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We as consumers have so much interest in food, but we haven't realized where our food comes from. We as consumers don't appreciate the people who pick and harvest our food. This story begins in a town in Immokalee, Florida. where Immokalee a town that feeds a large part of the country during the winter. Benito Garcia, one of the tomato pickers, lives with 15 to 16 people in a trailer with his son and his wife. Garcia wakes up at 4 in the morning, drops his son at 5 o'clock at a baby sitter every day before leaving for work, and at 8 p.m. he picks him up.
Once they arrive at 7-7:30 in the morning at the farm, where they have to wait for a couple of hours until the dew is gone from the plants, during that time these farm workers aren't earning anything. They don’t officially start getting paid until their first bucket is filled. As it gets to noon, the temperatures start to rise and many workers can't stand the heat. As one of the workers described: “Sometimes you could feel the breeze from the pesticide they were spraying over there”. These workers aren't told about the risk of pesticide. Farmworks are meant very little within our society, we don’t realize the hard work they put into harvesting the food we eat for a very cheap pay like about $42.27 a day from 5 in the morning to 8 at night.
Over the last, decade as productions costs like seeds, pesticides, fertilizers, machinery, and fuel have increased. Leading supermarkets to demand that farmers maintain their prices causing a dramatic cut into farmers profits. In the 60s and 70s the supermarket was relatively stable then in the 1980s, Walmart decided to get into the grocery business. Walmart bought larger quantities from farms and offered the product to its customers at drastically lower prices. In order for the industry to compete with Walmart prices, the industry was forced to consolidate leaving only a few large competitors within the industry. These hundreds of thousands of farmers have only a handful of supermarkets to sell their products to. These “supermarkets have a historically unprecedented amount of power when a company is able to dictate the pricing structure down its entire chain a free market no longer exist”, the movie says. Which is known as an unfree market, monopsony. The buyers in the supermarkets who buy these products make it impossible for the industry to work in a normal way. This is why many farm owners have to push the workers to work faster for less pay. This is why poverty is occurring within the farming industry. How one end of the chain doesn't really connect to the other end for the chain.
Supermarkets care about their customers and their business, but they really don’t think about how much pressure they are putting onto the farmers who are being paid less for more work and which has caused us to have poverty within our society. Over the course of the average workday, these farmworkers pick, care and throw about 4000 pounds of tomatoes, earning them about $40 a day a little over a penny for each pound. Workers at the base of almost every supply chain in America are guaranteed at least a minimum wage to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
Before watching this film, I really didn't think about where food came from. I am very amused by how much work a farm worker puts in the field. It made me think about that I should not waste food because of the amount of hard work each man and women put into harvesting that food that ends up at our homes. Appreciate your food whenever you eat something and think about the person who worked brutally in order to produce that for you. Appreciate the hard work and the most difficult job these men and women do for a very extremely low pay for the people in this nation. We should as a society stand up for each of these works by fighting for their pays to be higher and for their equality in this nation.
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