Gangster of Food

Dear Delusional Right Wing Zealot,

In your righteous zeal to condemn anyone, no matter how poor, how desperate or hopelessly victimized as a serious threat to the security and wealth of our great nation, you have overlooked one obvious fact: your children are lazy, fantastically lazy. Not just your children, all American children raised on the supple breast of lady liberty are junk food munching, gadget collecting, TV zombies. Not only are your children lazy but you are probably lazy as well, not just physically, which is a great enough crime on its own, but also intellectually.

A lot of you feel like laziness is your right given by god and country and perhaps it is, but the fact remains if we are to consume, someone must produce. From i-phones to cheeseburgers the actual stuff must be there if we are to consume it. For the i-phone, the computer, the flat screen, the navigational system we can look abroad. To Africa, the middle east and Latin America for the raw materials and to the Far East for the labor. Behind every retailer, ad executive, public policy coordinator and computer programmer there are thousands of miners, sailors, oil rig operators, chemical plant workers, and manufacturing plant laborers providing the stuff that keeps them doing their thing. These people are generally located in areas where local economic and political factors conspire to keep their wages low, which is good because, who would pay even more for an i-phone?

The other thing that all these busy professionals need is food and this brings us to the cheeseburger, the actual food of which I am a gangster. Food is more complicated because it requires land to produce and land does not transport as easily as a Brooks Brothers clad VP does. Food is also bulky, relatively cheap and perishable. So the fact remains that we still need to produce at least some of our food here in the United States, because we have a lot of land. And a good climate and soil and so forth. The only thing we don’t have a lot of is people who are willing to work at wages that are low enough to restrict their access  to spacious and comfortable accommodations as well as good food and i-phones. Also, you can’t afford an i-phone if you spend all your money on food, so it has to stay really cheap. Artificially cheap. And seeing as your sons and daughters aren’t lining up to pick tomatoes in the summer in a swamp in the middle of Florida in order to earn little spending money. And seeing as the urban homeless aren’t hitchhiking down to Greeley, Colorado for the opportunity to wade around in a pool of beef blood and feces while hacking pieces of limbs off of dead beasts moving by at a speed so breathless that limbs of the living beasts are sometimes inadvertently severed. Shit, we can’t even get enough idealistic college students to head on down to Napa for the fall grape harvest for the kind of money they pay. We need to find someone else to do this dirty work because we still need to eat, and we need to eat cheap.

It wasn’t even the Latinos who came up with the idea, American meat and poultry producers came up with it way back in the nineteen eighties. You see, chicken farming is far from the idyllic, All American, pastoral mythos so winsomely evoked by the Perdue chicken farms label. As it turns out it is one of the most vile and contemptible jobs in this country. Anyway, I’m not Eric Schlosser so I’ll leave it at that. It will suffice to say, your kids ain’t gonna do that shit for too long. So the chicken producers came up with a great idea: seeing as the brown people to the south of us were living in increasing abject poverty due in part, to American economic policies (see: farm bill), why not advertise in the local papers down there for some labor? After all, after your generations- old corn farm goes belly up because the price of corn on the world market is such that you need 5000 heavily fertilized, intensively irrigated acres and a government subsidy just to pay the mortgage, what better next step in life than to move far away from your family and friends to a country where you don’t even speak the language and the locals refer to you alternatively as spic, greaser or frijole to earn peanuts for inhaling toxic quantities of ammonia gas?

I just think maybe, at the very least, we shouldn’t give these people such a hard time. Maybe we shouldn’t blame our pretty princess problems on the most put upon and vulnerable people in our land. You think rounding up all the spics and sending them back down south is going to solve even the most marginal unemployment rates? Do you really believe that, if we were to somehow rid ourselves entirely of the “brown menace”, that IBP and Tyson and Smith foods would just up and go to the cities and start offering all- comers decent wage jobs in safe and respectable facilities and your kid would go on down to the local slaughterhouse and get himself a job so he could learn the value of hard work in that year before college or on summer break?

The attitude became unbearable as I was listening to an account on the BBC the other day that described modern day slavery going on in this country right under our noses. Apparently, some “food producers” for lack of a better term, have been using threats of violence, intimidation and coercion in order to prevent their laborers from leaving the job. Not only that but they were extorting them by charging outrageous sums of money for ordinary, day to day necessities such as bathing under a garden hose. Many listeners wrote in to express their view that they had “no sympathy” for the victims of this modern day travesty of American Values because the victims were “probably illegal immigrants”. Like that’s the fucking issue. It’s not. The issue is that slavery, or anything like it, has been illegal in this country for almost 150 years. And freedom loving Americans should never tolerate this kind of activity by our citizens or on our soil. I thought, “my god the country is collectively stupider and more immoral than I ever would have believed possible”. So you don’t have a job, or your job sucks, your pissed yadda yadda yadda…. go on down to the local chicken factory and ask if you can shovel some shit. If they won’t let you it’s probably because the supervisor, shrewd man that he is, can look in those dull eyes of yours in that fat white face with that shit eatin’ grin and see the laziness written all over it.

Sincerely,

GOF