VIRGINIA NESMITH
Sacred Food: Sacred Workers

Food is intrinsically sacred; we depend upon it for life; we commune around it; we worship with it.

And yet, we cannot rest easy at our tables. And we will not, as long as the men, women and children who climb for our apples, dig for our potatoes and pluck grapes off the vine, cannot adequately feed themselves.

Several years ago I met Gloria, a woman in her early thirties who had been picking oranges since she was a child. She climbs ladders, fills 90 pound sacks with the fruit and climbs back down to dump them in a bin. Even while pregnant Gloria worked the orange groves because she needed the money, scant as it was – about $1 per 90 lb. sack. Exposed to numerous toxic pesticides, she feared for the health of her unborn baby.

Gloria is one of over two million farm workers who harvest our nation’s fruit and vegetables, 85% of which are still hand picked. Farm workers work harder for less money than any other group of laborers in this country. After long hours in the hot sun, they return to overcrowded trailers, shacks and even cardboard boxes. They are excluded from many of the laws protecting other workers and those that are in place are often not enforced.

Farm workers are organizing nationwide to change such conditions, through both labor unions and community organizations. As they fight for justice in the fields and the empowerment to make it lasting, they invite us to put our faith into action and join them. National Farm Worker Ministry is an interfaith organization which provides opportunities to do that. We educate and mobilize concerned consumers to support farm workers as they organize, traveling with them on the road to justice.

It is a journey that can be challenging for those of us in faith communities. For as farm workers organize, they don’t ask us for charity; they ask for solidarity. As they challenge the power that large agribusiness holds on state, local and federal levels, they don’t ask us for mediation. They ask us to lend the weight of our convictions and our powers as consumers to balance the scales so that they have a place at the table where true reconciliation can happen.

They ask us not for words but for deeds: to visit their fields and camps; to challenge unscrupulous growers and to promote boycotts; to write McDonald’s or Mondavi; to march in Chicago or Toledo; to talk to store and restaurant managers in our neighborhoods; to drive workers to meetings in North Carolina; to organize prayer vigils in Oregon, and delegations in Florida; to walk the halls of the capitol building in Sacramento or Washington, DC.

They ask us to sacrifice with them. Farm workers face intimidation and retaliation and risk their jobs, their housing, their physical safety and their relationships with co-workers when they speak up about abuses in the fields. They ask us to share in those risks: to risk confrontation with people of good will in our congregations, to sacrifice the comfort of ambiguity found in ceaselessly studying the issue, and to give up the neutrality that enables those abusing power, to stay in power. They remind us that God clearly calls us to cast our option with the poor.

But the journey isn’t just about challenge. It is about hope.

Whether we were born in Mexico, Guatemala, Haiti or the U.S, farm workers call us out of the racist system that divides us and into right relationship as brothers and sisters equally loved by God. We are bound one to another each time we take into our bodies the product of their hands. The orange I ate this morning may have been picked by Gloria last week.

But tasty and vitamin rich as it may be, that orange will only really nourish and be truly sacred when Gloria wins a measure of justice. Farm workers call us to believe that is possible; that if we stay at it long enough, growers, company managers and farm workers do sit down at the table sharing
a respect born out of struggle. New relationships are established based on mutual interest in creating a viable industry. Fairness for all in the agricultural industry – fair prices for growers, fair treatment of workers, humane treatment of animals and respect for the land – is a reality that together, as eaters one and all, we can bring to life.

Si se Puede!

Virginia Nesmith is Executive Director of National Farm Worker Ministry. For information on current farm worker issues, worship materials and educational resources, visit www.nfwm.org.


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This article was published in the Winter 2006 issue of Catholic Rural Life©. No portion of this article may be reproduced without written permission from The National Catholic Rural Life Conference. To purchase the Spring 2006 issue of Catholic Rural Life, please contact The National Catholic Rural Life Conference office at 4625 Beaver Avenue, Des Moines, Iowa 50310-2199, call (515) 270-2634, or e-mail ncrlc@mchsi.com. The cost is $2.50 an issue plus postage and handling.