Buying Green

Posted by Timothy Dzurilla May 17, 2007

There is a movement in the United States and Europe to eat food that is “organically grown”. We have high-priced special grocery stores, purchase products with cute little stamps, and think the more plastic wrapping on a veggies the better it must be.

Needless to say, I believe this movement to be both pretentious and contrary to the ultimate goals of said movement.

The fine folks actually growing foods that are truly organic cannot afford the certification for those cute little stamps; the fine folks without the funds to buy healthy food cannot do so because of selective governmental agricultural subsidies favoring soy and corn.

What does this have to do with Latin American and Caribbean cuisine? Everything!

In 1993, President Clinton increased border security between the US and Mexico before announcing the oxymoronically named neoliberal policy, NAFTA, in 1994, because of the predicted number of Mexican and Latin American farmers fleeing to the US to find work. And they did with the decrease in money earned by farmers and the consolidation of agricultural land.

In the past four months the recent demand for “green fuels” has driven up the cost of the tortilla – a fundamental staple in Latin American cuisine – as a result of the disappearance of local, small farmers. The existing “organic” or “green” farms in Latin America are typically worked by illegal immigrants and resemble old Spanish haciendas.

How then do families in Latin America afford to feed their family? Send the eldest son to the US to take a low-end job for a few years to earn enough money to get out of debt.

Cuisine is more than showing off your newest culinary skills for friends, more than buying “green” products so you feel better about a lifestyle that is in all likelihood wasteful in ways the world has never seen, and, in some ways, more than feeding yourself and your family. How we feed ourselves is a geopolitical statement for sure. Just make sure your buying the statement you want to make.

Start a discussion and we can continue to chew the fat on this topic.