Tag: consumerism

Is Free Trade Fair?

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migrant workers in California

Migrant farm workers in California. (photo from Google images)

Last Friday, Andy and I attended a panel discussion about how to create a sustainable food system. We learned about the ways that farm workers here in Canada have been shipped in as cheap labor through temporary foreign worker programs, but are denied the basic protections that most people enjoy at their jobs—like paid vacation time, or overtime pay. “Piece rates,” rather than minimum wage, determine their income, and these rates are so low that half the workforce can’t pick produce fast enough to even make minimum wage! Workers are also at the mercy of unscrupulous contractors who function as the middlemen between farms and laborers, retaliating with job termination if workers complain about their housing, working conditions, or pay.

A priest running a migrant worker shelter two borders south, in Tijuana, Mexico, described the even larger problems facing agricultural workers in the United States. The U.S. economy depends on foreign labor, but unlike Canada, has no program for temporary workers at all. The result, he says, is an immigration system in chaos. 600,000 workers were deported from the U.S. last year. Many of them end up at the priest’s shelter, bewildered by their sudden twist of fate, separated from spouses and children, and—in many cases—finding themselves in Mexico for the first time in their lives. The priest told us about a surprising new industry popping up in Tijuana: call centers to employ the growing number of new deportees who speak better English than Spanish.

Mexican farmers

A small-scale farmer in Mexico (photo from Google images)

Ironically, it was an American-led free trade agreement which created the surge of illegal immigration from Mexico in the first place. When the North American Free Trade agreement (NAFTA) went into effect back in 1994, farming markets were opened so that peasant farmers in Mexico were suddenly competing against large, government-subsidized corn growers in the American Midwest. These small farmers couldn’t compete with the cheap imports from large-scale commercial farms in the U.S., and many of them went bust. Failed farms forced people to migrate first to Mexico’s cities, and then north to the U.S. looking for work. In the last ten years, narcotics cartels have intensified the problem by pushing even more Mexican farmers off their land and causing even urban dwellers to flee the threat of violence.

peasant farmers

Corn had been the staple crop in Mexico for centuries. (photo from Google images)

Finally, the director of the Domestic Fair Trade Association (DFTA) in Seattle, Washington, discussed the connection between the plight of small farmers in the U.S. and migrant farm workers from Latin America. Both are losing out against large-scale agribusiness, she says, and their best hope protecting their livelihoods is to band together to defend their rights against corporate giants like Monsanto. The DFTA is hoping to create these kinds of mutually beneficial partnerships all along the supply chain, connecting workers, farmers, suppliers, retailers, and consumers to work for the common good rather than pursuing their own economic benefit at the expense of others.

I have long been aware of the importance of buying fair trade when it comes to products imported from the developing world, such as coffee or chocolate. But this panel discussion opened my eyes to the reality that the agricultural sector here at home is hardly different from the unethical systems that prevail in other parts of the world.

The U.S. and Canada are wealthy, developed nations, but we are still depending on an underpaid, overworked labor force for our cheap, abundant food. Our laws do little to protect farm workers from exposure to harmful chemicals, abuse at the hands of their employers, and nonpayment of wages, and our legal system similarly lags behind in protecting the rights of small farmers.

These are serious problems that should concern anyone who eats food. The United States has an aging farm population, and we have reached a point as a society where we have more people in prison than we do on farms (an absurdity on both counts). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the general population has a life expectancy of 73, but the average migrant farm worker can only expect to live to the age of 49. Furthermore, EPA safety standards for farm workers haven’t been updated in twenty years.

It’s obvious in our laws and in the way we have structured our economy that we don’t value the people who produce our food. We have come to see them as just another inanimate, economic input; something to be squeezed for as much productivity on as little pay as possible, to keep profit margins high and prices low for consumers like us.

There is currently no federal regulation for fair trade.

Think about that for a moment.

Farms—companies of all kinds—are under no obligation to prove that their products have been created without exploiting the people or the natural landscapes of the places where they were produced. There’s no way for us to know whether the food that we’re eating has poisoned a river, poisoned someone else’s body, or relied on slave labor to make it to our plate.

It’s high time fair trade came home to North America. We have a responsibility as North Americans and as Christians to care for the people who are sustaining our lives while barely being able to eek out a life of their own in the most prosperous nations on earth.

The video below features interviews from small farmers and migrant workers in the American South, and follows the story of a farm in Florida that is becoming part of the solution:

The Good Life

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A few nights ago I went out with a friend to celebrate our birthdays, which fall just a few days apart. She is turning 19 years old. She had never visited a mall, or ventured even as far as the popular shopping street that lies just five minutes’ auto rickshaw ride from her house. I had floated the idea of going out for ice cream, and when we asked her older brother for permission (in the absence of her father, her brother is charged with the responsibility of keeping his sister safe and out of shameful situations), he suggested we go to this nearby market. My friend was immediately excited, because the shopping area includes Big Bazaar. She had been seeing commercials about Big Bazaar on TV for months, and it had long been her dream to visit the place herself.Big Bazaar is essentially an Indian version of Wal-Mart: clothing, household utensils and appliances, linens, groceries, and just about everything else you can imagine, all under one roof and available in air-conditioned convenience. Big Bazaar is quite a novel shopping experience if you’re used to bargaining with individual street vendors at a traditional outdoor market, and this Western, streamlined version is marketed as the place where “New India” (read: young, sophisticated, and modern India) shops.

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I can appreciate the peace of mind that comes from fixed prices instead of a haggling process in which you aren’t guaranteed to end up with a fair price. I can also understand the preference for shopping in air-conditioned comfort instead of having to wander around outside. But there’s also something tragic about the idea of India’s traditional outdoor bazaars being replaced by a characterless alternative. Many of my neighbors take pride in their bartering skill; for them, haggling is an enjoyable game and an accomplishment to be proud of rather than a source of stress. At our local vegetable market, A. knows many vendors by name, and is friends with their family members. He sees them every day, and they often throw in a sprig of fresh cilantro or a handful of chili peppers for free, as a token of friendship. We were once invited to a wedding for one of the family members of our veggie supplier. At Big Bazaar, the suppliers are faceless and the check-out people are strangers. Everyone in the store is anonymous. But it’s not just the sentimental value of relationships or the communal feel of a local economy that’s at stake—it’s also local people’s livelihoods. Over half of India’s population is self-employed, and in my city that includes about 10,000 street vendors who sell snacks, clothes, chai cups, buckets, samosas, and everything else that’s available at outdoor markets. Besides those vendors, there are also thousands of small-scale entrepreneurs whose income depends on small shops, restaurants, tea stalls, beauty parlors, and print shops. If Big Bazaar really becomes New India’s main shopping destination, then that will mean thousands of “little people” going out of business in the wake of corporate consolidation… much like the effects of Wal-Mart on small towns in the U.S.

As we walked into the bottom floor of the tall building, my friend squeezed my hand tightly. “I’ve heard that they have those moving staircases here,” she said, “and there’s no way I’ll be able to walk on those!” I laughed. “You’ll have to,” I said, steering her towards the escalator, “because there’s no other staircase!” As we approached the bottom of the escalator, we noticed a middle-aged woman who was also preparing to brave the “moving stairs” for the first time. She stood nervously with her scarf over her head, tentatively stretching one leg out in front of her and pulling it back in a panic each time her foot actually made contact with the steps. “Come on, let’s go together,” I said, grabbing her arm. The two escalator rookies clung to each of my arms and hovered just behind me as I guided them forward onto the steps. Hesitantly, they made a dramatic leap onto the bottom stair and then wobbled precariously back and forth as it began to move, threatening to pull all three of us backward onto the ground. At this point we all burst into laughter: me at the hilarity of the situation; they at the relief of realizing they had survived and we were moving. It was only a few seconds, however, before they both realized that we were gliding inevitably toward an equally terrifying dismount. Anxious concentration gripped them and they in turn gripped my arms; with another awkward leap, they were safely on the terra firma of the second floor. Now we stood together in hysterics, along with the woman’s two younger relatives who appeared to be veterans of the moving staircase and had been awaiting her arrival at the top. Other shoppers cocked their heads in confusion as they passed, probably trying to guess the relationship between the foreigner and the apparent villagers.

As we walked around, my friend was in awe of the bright lights, the cold air emanating from the refrigerated section, the entire aisles filled with endless varieties of hair care products, soap, or laundry detergent. She marveled at the sheer volume of spices, vegetables, packaged snacks, and grains arranged in colorful displays. To her, the store was the picture of luxury, endless options, and prosperity. It was a sort of stepping-through-the-looking-glass experience of walking into the clean, shiny world of TV serials and cosmetic advertisements, but she was still living it vicariously; the jewelry, shampoo, or clothing that caught her eye was always shockingly expensive.

After our tour of Big Bazaar, we stepped into a couple of shops selling expensive wedding clothes so that my friend could look for Eid clothes, but I warned her that they would likely be very expensive. At the end of Ramazan, everyone who can afford it buys fancy new clothes to wear on Eid, similar to the tradition of Easter clothes that I grew up with. She seemed to enjoy holding up the beautiful dresses to herself in the mirror (again, just one step removed from actually wearing them). But after she had checked a couple of price tags I could also see that she was visibly uncomfortable with the attention of shop attendants since she knew herself to be somewhat of an imposter: there was nothing in the store that she could afford or that I would be willing to pay for.

We left the shops and wandered down the street admiring the carts of bangles, earrings, and deep-fried potato snacks. We passed several restaurants and a small table for a mehendi walla, with laminated photo examples of the intricate henna designs he would draw on women’s hands or feet, for a fee. We finally settled on Indian-style “Chinese” food at a small open-air restaurant for dinner, and over the meal I asked her what her favorite thing was that had happened between her last birthday and this one.

She looked at me with conviction. “Eshweety,” she said, in her endearingly stylized pronunciation of my English name, “This day is the best thing that has happened to me all year.”

“You’ve wanted to come here for a long time,” I said. “Is it the way you expected it to be, or is it different.?”

She fixed me with her intense gaze again. “It’s exactly as I imagined,” she said seriously. “It is wonderful.”

After dinner, we headed to an air-conditioned ice cream parlor for dessert. As we stepped through the doorway, a blast of cold air evaporated the sweat on our faces and necks. We sat down on a cushioned bench that ran the length of the back wall, painted with bright colors and studded with narrow windows into the attached restaurant behind. Our table faced the front counter where a rainbow of different ice cream flavors were on display under chilled glass panels. There was music from an old Hindi film playing. “It’s so peaceful in here,” my friend said in wonderment as she ran her eyes over the room. I slid a menu in front of us.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Whatever you want. I don’t know,” she said.

The menu was in English, but even my translated descriptions were difficult for her to conceptualize. She had never heard of an ice cream sundae. I ordered two small sundaes to share, and I have to say, they were beautiful. It had been a long time since I had seen an ice cream sundae, either.

My friend was beaming. “Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for bringing me here! This is so great!” she gushed. “I will never forget this!”

It was 9:30 pm when we paid and stepped back onto the street. “I can’t believe I’m still out right now!” she said. “And by ourselves! I’ve never been out this late in my whole life.”

I laughed. “It feels free, doesn’t it?”

“Exactly,” she replied.

On birthdays, I usually ask people what their plans or hopes are for the next year, but with my friend I didn’t want to take away from the joy of this simple moment by pondering too long on the big picture or bringing up a reminder that there is little for my friend to realistically hope for, much less to plan for. She had wanted to finish high school, but that is an unfulfilled dream, closed forever: she dropped out last year to help care for her mother after her health seriously deteriorated. After being forced to abandon her studies, she joined a six-month tailoring course nearby, but family circumstances had prevented her from completing that, either. Her family is currently trying to arrange her marriage to some boy from a village out in the middle of nowhere. My friend will likely be married off by this time next year.

But that night, my friend was just a teenage girl experiencing the thrill of shopping at a mall for the first time, and she was giddy with excitement. To her, this outing was synonymous with freedom and maturity and the good life. I was happily amused by her enthusiasm, and thoroughly enjoying her big smiles after so many months of heavy conversations about her constricted world in which nothing is under her control and nothing seems to turn out well.

And yet… I was aware of a sadness, too, under my momentary enjoyment; a premonition of the dead-end of discontent in which this would all end. I want my friend to have more control over her own life, and more opportunity for new and interesting experiences. But I don’t want her to equate happiness with access to all of the shiny, expensive products we saw in the stores, and to feel that she will never be happy or important or beautiful without them. That was the underlying contradiction throughout the whole night: ambivalence about exposing my friend to more of this world when I knew that it would reinforce the idea of a “modern,” Western, consumer lifestyle being the pinnacle of experience; when I knew that it would encourage her to emulate the culture of higher-ups in society whose whiter skin and stylish clothes seem to make them “superior.” I didn’t want her to see the mall as a paradisaical antithesis to the slum, because that’s what all the ads and the daytime TV are trying to say, and it isn’t true.

How do I explain that I grew up with malls and movies and ice cream, but that the things I hold most precious in life have only begun to develop in the years since all of those things started to lose their sheen for me? The truth is that all the accoutrements that money can buy can’t fill an empty life with meaning or love, and I knew that many of the well-dressed women who brushed shoulders with us in the aisles of Big Bazaar probably didn’t lead lives that were much more free or fulfilling than my friend’s.

The Ugly Truth About The Beauty Myth

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          A few months ago, I read Naomi Wolf’s book The Beauty Myth and it felt like a missing piece sliding into place, naming that vast and vague sense of unfairness that I have instinctively felt since childhood. It’s the reason that as long as I can remember, I have been surrounded by private and public conversation that centers on the pitiless appraisal of women’s bodies. The reason I was able to so easily detach from my real appetite for several years in order to hinge my hunger instead on whether or not the reflection in the mirror deserved food or not. The reason why I have so often fallen into the catch-22 of aching to hear that I was beautiful, only to find that the judgment, having been passed, reaffirms my precarious position more than my personhood, and that I feel resentful towards the man who has power to pass such a judgment in the first place without needing mine in return.

If you’re a woman, you can probably relate to these kinds of experiences. If you’re not a woman, ask one who’s close to you about this and she can probably tell you how this same undercurrent has pulled at her throughout her life. ­But I have hope that if this thing has a name—if it is a man-made construction rather than simply “the way things are” or, worse, “the way God designed things to be”—well, then it’s a system we can climb out of to claim our freedom.

The book explains the myth that our society has constructed: that beauty is a universal, eternal, and unchanging quality, and that possessing it is the only way for women to obtain worth, love, or power in society. Any cross-cultural experience or historical research quickly reveals that standards of beauty are diverse and contradictory throughout time and across the globe. While I grew up always trying to get a tan in the summer, my Chinese friends were horrified at the idea of ruining pale skin with sunlight, and while women in the U.S. diet to stay slim, my Indian friends tell me I’m too skinny and encourage me to get “nice and fat.” Think of foot binding and corsets and all the other strange things women have done over the centuries in pursuit of “beauty”. Nonetheless, the current beauty myth has been retold with such an alloy of fervor and monotony in advertisements, literature, film, popular culture, and even scientific journals that it has convinced most women, either consciously or unconsciously, that their worth lies in their sex appeal.  With that in mind, women are essentially doomed to an endless treadmill of buying products and disciplining their bodies as they strive toward an ideal of “beauty” which, with the advent of photoshop, airbrushing, and mass media, is based less on the human form than on the humanoid creations of advertisers and pornographers.

The belief system inspired by the myth explains why, despite the fact that women are more educated, enjoy better health, and have more legal rights, professional opportunities, and influence in wider society than at any other time in history, we’re in a worse state than any previous generation of women “in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically.”  Writing in the early ‘90s (and all of these trends have surely intensified since then), Wolf points out that over the last few years, “eating disorders rose exponentially… cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing medical specialty… pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal.”

Wolf maintains that this unrealistic ideal and the unhealthy lengths women go to in order to achieve it have not come about accidentally. This situation has been invented—by advertisers, among others—in order to keep women more concerned with maintaining their appearance than with bringing the full power of their energy and intellect to bear on the world. Who knows what kind of upheaval might result in society from women collectively unleashing their full talents for the first time, after centuries of restrictive roles and separate spheres that have prevented them from participating fully in human history?

The beauty myth creates a caste system which offers social rewards sporadically and temporarily, but playing by its rules, even the most beautiful woman ultimately loses (it’s no coincidence that to be a model, an eating disorder is basically a prerequisite). Whatever fleeting admiration she gains through the system feels like love, but it blocks the real thing by never allowing a woman’s true self to be recognized and loved for who she is. And eventually she will grow older, the lines and marks of lived experience on her body disqualifying her for “beauty” and taking away all her power and worth in society. Wolf suggests that the way out of this mess is not to scramble towards the top of the heap, but to refuse to be locked inside of a caste system at all.

How have we bought into this lie and perpetuated its power in our own lives and the lives of others? What does it look like to break free and to help others do the same?

Source: New feed

Comfortable Crucifixion 

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art by Banksy
          I’ve been contemplating this image a lot since I came across it a few weeks ago, thinking of how poignant it is for the nails in Jesus’ hands to be represented by shopping bags; for the sin nailing him to the cross to be the greed and excess of consumerism.  More specifically, of my consumption.

Living “simply” doesn’t mean I’ve conquered that internal drive to pursue comfort by acquiring more. I realized the other day that when I think of my home country, for example, what often come to mind are the products that I miss. Jamba Juice. Peppermint mochas from Starbucks. Scented body wash. Comfortable furniture. And I suppose that’s not bad in itself, but why are those the things that come to mind when I’m feeling tired and discouraged? The other day I thought about wandering around the supermarket in my hometown and just the idea of leisurely browsing aisle after aisle of specialty foods in air-conditioned comfort with endless options and variety and a massive supply that never runs out sounded so good to me. I found myself daydreaming about just walking around there, not even buying anything.  I mean, I like eating hummus and cheese and Fritos and all those things you just can’t get easily in Northern India, but even just shopping for them sounds comforting and familiar. The idea of the glossy lights and colors of the cosmetics section brings up similar feelings, even though I hardly own any makeup and am usually turned off by all of the advertising when I’m actually near it.

The Kingdom of God that Jesus is constantly talking about in the Gospels encompasses God’s vision for humanity to enjoy freedom, justice, mercy, peace, and inclusion in a community of love. In first century Palestine, the powers of evil which killed Jesus were embodied in the brute force of Rome and the religious authority of the Pharisees, whose legalistic, judgmental, and top-down religious system was set against everything his Kingdom stood for. In the same way, perhaps a big part of the Empire and religious establishment of our day is the soulless system of materialism, consumption, and ever-increasing wealth in which we are all enmeshed in some way or another, whether we realize it or not. Globally, this system values profits and products over people, exploits the poor and vulnerable with low wages and unsafe working conditions to create cheap, mass-produced commodities for the wealthy, and often involves the degradation of the natural world in order to create these disposable items that will one day become trash in a landfill.

And this impersonal system of commerce not only harms our neighbors—it eats away at our own souls as well.  We consume to feel beautiful, important, safe, impressive, comforted, or just distracted from the needs of the world and the inner turmoil of our souls.  Maybe we even pursue more and more external stimuli and experiences and possessions in order to be distracted from the gaping fear that if we ever stopped to look too deeply within ourselves we might find that we are not who we present ourselves to be, or—worse— that there is nothing of substance within us at all.  There are a lot of buoyant memories from my younger years of happily buying a new outfit or accessory or CD and feeling a sense of fulfillment with the new appearance or experience I was instantly gratified with, but I remember too that none of those times ever felt like the last time I would need another stick of eyeliner or some new music. There was always more out there that I didn’t have, and as trends changed I would inevitably want more or at least something different than what I already had. Seasonal fashion and planned obsolescence and insecurity  in who we are can fuel continuous consumption that makes us feel like we’re on the way to being a happier person by satiating ourselves or achieving a certain image, but we never seem to arrive. I still find this mistaken belief system at work in my heart.

As I consider this unorthodox but rather profound image of Jesus on the cross, the thought strikes me that this carefully-cultivated superficiality needs to be crucified before authentic life can grow in its place.