Helping Hands that Feed
Berries
have been on my mind a lot lately. It started
with a feature story I edited for our spring
magazine about how Europe’s demand for
year-round berries is fueling an ecological
disaster in the arid southern reaches of Spain
and Portugal as farmers suck aquifers dry. (Keep
your eye out for the online version of the
article, which we’ll be publishing
later this month.) The story got me thinking
about my own berry consumption, and what
environmental footprint it might have,
particularly in the off season. It even got me
attempting to explain seasonality to my
berry-loving toddler during a recent grocery
store trip — albeit not
successfully.
Soon after, a press
release landed in my inbox announcing the
Environmental Working Group’s annual Dirty
Dozen list of produce most contaminated with
pesticides. As has been the case for several
years now, strawberries top the list of
conventional fruits and vegetables with the
highest pesticide load. This year, blueberries
also joined them in the top 12. The list serves
as a reminder that the chemicals we put on our
crops impact not only the soil and water, but
also our health.
And then, last
weekend, the California farmworker community of
Parajo suffered massive flooding when the Pajaro
River levee broke following yet another heavy
storm. The unincorporated area in Monterey
County is known especially for its strawberry
crops and is home to some 2,000, mostly
low-income, farmworkers who had to evacuate in a
hurry. The majority remain displaced, and many
have lost their jobs since local fields are too
waterlogged for growing. While aid and emergency
supplies are flowing into the area, many of the
farmworkers are undocumented, meaning they are
not eligible for the same type of aid as US
citizens.
This tragedy could have
been avoided: Officials have known since as far
back as the 1960s that the Pajaro levee was
vulnerable, but chose not to act because they
determined the costs
of upgrading the levee outweighed the
benefits of protecting a low-income farming
community. (To learn more about the farmworkers'
plight in Pajaro, tune into Journal
Editor Maureen Nandini Mitra’s Terra Verde
podcast.)
The through line here
may be berries, but the takeaway for me is much
deeper: It’s time to reckon with our broken food
system. Where we grow our food matters. How we
grow it matters. And how we treat those growing
it matters most of all. 
Zoe
Loftus-Farren
Managing Editor,
Earth Island
Journal
Photo by Harold
Litwiler |
