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by retrac
1190 days ago
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Helping out on the family farm is in its own category, in my opinion. For one thing, the parents are probably actually supervising. So they are probably taking some measures to ensure the child is not dismembered. Most parents do have a strong interest in making sure their children aren't wounded or killed. It becomes a different question when we're talking dozens of kids working in a corporate meat processing plant. > this is why food is cheap people True. Though as an outsider looking in, it looks disturbing like a class, or even a caste system. Children, illegal immigrants, and workers with little to no bargaining power -- confined mostly to specific rural regions of the country -- do backbreaking labour, often in illegal and unsafe conditions, in order to provide cheap food for the ruling middle class and elites. Said middle class and elites would rather perpetuate these conditions than face even a few % increase on the price of their food, which they'd be able to afford. I know you didn't mean that, of course. This is just me taking general aim. It's my first reaction to "this is why American food is so cheap" -- well should it be? Or are Americans just externalizing the costs of that cheap food on to others? |
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The Norman Rockwell image in popular culture of an American small family farm with kids building character helping out next to their parents produces less than 20% of US agricultural output today. The vast majority of farms (by volume, not by population) are much larger corporate operations, making over $1M/year, with the labor not reporting to Mom and Dad but to some plant supervisor.
Side note, I dispute that the "middle class and elites" would genuinely rather perpetuate these conditions than face even a few % increase in the price of food if given that choice. The problem is that this proposition assumes perfectly rational, fully-informed consumers, and that's not reality. It's impossible to know at the supermarket if a package is colored green and has a picture of a happy cow on it because it's from an environmentally responsible small family farm that treats their dairy cows with kindness or if that's just the packaging that polled well with the focus group, allowing Cargill or whoever to make even more profit. I'd personally be happy to pay a few percent more for my food if it would reduce pesticide and herbicide pollution, reduce single-use plastics, improve work conditions. But the people making those decisions have no realistic way to communicate with me (aside from the plastics I can see in the store, though too often the brown cardboard packaging is just to win my purchase and actually hides a plastic coating that makes it the worst of both worlds). The only real signal that's accurately transmitted is the price, and it should be obvious that uninformed consumers will choose the cheaper option.