaragua totally unbelievable surreal situation and the jobs they were doing those Nicaraguan farmers were jobs that in my grandfather's time would have been done by white Canadians white english-speaking Canadians who also probably did not have great working conditions but to me from that study at that time when I was interested in those questions within Canada because these are not questions you can receive globally the situation for farmworkers in Canada is not the same as it is in China you know you've got to develop these expertise in a way that's selling it to a particular place tubular point in time when I should mention true the point in time I read some articles recently about Ontario again specifically about Apple farming in Ontario where they were talking about the the former pattern of illegal immigrants from Nicaragua now being replaced with legal immigrants from the Philippines importing cheap laborers in the Philippines that our current government programs again bazaars the distances involved so your apples are being picked and packed by people from the Philippines and these Filipinos in order to get the paperwork a lot of them have qualifications as nurses and schoolteachers they're being kind of underemployed in her farming industry really strange to the questions but I mentioned this because this shows how much the situation can change in just a few years in one particular place in one particular point in time the question of who is doing the farm labor is worth thinking about and is worth looking into but the answers may not be what you think there but look in my grandfather's day this type of agricultural labor was done by white english-speaking Canadians and stereotypically those guys were hobos if you look into the history of the term hobo this was a specific stereotype about the type of guy who would ride the train for free to get back and forth between the city and where the fruit was harvested who would do seasonal labor and then he would stereotypically be a drunk or an alcoholic in between harvest seasons when they were neither picking or planting and so on and back in the 1930s and so on there was a whole subculture surrounding this guys like Woody Guthrie have all these songs about being a hobo and they specifically refer to work on a farm these were guys who lived part time in the cities and part time in the countryside and so on so I say this to say I'm not glorifying the past that had its own social contradictions of its own form of oppression and so on but there are fundamental differences if those jobs in southern Ontario working on those farms were being done by Canadian citizens those Canadian citizens can go to the police if there's a problem they can speak English in theory they can form a union and they can bargain for higher wages they can access health care if you're a Canadian citizen you can go to a hospital and you can demand to get treatment even if you don't have any paperwork you speak English fluently and you were Canadian one way or another you can go to the hospital you go to the doctor if you're an illegal immigrant from Nicaragua and you get injured whatever all kinds of accidents happen what are you gonna do and nobody really wants to talk about this issue because politically you are presumed to be right-wing if you in any way question the current neoliberal paradigm of mass migration for wage-labour whether it's questioning the Filipino example or the Nicaraguan example or what have you if you would anyway try to say look I think this is deeply problematic and yes the issues of it being cross-border labor really do change the picture they really do in a meaningful way transform a situation that would have issues of exploitation and poor wages to begin with and it gets dramatically worse because those questions I did a whole an exhausting semester long course dealing with migration politics last year and at the beginning I talked the professor I said well you know these are really important issues and I've cared about them for years and years but nobody can talk about the makanda they're in a black box of political issues nobody can discuss because neither the left-wing nor the right-wing or the center nobody can deal with questions of migration and labor rights I remember the professor reacted she didn't know what I was talking about yeah well during that course let me tell you she knew what I was talking about just asking these questions is I can tell you in Canada is not politically acceptable not for any it's become part of the unquestioned new normal of neoliberalism that you know in Ontario Canada we eat food produced by Nicaraguans and Filipinos and that we don't deal with the surreal contradictions of questions that raises so look I also lived if you watch the channel regularly you know I used to live in Laos I used to live in Cambodia in that part of the world I was heavily interested in where my food came from and where in food production and agriculture I don't mean where my food came from I was really interested in agriculture and I hung out with agronomists and in terms of what I could speak about in the language in the Lao language I learned all this vocabulary related to rice farming and it's so much research both on what agriculture was the farming that was going on and about government policies UN policies international policies how agriculture had been changed in recent years I was really into it I was massively into agriculture in that part of the world where of course there were very different questions of human rights and wages being paid and what-have-you it's a totally different although somewhat parallel set of questions surrounding food production but yeah that was something was really interested in really passionate in and I can remember talking to one woman a woman whose her her University diploma was in agronomy I said to her look you know honestly for years now I was thinking if I could do my life over again I wish I would have gotten a diploma in agronomy now I don't feel that way anymore actually for all kinds of reasons I now I don't regret that that wasn't my my academic focus but I just say not in a trivial way during those years in Asia these issues were a meaningful part of my life now they're not right now and as a vegan I don't think we can say in a simple way that they have to be yes how legumes are produced how vegetables are produced how rice and wheat are produced those are really important questions but I think if you met someone who's vegan who had no interest in those things but who was really interested in how toys are produced that's also a completely legitimate area of study I you know if you're a parent I've got a two-year-old daughter I got to buy gifts and send them who are in the mail and it's a problem for me that most of this stuff is kind of plastic and manufactured in China and I wish I had more positive alternatives and I'm out there looking all the time can I get something made out of wood can I get something made in the country that has human rights believe me if someone manufactured goods there's a huge difference because only made in South Korea and something made in China so they made in Thailand even you know even though God I know too much about factory conditions intact weapons I know both factory conditions and farm conditions in Thailand because I've done the research but look it's not at a false humility that I say not everyone can be an expert on everything and it's good to be honest with yourself and others about what you care about where you are going to try to exercise your limited capacity for activism and for some people that's going to be agriculture for some people that might be clothing like this documentary I mentioned about how blue jeans get made called China blue and yeah migrant workers rights it is a specific issue it's a single issue not everyone can be an expert not everyone could be an activist but obviously the inspiration for this video in terms of why just filmed this Nell was just getting ready to work out before I go to school is I'm happy for this guy the vegan cheetah Charles Marlow I'm happy for him that he's you know pursuing his own interests um I don't look at this guy the way other people do other people look at him kind of hyper critically as if why can't he be the perfect vegan Messiah I look at him the same way I look at my own brothers just said years ago when I first made a video talking with a guy I have a I have 99 different brothers several of them have had lives you know dented by drug and alcohol use a guy like vegan cheetah he probably had not thought about any of this stuff five years ago and in the past in the past couple of years he got really politically awakened by veganism and at first his engagement veganism wasn't political then he starts asking these other questions he gets more gauged and those lead to new questions new political interests new forms of political engagement and that's great and that's wonderful and I would be so happy if any of my own brothers responded that way any my brothers or sisters and they don't and I you know I think less of them I've got to tell you my brothers and sisters in terms of DNA I don't think they were born you know innately less intelligent than myself but they have never started on that path that vegan cheetah went down now on the other hand again at the very beginning this video I said why many vegans react negatively to these questions being raised and uh again just simply vegans shouldn't get defensive no you can't research everything no you can't be interested in everything and no it is not necessarily our approach against you if you are not interested in rice agriculture and Laos or in Apple farming in Ontario they're all specific issues and instead if your interests and your capacity for activism is attached to clothing production or toy production do that politics is the art of the possible figuring out what's possible and the reason why veganism is such a huge issue is that it's possible for everybody it's possible for you here and now no matter who you are watching this video and it is not possible for everybody to be engaged with factory conditions in China farm conditions or in ontario or any other specific issue but if you can it's wonderful
issues on this channel in a way that will still be meaningful five years from now if someone randomly clicks on this video and doesn't know the context for the discussion I'm having and I think that still five years in the future we're gonna have an issue where vegans react negatively to this question of what about farm laborers what about you know the human rights of people who are picking vegetables where people react to that a negative and defensive way because it is thrown in the faces of vegans as an excuse not with sincere interests not really as a sincere question at all it's thrown at vegans in the same way that what about lions it's yeah well what about lions do you want to have a conversation to the Lions you want to talk about habitat conservation for lions you want to talk about natural parks and the diets of lions and how to keep lying and that's okay yeah all right I'm vegan but I can I can talk to you about lions no problem maybe we can have a real interesting conference what do you know about lions well I owns an important part of your life I remember growing up with the sound of lions growling on the horizon um look man uh this is a strangely jocular way to start the video but my point here is what about lions could be a meaningful conversation could be the beginning of an important set of questions but we as vegans normally just encounter it as a kind of hostile contemptuous and dismissive thing likewise the question of well where does your fruit come from where do your vegetables come from that does link to a whole bunch of really important and meaningful questions but most vegans are apprehensive and respond negatively because they're only used to hearing that as a kind of dismissive distraction as an excuse for why people eat meat anyway so coming from a perspective of meat-eaters who say well if you can't be a hundred percent morally pure why should I try to even be ten percent or 50 percent morally pure if somebody is going to get exploited by something anyway then why shouldn't I just continue to eat hamburgers now not everyone can be interested in everything I personally I am someone who's interested in how our food is produced how where rice comes from where vegetables and fruit come from we'll come back to that interest in a second but I understand not everyone can be for a sort of parallel set of questions I think it is really interesting to look at where clothing comes from now obviously vegans refuse to wear leather for moral reasons vegans also refused to wear wool for ethical reasons if that really makes my life difficult because here in Canada men's clothing is it's all made out of wool it's a huge problem for me it's really difficult for me to find remotely respectable-looking clothing uh but someone could say quite correctly well what about factories that make clothing out of cotton what about human rights what about the conditions of workers what about and this is a meaningful question this can be a meaningful question but if people are asking it just in a dismissive way of saying well conditions in clothing factor that this shirt is just caught and obviously everything I'm wearing is vegan but still what about the human rights of people who make these these clothes in this kind of context um there's a really good documentary called China out blue it's just two words China blue I could put a link in the description I think you can see that online for like $0.99 I remember I paid for it I saw it legitimately but it was either 99 cents or a dollar 99 so it's almost free and that's a really memorable portrait of what factory conditions are like not in the worst Factory in China by any means it's really not it's not remotely the worst if anything at that point in time it might have been an above-average Factory in terms of quality of life for people there in many ways in many ways it's a good Factory and that's why the the owners of the factory allowed the documentary to be made but nevertheless you look at the kind of crummy difficult terrifying life the people in that factory are living in many ways you get the kind of human story of it and now you got questions now um I had okay so say a little bit more about me and my interest in this field yes I was interested in migrant workers and farm conditions back when I lived in Toronto Ontario Canada and I was a political science student the time was a much younger man and you know we had this bizarre situation in southern Ontario where our farm parties was being picked by Nicaraguans and as I looked into this you might think these Nicaraguans would cross the border just once and then stay in Canada for a long time no even though they were illegal immigrants these Nicaraguans were almost universally they were returning to their hometown once a year so they were going by land and illegally crossing those borders annually and of course twice because you got to go one direction turn around and come back so going from Canada into the u.s. from the US into Mexico and then from Mexico down to Nicaragua totally unbelievable surreal situation and the jobs they were doing those Nicaraguan farmers were jobs that in my grandfather's time would have been done by white Canadians white english-speaking Canadians who also probably did not have great working conditions but to me from that study at that time when I was interested in those questions within Canada because these are not questions you can receive globally the situation for farmworkers in Canada is not the same as it is in China you know you've got to develop these expertise in a way that's selling it to a particular place tubular point in time when I should mention true the point in time I read some articles recently about Ontario again specifically about Apple farming in Ontario where they were talking about the the former pattern of illegal immigrants from Nicaragua now being replaced with legal immigrants from the Philippines importing cheap laborers in the Philippines that our current government programs again bazaars the distances involved so your apples are being picked and packed by people from the Philippines and these Filipinos in order to get the paperwork a lot of them have qualifications as nurses and schoolteachers they're being kind of underemployed in her farming industry really strange to the questions but I mentioned this because this shows how much the situation can change in just a few years in one particular place in one particular point in time the question of who is doing the farm labor is worth thinking about and is worth looking into but the answers may not be what you think there but look in my grandfather's day this type of agricultural labor was done by white english-speaking Canadians and stereotypically those guys were hobos if you look into the history of the term hobo this was a specific stereotype about the type of guy who would ride the train for free to get back and forth between the city and where the fruit was harvested who would do seasonal labor and then he would stereotypically be a drunk or an alcoholic in between harvest seasons when they were neither picking or planting and so on and back in the 1930s and so on there was a whole subculture surrounding this guys like Woody Guthrie have all these songs about being a hobo and they specifically refer to work on a farm these were guys who lived part time in the cities and part time in the countryside and so on so I say this to say I'm not glorifying the past that had its own social contradictions of its own form of oppression and so on but there are fundamental differences if those jobs in southern Ontario working on those farms were being done by Canadian citizens those Canadian citizens can go to the police if there's a problem they can speak English in theory they can form a union and they can bargain for higher wages they can access health care if you're a Canadian citizen you can go to a hospital and you can demand to get treatment even if you don't have any paperwork you speak English fluently and you were Canadian one way or another you can go to the hospital you go to the doctor if you're an illegal immigrant from Nicaragua and you get injured whatever all kinds of accidents happen what are you gonna do and nobody really wants to talk about this issue because politically you are presumed to be right-wing if you in any way question the current neoliberal paradigm of mass migration for wage-labour whether it's questioning the Filipino example or the Nicaraguan example or what have you if you would anyway try to say look I think this is deeply problematic and yes the issues of it being cross-border labor really do change the picture they really do in a meaningful way transform a situation that would have issues of exploitation and poor wages to begin with and it gets dramatically worse because those questions I did a whole an exhausting semester long course dealing with migration politics last year and at the beginning I talked the professor I said well you know these are really important issues and I've cared about them for years and years but nobody can talk about the makanda they're in a black box of political issues nobody can discuss because neither the left-wing nor the right-wing or the center nobody can deal with questions of migration and labor rights I remember the professor reacted she didn't know what I was talking about yeah well during that course let me tell you she knew what I was talking about just asking these questions is I can tell you in Canada is not politically acceptable not for any it's become part of the unquestioned new normal of neoliberalism that you know in Ontario Canada we eat food produced by Nicaraguans and Filipinos and that we don't deal with the surreal contradictions of questions that raises so look I also lived if you watch the channel regularly you know I used to live in Laos I used to live in Cambodia in that part of the world I was heavily interested in where my food came from and where in food production and agriculture I don't mean where my food came from I was really interested in agriculture and I hung out with agronomists and in terms of what I could speak about in the language in the Lao language I learned all this vocabulary related to rice farming and it's so much research both on what agriculture was the farming that was going on and about government policies UN policies international policies how agriculture had been changed in recent years I was really into it I was massively into agriculture in that part of the world where of course there were very different questions of human rights and wages being paid and what-have-you it's a totally different although somewhat parallel set of questions surrounding food production but yeah that was something was really interested in really passionate in and I can remember talking to one woman a woman whose her her University diploma was in agronomy I said to her look you know honestly for years now I was thinking if I could do my life over again I wish I would have gotten a diploma in agronomy now I don't feel that way anymore actually for all kinds of reasons I now I don't regret that that wasn't my my academic focus but I just say not in a trivial way during those years in Asia these issues were a meaningful part of my life now they're not right now and as a vegan I don't think we can say in a simple way that they have to be yes how legumes are produced how vegetables are produced how rice and wheat are produced those are really important questions but I think if you met someone who's vegan who had no interest in those things but who was really interested in how toys are produced that's also a completely legitimate area of study I you know if you're a parent I've got a two-year-old daughter I got to buy gifts and send them who are in the mail and it's a problem for me that most of this stuff is kind of plastic and manufactured in China and I wish I had more positive alternatives and I'm out there looking all the time can I get something made out of wood can I get something made in the country that has human rights believe me if someone manufactured goods there's a huge difference because only made in South Korea and something made in China so they made in Thailand even you know even though God I know too much about factory conditions intact weapons I know both factory conditions and farm conditions in Thailand because I've done the research but look it's not at a false humility that I say not everyone can be an expert on everything and it's good to be honest with yourself and others about what you care about where you are going to try to exercise your limited capacity for activism and for some people that's going to be agriculture for some people that might be clothing like this documentary I mentioned about how blue jeans get made called China blue and yeah migrant workers rights it is a specific issue it's a single issue not everyone can be an expert not everyone could be an activist but obviously the inspiration for this video in terms of why just filmed this Nell was just getting ready to work out before I go to school is I'm happy for this guy the vegan cheetah Charles Marlow I'm happy for him that he's you know pursuing his own interests um I don't look at this guy the way other people do other people look at him kind of hyper critically as if why can't he be the perfect vegan Messiah I look at him the same way I look at my own brothers just said years ago when I first made a video talking with a guy I have a I have 99 different brothers several of them have had lives you know dented by drug and alcohol use a guy like vegan cheetah he probably had not thought about any of this stuff five years ago and in the past in the past couple of years he got really politically awakened by veganism and at first his engagement veganism wasn't political then he starts asking these other questions he gets more gauged and those lead to new questions new political interests new forms of political engagement and that's great and that's wonderful and I would be so happy if any of my own brothers responded that way any my brothers or sisters and they don't and I you know I think less of them I've got to tell you my brothers and sisters in terms of DNA I don't think they were born you know innately less intelligent than myself but they have never started on that path that vegan cheetah went down now on the other hand again at the very beginning this video I said why many vegans react negatively to these questions being raised and uh again just simply vegans shouldn't get defensive no you can't research everything no you can't be interested in everything and no it is not necessarily our approach against you if you are not interested in rice agriculture and Laos or in Apple farming in Ontario they're all specific issues and instead if your interests and your capacity for activism is attached to clothing production or toy production do that politics is the art of the possible figuring out what's possible and the reason why veganism is such a huge issue is that it's possible for everybody it's possible for you here and now no matter who you are watching this video and it is not possible for everybody to be engaged with factory conditions in China farm conditions or in ontario or any other specific issue but if you can it's wonderful