[Vision2020] Immigration and Cheap Food

[Donovan Arnold]

Ron,
 
Thanks for the article. There is so much wrong with our immigration policy. I really hope the President turns to this issue after dealing with regulation of Wall Street and the oil spill. 
 
I think what people forget, first and foremost, is that immigrants are people that deserve respect and dignity and a reasonable opportunity to gain citizenship. They are all too often wrongly treated as just exploitable economic commodities. It is time to stop this great injustice we call  US Immigration Policy. 
 
Cheers,
 
: D onovan

--- On Fri, 5/28/10, Ron Force <rforce2003 at yahoo.com> wrote:


From: Ron Force <rforce2003 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Immigration and Cheap Food
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Date: Friday, May 28, 2010, 12:56 PM






Here's the URL and the author


Ellen Ruppel Shell - Ellen Ruppel Shell is a professor and science journalist who teaches at Boston University. She is the author most recently of Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.http://www.theatlantic.com/food/archive/2010/05/cheap-chickens-and-industry-fat-cats/57254/





From: Ron Force <rforce2003 at yahoo.com>
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Sent: Fri, May 28, 2010 11:41:02 AM
Subject: [Vision2020] Immigration and Cheap Food



Cheap Chickens and Industry Fat Cats

May 26 2010, 1:17 PM ET | Comment
shell_chickens_5-26_post.jpg

jlastras/flickr

Yesterday at my beloved local library I stumbled upon a title that I would otherwise have missed: Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food, by University of Arkansas anthropologist Steve Striffler.  It's a wonderful book filled with eye popping factoids, among them that chicken "in its most basic form is simply not that profitable." 

So, rather than sell us a plain old bird, producers "add value" with thousands of different "chicken products"--some wildly successful, like the 700-calorie Burger King Chicken Sandwich, some less so, like the Tyson "giblet burger" made of pure gizzard that even the Arkansas prison system refused to inflict upon its inmates. Food engineering has helped make chicken profitable, but it's immigrant labor that has kept it cheap.  Writes Striffler:

    "Mexican immigration in particular has been about ensuring a steady supply of cheap food.  Today, most of the labor of producing and processing food in the United States is done by Latinos, a majority of whom are immigrants from Mexico ... The problem is that we now have a food system that not only is dependent on cheap labor, but also requires an easily exploitable workforce to produce and process unhealthy foods.  Americans are destroying their bodies by consuming the wrong foods, and immigrants are destroying their bodies by producing those foods." 



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