Death is Part of the U.S. Agrarian Utopia

Farmworkers, heat danger, and hope

Last week Dario Mendoza, 26, died while working on a farm in Yuma County, about 200 miles southwest of where I live in Mesa. This was reported by the Washington Post in an article about the heatwave that suffocated Arizona for almost all of July. Dario was mentioned halfway through reporting on the seven new heat-related deaths, stating that the high was 116 F the day he collapsed and that his death is under investigation by the Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health. The article moved on to the next tragedy, and the next and the next, like there’s no other way to act, no hope for change. Is it not a reportable fact that Dario’s death is an outrage?

When I say hope, I mean it as action. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in her introduction to Not Too Late, “Hope is not optimism. Optimism assumes the best, and assumes its inevitability, which leads to passivity, as do the pessimism and cynicism that assume the worst. Hope, like love, means taking risks and being vulnerable to the effects of loss. It means recognizing the uncertainty of the future and making a commitment to try to participate in shaping it.”

If you live in the U.S. or Canada, you’ve probably eaten something grown in Yuma. I know I have. Yuma County grows 90% of the winter leafy greens eaten in the U.S. and Canada, according to the Yuma Fresh Vegetable Association. A report by the University of Arizona says, “Yuma County accounts for about 30% of Arizona’s total agricultural cash receipts. There were 456 farms in Yuma County in 2017, covering 193,823 acres of cropland (94% irrigated).” The city of Mesa, where I live, covers 85,200 acres.

This mass of farms becomes indistinguishable when I’m in the grocery store deciding which lettuce to buy, in a rush, talking to my kids. I don’t think about the deadly conditions the workers face or that the farms depend on migrant laborers who have little protection in the U.S. The Yuma farms pump out vegetables as commodities at a terrifying pace, trying to keep up with my hunger. The farm doesn’t want me to come around and check the place out, but even so, it’s my local farm in a very real way. 

The Yuma farms are fulfilling the dreams of commerce, capitalism, and the agricultural system that’s been in place since after WW2. This system values making money first and sees the death of farmworkers as a cost that isn’t too high to pay. The system believes some people should remain poor to make others more powerful. 

But who am I to make broad accusatory statements? Reading Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (as part of my food politics education from Alicia Kennedy’s reading list) reminded me how little elites care to hide their contempt for workers. It’s true across time. In 1724, George Cheyne wrote in an essay, “Ideots, peasants, and mechanics have scarce any passions at all, or any lively sensations, and are incapable of lasting impressions.” Cheyne was a leading and well-respected physician, philosopher, and mathematician. I don’t want to link to any recent examples, but they are plenty even if sometimes more subtle.

I’m confident that farmworkers would fall under Cheyne’s dismissal, and in 2023 they remain low on the priority of care. Civil Eats reports on how food chain workers are demanding protection as lawmakers work on the 2023 farm bill. It’s insane to me, but the fact is that “food system workers have been left out of the past 18 farm bills stretching back to the 1930s, when the bill was first enacted.” There’s more work being done than ever to change this, and there’s some reason to be hopeful that more protections for workers will be in the 2023 farm bill. 

Everything about the conventional farming system wants to make the separation between picker and eater so great that the labor needed to bring lettuce to my table fades from notice. The ease of grocery stores is undeniable. I’ve lived in Arizona as an adult since 2017 and haven’t figured out a routine for consistent shopping at farmer’s markets or being part of a CSA. There are many human reasons: The CSA I used to be in shut down because of a death in the family. Usually I don’t want to drive farther to get to the farmer’s market. The Yuma farms fill in the gaps.

But I can’t unsee labor when I eat vegetables, and that began for me in 2016 when I actually had a local farm where I knew the people picking the vegetables. The separation disappeared. I wrote the newsletter for the organic farm in exchange for a CSA membership. This farm isn’t memorable only because of the produce – the most luscious, luxurious, and beautiful I’ve ever eaten – but because of the people. 2016 was a lonely uncertain year in my life. When the farm manager gave me the ‘job,’ he valued my writing at a time when it meant more than he knew. I was newly freelancing and staying at home with my young son while my husband slogged through grad school, making minimum wage.

I filled the newsletter with recipes for the vegetables people would receive in their boxes and hung out at the farm on pick-up day. A friend and I coordinated pick up times so our kids could play while we chatted. An older woman working for the farm quasi-adopted me and had me and my son over to her cottage often. She gave me old copies of The Sun magazine, and we talked about writing. 

The farm was started by a family and backed by the university in the town. They cared for their workers, and there were good working conditions. Some workers were grad students, and I’m sure they weren’t making much money, but they wanted to be there. (And the problems with the academic/grad student system is a story too big to get into right now.) Everyone at the farm believed that organic vegetables mattered and were happy to work hard to grow them. But no one was risking their life.

It’s interesting how clearly I remember it seven years later. I could write many newsletters about the memories from my time with that farm. It felt so good to be a part of it, to literally be able to hug the person who picked my vegetables.

Everything about my society and parts of myself wants the Yuma farm to fade into abstraction so I can avoid the true cost of my salad greens. My reading, though, reminds me that abstraction is an escape, a privilege, and a bogeyman that keeps us thinking there’s no way to change the systems and oppressions we live under and observe.

After reading Adrienne Rich, Claire Dederer, and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, I’m paying attention to how quickly I use “we” without questioning it in my writing. I notice how I want to talk in abstraction. I desire to be in an imaginary land with easier answers that inevitably delight in vagueness. 

But there’s nothing abstract about the fact that a young man, my brother’s age, died because of my shopping habits, the failure of the government to demand better, and the low value the farm system ascribes to the labor of picking vegetables.

I’m eating melon that Dario could have picked – we are not that far apart. I’m eating melon, his family is grieving. This wedge of injustice tries its damnedest to keep us apart.

Building a just and sustainable world will take all kinds of work. It requires picking vegetables just as much as creating better laws and regulations. It requires caring for the young, old, sick, unhoused, poor, and grieving just as much as it requires journalists’ reportage.

I live in a state where people are dying from the heat to keep everyone else fed. Writing about food, for me, must contend with this truth even as it overwhelms me. Good Enough remains in the name of this newsletter because now is as good enough time as any to act because it’s the time I have. To echo Jia Tolentino in Interview magazine, “I don’t feel that I have the right to consider giving up hope.”

We can upend things by changing how work is valued. By rejecting the model that wage determines value. I want to use this space to write about the work and workers so far undervalued and unprotected, as well as the people already using hope as action. But there are days when I need to write instead about someone who shouldn’t have died.