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A Better Food System For All
Sept. 9, 2008
By ROC Stewardship Council Member Maricela Morales

In May of this year, what was then the single largest worksite Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in U.S. history involved 900 ICE agents and occurred at a slaughterhouse and meat packing plant. Nearly 400 food workers were shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles and fenced in at the site of the National Cattle Congress Fairground in Iowa. The children of the food workers were left to fend for themselves for as long as three days because of their parents’ sudden and unexplained disappearance, at the hands of the Department of Homeland Security.

In California, six farm workers have died over the last few months due to extreme heat exposure. The first was a seventeen year old young woman who was pregnant and had been working for over eight hours in one-hundred degree weather. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), farm workers, although not the only employees to work outdoors, are the most likely to die of heat exposure.

Concern for farm workers and a desire to work collaboratively with farmers to address worker justice is what brought me to the Ventura County Ag Futures Alliance (AFA) and from the AFA I was inspired to join ROC and the New Mainstream Campaign. As Associate Executive Director of the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) it was important to see that the New Mainstream Campaign for a sustainable food system entailed some twenty goals, several of which are based in social and economic justice values including a living wage, health insurance and safe and decent housing for workers. There is even talk of food and farming workers having “significant opportunities for personal development and advancement.” For low wage and undocumented food workers, such opportunities are rare. In addition to food and farming workers, the New Mainstream Campaign also prioritizes increased access to healthy food for all people, in particular neighborhoods and communities that are plagued by an overabundance of unhealthy fast food and mini-mart-style processed food outlets and a seriously inadequate number of places where working families and youth can buy healthy, local, fresh and tasty real food.

ROC’s work for a sustainable food system is critical not only for basic human survival but also to make possible what we aspire to for ourselves and our community. We aspire to experiencing joy, and food can either bring us joy or disease. We aspire to economic sufficiency and our food system can either drive farmers to bankruptcy and suicide or it can be profitable for farmers and co-producers. We aspire to the beauty of open fields instead of parking lots or run-down buildings, and agriculture provides us that beauty. The New Mainstream Campaign then is as practical as it is visionary.

More and more people are taking part in realizing the vision of a sustainable food system. That is the energy and power of ROC – you and all of us working together. ROC has engaged thousands through the Changemakers network (www.roctnetwork.org/join) , Ag and Food Sustainability Alliances, Fellows Program, regional and statewide policy working groups and most recently the call to action for a 21st Century Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture (www.fooddeclaration.org) . So whether your interested in farming, farm workers, buying local, reversing the obesity epidemic, feeding the hungry, protecting biodiversity, animals, air, land and water or you like to eat fair, good, clean food there’s a place for you at the ROC table. Join us!
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