Viernes

[logovo]

DW & LJ & IJ
You know how there are all these posts where people explain how they're going to handle crossposting and commenting in different journaling services? This post is not that!

I have no freakin idea what I'm going to be doing from one week to the other. Like it's a mood thing, which is not helpful to other people, but I'm hoping not much of an inconvenience. Besides having accounts seemingly everywhere, I also have a Spanish LJ which I've been pretty much ignoring for months now. I'm not moved to post in Spanish lately and have been feeling distracted and low energy about fannish stuff in general. What that is about I don't know and it makes me slightly unhappy.

Stuffed and Starved
This morning I began yet another scary food business book, Stuffed and Starved, reading the chapter on how Mexicans from the south of the country really have very few choices if they don't want to starve. Since NAFTA went through the small farmers were doomed, and now it's either go to the big cities (where the extra workers have driven down wages for everyone) or come to the US. I think a lot of people don't realize that Mexicans coming in as unskilled labor into the US would have much rather have stayed in their small towns, trying to make a living like their parents did. That just isn't an option anymore, with cheap corn and other crops coming in from the US. One surprising factoid that I got from this book is that the US only buys about 2% of all it's imported crops from Mexico. That seems incredibly low, so I need to check where they got that number from.

Comments

[normaltrouble]

There are some people out there, and yes, I have spoken to them...personally, I think they should be tagged, and tracked, like wild animals, but I digress...who are :
1. Extremely worried about produce that comes from Mexico.
Also:
2. I am convinced, if you gave them the best tasting most delicious salad they had ever tasted in their life and advised them 50% of it came from Mexico after they were moaning in saladtastic ecstasy, they'd start complaining...about how horrible!it!tasted!
And...
3. There is also a contingent that believe that trucks filled to the brim with horrific!Mexican!produce! are being thrown willynilly and unmarked and unsigned and undocumented in unmarked trucks into markets all through the USA....
Furthermore...
4. There is no reasoning with these folks. You could pay their way through college and get them a fancy degree in international food trade and marketing and they still wouldn't understand a damned thing.

[bell]

Mexicans coming in as unskilled labor into the US would have much rather have stayed in their small towns, trying to make a living like their parents did. That just isn't an option anymore, with cheap corn and other crops coming in from the US.

Yeah.... I wish more people knew that. I wish more people realized that the better conditions are available to everyone everywhere, problems like overwhelming immigration, terrorism, starvation and crime would lessen. Instead of just looking out for their own selves and their profits. *sighs*

I think I need to read that book, Stuffed and Starved.

[logovo]

I'm amazed by the low percentage quoted of produce brought in from Mexico, so maybe next time you can tell them that they need to worry about other countries too ;) Nah, they probably wouldn't get it. But they are right in worrying about the food chain, where you have no idea where your food is coming from. The Mexican chiles with salmonella last year and the milk with - gah! cant' remember what the problem was - the milk from China. Oh and the peanut butter in that filthy plant in Georgia -- all about reducing costs, paying the farmers and workers the lowest amounts possible... Oh, and then the 2008 recall of US ground beef because of e-coli, beef being sold at Whole Foods of all places :/

[logovo]

It's a very hard life to leave everything you know to go to another country to become a minority that's despised by many, it's seems such an obvious thing that most people would rather not put themselves through that, but that seems to get lost a lot of the time when dealing with immigration.

[logovo]

Oh, and the book is pretty good so far!

[bell]

The difficulties immigrants face are not appreciated by either the people in the country they're going to, or the country they're from.... the country attracting the immigrants get angry, and the one exporting immigrants (often) have false ideas/hopes of what it's like to work in a richer place. But immigrants, I do not envy them. Low-wage jobs, being in a hated minority, away from home and culture and family, uncertainty of future.... it's tough.

[franzeska]

I can't believe how dumb people can be about immigrants. Who wouldn't rather stay in their home town? (Or at least in a big city that's closer to home and speaks the same language.) Sheesh. But I guess the specter of Job Stealing Oh No is more exciting than applying a little common sense.