Speaker 1: Zone media.
Speaker 2: When I was younger, I had a variety of jobs
Speaker 2: for a pretty young age. I'd help out with lambing.
Speaker 2: A lot of people around us had a lot more
Speaker 2: sheep than we did, so pretty often in springtime, when
Speaker 2: I wasn't at school, I'd be dropped off at a
Speaker 2: barn in the morning with overalls, boots and a pack lunch.
Speaker 2: After school, I worked in shipping for a tomato grow
Speaker 2: It sucked and I hated it. If I'm going to
Speaker 2: work that hard, I want to be outside all day.
Speaker 2: That was the only time in my life I've ever
Speaker 2: had to interface with the Microsoft exelf. It defeated me.
Speaker 2: I've done all sorts of other things too, shot pigeons,
Speaker 2: torn about, flood damaged houses, short ordered cooked, walked through
Speaker 2: the woods with a bunch of other guys to make
Speaker 2: some birds fly towards some rich people with guns, mucked
Speaker 2: our horses, even delivered frozen turkeys on a bicycle once.
Speaker 2: I've done some horror stuff too. Once I had to
Speaker 2: wear a hazmat suit to demolish your walk in freezer
Speaker 2: that have been without power for a month. It was
Speaker 2: one of the worst things I've ever smelled. It smelled
Speaker 2: worse than death. I've never seen so many grown adults
Speaker 2: vomiting in one place at one time. Hello, and welcome
Speaker 2: to my podcast. I promise that would be one of
Speaker 2: the only mentions of feted smells today. I'm doctor James
Speaker 2: Stout and this is Natural Causes, a podcast about going outside.
Speaker 2: Today we're talking about food, the people who make it,
Speaker 2: and the giant corporations who ship bit across the western
Speaker 2: hemisphere and put it inside a tortilla. Let's go so.
Speaker 2: As I said, I've had lots of jobs. I hate
Speaker 2: inside work. I'm under no illusion about outside work either.
Speaker 2: A lot of people seem to glorify manual labor these days,
Speaker 2: but working outside with your hands, your back, you're baking
Speaker 2: knees and your sore feet and the hot and the
Speaker 2: cold for endless weeks isn't particularly bucolic either. That's the
Speaker 2: way I feel about fruit and veg faking. It's hard, repetitive,
Speaker 2: often very poorly compensated. I have massive respect for the
Speaker 2: folks who do it, and I hope for a world
Speaker 2: but one day they are fairly compensated and treated with dignity.
Speaker 2: Right now, those folks who are out in the fields
Speaker 2: all day in the sun and every penny they make,
Speaker 2: and sadly that's not very many pennies. So recently, when
Speaker 2: I saw a disturbing trend that people blaming workers for
Speaker 2: the cyclospora outbreak that currently has America experiencing it unprecedented
Speaker 2: in continents outbreak for the modern era, an outbreak that
Speaker 2: has now killed two people, I wanted to weigh it.
Speaker 2: I don't think the reason twenty five thousand people, more
Speaker 2: than five times the previous record number of cases, are
Speaker 2: currently suffering through quote explosive diarrhea. It's something we can
Speaker 2: lay at the feet of the hard working people who
Speaker 2: pick your letters. I do think it's absolutely something we
Speaker 2: can blame on labor exploitation, voluntary self regulation in the
Speaker 2: food industry, and the slashing of the food safety apparatus
Speaker 2: by DOGE. So let's get into America's in continent summer.
Speaker 2: Who's behind it? On why half the Midwest is currently
Speaker 2: experiencing Well, let's hear from an expert what they're experiencing.
Speaker 3: It's called explosive diarrhea because your body is not really
Speaker 3: good at telling the difference between liquid and gas.
Speaker 4: So the kind of signals.
Speaker 3: You're getting when you have to go is a little
Speaker 3: bit messed up, and so you may think it's one
Speaker 3: thing and you've got just like a high volume of
Speaker 3: liquid leaving your body at that point.
Speaker 2: That's Liz, who kindly responded to my request for a
Speaker 2: shit'splosion understander when I posted it online recently. I think
Speaker 2: now is a good time to say that, as tempted
Speaker 2: as I am to use the word shitting yourself throughout
Speaker 2: this episode, I understand that that's something that folks with
Speaker 2: IBS would find it hurtful. So I'm going to try
Speaker 2: and using continents instead, because I would rather be unkind
Speaker 2: to people causing massing continents than the people living within continents. Also,
Speaker 2: two people have lost their lives to this condition, so
Speaker 2: I want to bring the gravity that this deserves. Anyway,
Speaker 2: here's Liz.
Speaker 3: Even common Liz, I work for a health department on
Speaker 3: the West Coast.
Speaker 2: In case you somehow miss a NonStop stream of reporting
Speaker 2: on this topic, let me catch you up. Fifteen states
Speaker 2: in the United States are currently experiencing a cyclosporer outbreak.
Speaker 2: Cyclospora is a little parasite and it finds its way
Speaker 2: into the human body by ingestion. In this case, it
Speaker 2: finds its way into the human body by ingesting letters.
Speaker 2: The outbreak was first linked to a salad served at
Speaker 2: Taco Bell. You shocked, but obviously Taco Bell doesn't grow salad.
Speaker 2: A company called Tailor Farms the Mexico does, though. On
Speaker 2: the seventeenth of July, they voluntarily pulled their iceberg letters
Speaker 2: from shelves, and the next day they were identified as
Speaker 2: the cause of this outbreak by the FDA. Then the
Speaker 2: FDA announced they had found cyclospora in Tailor Farms letters,
Speaker 2: and then they retracted that statement, but they nonetheless said
Speaker 2: that they had quote overwhelming epidemiological data that linked the
Speaker 2: salad producer to the INCONTINENTUS outbreak flowing through the Midwest.
Speaker 2: Tailor Farms is a huge conglomerate that grows much of
Speaker 2: its lettuce in Mexico. It's based in California, and it
Speaker 2: is the world's largest cut fruit and veedge producer. In
Speaker 2: a profile of the company for the Berkeley High School
Speaker 2: of Business newsletter, it's identified as being a quote seven
Speaker 2: billion dollar enterprise. They don't know if that means revenue
Speaker 2: or value or what, but it's a big ass company.
Speaker 2: They have about twenty five thousand employees, which is roughly
Speaker 2: equal to the number of people within continents due to
Speaker 2: their lettuce. But what exactly is it cyclost for his
Speaker 2: stuff and how did it get into a crunch.
Speaker 3: Rep Cyclospora cataianensis only infects human beings, at least as
Speaker 3: far as we know. In order to replicate, it has
Speaker 3: to infect the lightning of our intestine, so it needs
Speaker 3: to have a cycle through a human body in order
Speaker 3: to infect other human beings. You know, it's shed when
Speaker 3: somebody who has an infection has diarrhea or you know,
Speaker 3: just otherwise has a bowel movement somewhere. That material gets
Speaker 3: into the environment and then the parasite in the form
Speaker 3: that it's shed, it has to spend a couple of
Speaker 3: weeks out in just the open environment to kind of grow.
Speaker 3: It's not really a shell, but it's kind of a shell.
Speaker 3: It insists or it sporulates is the kind of term
Speaker 3: for it. And then only after that happens can you
Speaker 3: get infected with it.
Speaker 4: It's got a durable shell.
Speaker 3: The shell allows it to kind of be ingested by people,
Speaker 3: get through our stomach acid and into our intestines, where
Speaker 3: it breaks open and it starts to cycle.
Speaker 2: Again. I think this is where the basis for the
Speaker 2: supposition that this comes from farm workers comes from. But
Speaker 2: let's consider that a bit more deeply. The Lotti goes,
Speaker 2: I think that someone used the bathroom, either in a
Speaker 2: field or in a porter body or something, and then
Speaker 2: couldn't wash their hands or didn't wash their hands. Like
Speaker 2: everyone to pause here and say, I'm an outside person
Speaker 2: a shit in the woods more often than most people.
Speaker 2: But most people are not just dropping trout in the field.
Speaker 2: Let's throw that one out as a fairly ridiculous and
Speaker 2: quite racist supposition. In some parts of the tropics, cyclospora
Speaker 2: is endemic, and people there tend to suffer a lot
Speaker 2: less of the symptoms that people hear suffer when they
Speaker 2: conteract it. That means that sometimes cyclospora is present in
Speaker 2: the water supply, and if clean water is not being
Speaker 2: used to irrigate crops, then the cyclospora parasite could have
Speaker 2: got on crops that way. The question we should be asking, though,
Speaker 2: is how did it go from one field or number
Speaker 2: of fields to twenty five thousand infections. It is possible
Speaker 2: that someone wasn't provided with proper hand washing capabilities at
Speaker 2: a porter body. Even if that person picked letters for
Speaker 2: the rest of their shift, that does not account for
Speaker 2: the scale of what's happening to the sewers of the
Speaker 2: Midwest right now. I asked Liz, what might explain it? Now,
Speaker 2: this is just speculation, but I do think it's well
Speaker 2: informd speculation.
Speaker 4: You can have a.
Speaker 3: Small number of heads of lettuce that have the parasite
Speaker 3: on it, but if it's going through a shredder and
Speaker 3: the shredder is not clean all the time, it's like.
Speaker 4: A super spreader event for cyclospora.
Speaker 3: Like you know, you're singing into the event in a
Speaker 3: cruise ship, but it's cyclospora through a lettuce shrudder.
Speaker 2: These facilities might wash letters with chlorine, but chlorine isn't
Speaker 2: going to kill cyclosporer. So now let's just contaminated. Have
Speaker 2: created a machine that effectively does every letter so that
Speaker 2: goes through it with a microdose of parasites and then
Speaker 2: sends it on its merry way north where it makes
Speaker 2: it into a tailor farm's salad product that is sold
Speaker 2: to any number of restaurants or customers, and then someone
Speaker 2: eats it and then they experiencing continents. In fact, the
Speaker 2: day that we're recording this, which is the fourteenth, a
Speaker 2: couple of days before you receive it. We just learned
Speaker 2: that the FDA has sent inspectors to a Tailor Farm's
Speaker 2: processing plant in Mexico. I don't know why it took
Speaker 2: them this long, but it does give more creed than
Speaker 2: to this theory that Liz has. So how do we
Speaker 2: get from that to an outbreak? Well? I have not
Speaker 2: eaten at Taco Bell since George W. Bush's president, but
Speaker 2: my understanding is that it has a bad reputation regarding
Speaker 2: this exact issue. Actually, Taylor Farm supplies many other retailers
Speaker 2: repaired food and sells some package salad products to consumers
Speaker 2: that are also being recalled right now. Amusingly, I went
Speaker 2: on the FDA website today to confirm the record items,
Speaker 2: and I found that Tailor Farms is now doing a different,
Speaker 2: separate subsequent recall for salmonella as well. Great stuff, But
Speaker 2: before we get any further into this, we're ten minutes
Speaker 2: into the show existing. I think I have thoroughly burned
Speaker 2: any future Taco Bell partnership potential, But like twenty five
Speaker 2: thousand people in the Midwest, I am obligated to spray
Speaker 2: some shit out right now in the form of advertisements
Speaker 2: up to Saint Clair write a book about migrant labor
Speaker 2: in the food industry, and I want to quote from
Speaker 2: that now. So long as we have waged slavery, answered Shiliman,
Speaker 2: it matters not in the least how debasing and repulsive
Speaker 2: b task may be. It is easy to find people
Speaker 2: to perform it. But just as soon as the labor
Speaker 2: is set free, then the price of such work will
Speaker 2: begin to rise. So one by one the old dingy
Speaker 2: and unsanitary factories will come down. It will be cheaper
Speaker 2: to build new and so the steam stitch will be
Speaker 2: provided stoking machinery, and the dangerous trades will be made safe,
Speaker 2: or substitutes will be found for their products. In exactly
Speaker 2: the same way as the citizens of our industrial republic
Speaker 2: become refined. Year by year, the cost of slaughter house
Speaker 2: products will increase untill eventually those who want to eat
Speaker 2: meat will have to do their own killing. And how
Speaker 2: long do you think the custom would survive? Then? Well,
Speaker 2: how did that work out? Turns out that instead of
Speaker 2: conditions getting better, labour getting more free, and food price
Speaker 2: is rising, capital got more free and labor got more controlled.
Speaker 2: Starting with the passage of NAFTA, the North American Free
Speaker 2: Trade Agreement, it has become easier and easier for money
Speaker 2: to cross borders and harder and harder for people to
Speaker 2: do the same thing. Indeed, the same year that NAFTA
Speaker 2: came into force, Operation Gatekeeper here in San Diego saw
Speaker 2: a significant upsweep and border militarization. US unions responded to
Speaker 2: this moment badly. Rather than saying, if our bosses want
Speaker 2: to employ people in Mexico and pay them less, we
Speaker 2: will organize our siblings in Mexico and together we will
Speaker 2: demand the same dignified way. They doubled down on economic nationalism,
Speaker 2: So now some of your letters comes from Mexico. We're
Speaker 2: hard working folks get paid too little to work long
Speaker 2: hours cutting it in the fields. So Taylor Farms can
Speaker 2: make millions. They don't just abuse labor in Mexico. Here's
Speaker 2: a quote from a twenty fourteen piece in The Guardian
Speaker 2: about Taylor Farms. If you complain to them, they'll call
Speaker 2: La migre, said Rosi Gualalupe, a former supervisor, using a
Speaker 2: Latino term for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, A Department of
Speaker 2: Homeland Security agency also known as ice. If you don't
Speaker 2: have papers, that scares you. The managers said we didn't
Speaker 2: have any rights to form a union because they're were
Speaker 2: legals there. They said they'd start deporting people to Mexico,
Speaker 2: said Julian Camachol, a former loader who said he lost
Speaker 2: his job for trying to organize a union. The company
Speaker 2: cited other reasons, including a safety violation. In fact, this
Speaker 2: is not the first time Taylor Farms has been completed
Speaker 2: in a diarrhea outbreak. Here's Charlie Kennett, a food microbiologist,
Speaker 2: explaining little history of these outbreaks.
Speaker 5: My name is Charles Kennet, but I go by Charlie
Speaker 5: to most people, so you can call me Charlie. I've
Speaker 5: had over thirty five years of experience. In nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 5: fruit salad of an unknown country of origin caused seven cases,
Speaker 5: mostly in Georgia. In nineteen ninety nine, raspberries caused ninety
Speaker 5: four cases, mostly in Florida. In the year two thousand,
Speaker 5: raspberries and blackberries from Guatemala caused nineteen cases from mostly Georgia.
Speaker 5: So what you're seeing as a pattern of this happening
Speaker 5: every year, but nothing like eleven thousand cases right in
Speaker 5: two thousand and five, two day sel outbreaks. In two
Speaker 5: thousand and eight sugar snap piece from Guatemala. And in
Speaker 5: twenty thirteen, this was a big one, six hundred and
Speaker 5: thirty one cases in North America. Trace to suppliers in Puebla, Mexico.
Speaker 5: And guess who it was. Taylor Farms.
Speaker 2: Data fom's responding to this outbreak there they did so
Speaker 2: voluntarily and that sounds great, right, Well his list again.
Speaker 3: Tailor Farms at that time, back back when these outbreaks
Speaker 3: are happening, really put a lot of effort into trying
Speaker 3: to voluntarily put a lot of protections into place to
Speaker 3: make sure the food safety was better.
Speaker 4: They've kind of completely destroyed all of their good wile
Speaker 4: on that.
Speaker 3: It used to be like you want to protect people
Speaker 3: from getting a food born illness from package lettuce, Like
Speaker 3: look at Tailor Farms, and now it's like what.
Speaker 4: Are you guys feeling?
Speaker 3: Also, you have to think voluntary infection control, voluntary whatever
Speaker 3: is just a way to not be regulated.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: It's like we're showing so you don't have to regulate us.
Speaker 3: But if you're going to have systems so complex like
Speaker 3: food systems, so complex and international, you have to have
Speaker 3: the capacity to regulate them to be able to ding them.
Speaker 2: By twenty twenty four, Tailor of Moms would fully stop
Speaker 2: volunteering to make its food safe. At least according to
Speaker 2: an FDA report, they found a lack of hand washing
Speaker 2: facilities and significant cross contamination between different foods dusts, which
Speaker 2: sounds a lot like lizards hypothesis for the twenty twenty
Speaker 2: six outbreak. All right, so we've established a villain the
Speaker 2: comic book Evil Salad company that sells cut fruit and
Speaker 2: bedge under several brands to change the customers all around
Speaker 2: the country. And in case you're not yet convinced, please
Speaker 2: also know that Barri Weiss's substact newsletter has entered this
Speaker 2: discourse firmly on the side of the diarrhea, trying to
Speaker 2: paint it as unremarkable and non lethal. But now that
Speaker 2: two people have died and the outbreak has continued to
Speaker 2: grow from more than a month despite being identified, it
Speaker 2: seems entirely reasonable that the federal government should shoulder some
Speaker 2: of the blame for failing to keep people safe. What
Speaker 2: about that capacity to ding them that Liz mentioned, Well,
Speaker 2: if you cast your mind back to twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: before Elon Musk had a tantrum and left the government,
Speaker 2: the world's richest man was busy tearing apart parts to
Speaker 2: the federal government that do useful things and posting racist
Speaker 2: stuff on his website. He still does the racist stuff,
Speaker 2: but after blowing up the capacity of agencies out the FDA,
Speaker 2: he quit his job a doge and return to full
Speaker 2: time post. So what does all this mean for the
Speaker 2: safety of your salad?
Speaker 3: I will say part of this has to do with
Speaker 3: staffing cuts at FDA and at CDC.
Speaker 4: For sure.
Speaker 3: It's a lot harder to do this work when you're understaffed.
Speaker 3: Like you can't just email people these questionnaires. You can't
Speaker 3: just like put something on a machine and run it
Speaker 3: and expect the results to like it is. It is
Speaker 3: complicated to suss out whether a test is positive or negative.
Speaker 3: Sometimes cyclospora is hard to diagnose. It's hard to detect.
Speaker 3: It's especially hard to detect in produce.
Speaker 2: The procedure for a trace back in the event of
Speaker 2: an outbreak is pretty labor intensive, and at first it
Speaker 2: often falls onto state public health agencies. Essentially, someone either
Speaker 2: tests positive for food borne illness, which is less likely
Speaker 2: in the case of cyclospora, as GI doctors tell me
Speaker 2: it's not something they often test for at first, or
Speaker 2: someone reports an outbreak, and then well, I'll let take
Speaker 2: it from here.
Speaker 3: So if you have a reportable disease like cyclospora, we
Speaker 3: get a lot slip saying this person with this phone number,
Speaker 3: this contact information tested positive for this pathogen.
Speaker 4: From there, we.
Speaker 3: Take a look at the actual test result, make sure
Speaker 3: it looks like it's like a reasonably like accurate test result,
Speaker 3: because sometimes there can be some you know, issues with
Speaker 3: reporting or whatever. But usually we look at it it's like, Okay,
Speaker 3: this is definitely.
Speaker 4: Somebody in our jurisdiction who we want to reach out to.
Speaker 3: So we pull up something called the Hypothesis Generating Questionnaire,
Speaker 3: which is a food survey. Right, we have a bunch
Speaker 3: of questions for things that we know have caused outbreaks
Speaker 3: of cyclostore in the past, and we call them up
Speaker 3: and we ask this person, how like, can you spend
Speaker 3: a little bit of time with us.
Speaker 4: We understand you've been sick recently. We'd like to learn
Speaker 4: a little bit more about your illness and where.
Speaker 3: You may have caught it so that we can you know,
Speaker 3: figure out if there's anything.
Speaker 4: We need to do.
Speaker 2: What follows is a fairly involved questioning which the public
Speaker 2: health worker has to build trust with someone actively experiencing
Speaker 2: incontinents and then do an in investigation into what they
Speaker 2: ate or where they ate it in the past few weeks.
Speaker 2: Because of the relatively long time period between ingesting something
Speaker 2: with cyclostporer and the onset of symptoms, it can be
Speaker 2: hard feels to recall, so there can be a lot
Speaker 2: of credit card and receipt checking involved. Many of those
Speaker 2: state agencies rely on federal grants, which they might not
Speaker 2: be getting right now. So even though dough which cannot
Speaker 2: directly fire state staffers, they're still suffering because Elon Musk,
Speaker 2: the richest man in the world, a man who has
Speaker 2: lived such a miserable life that he thinks homegrown tomatoes
Speaker 2: are worse than store bought ones, decided it would be
Speaker 2: funny to fuck up the USA's food safety apparatus for
Speaker 2: a few months. Indeed, this could be behind the strange
Speaker 2: saga of the FDA claiming has a positive test for
Speaker 2: cyclostporer in tailor farm's letters, then rescinding that claim. PCR
Speaker 2: tests like the one for cyclosporer can be difficult to read.
Speaker 3: They're something called a cycle value threshold or a cycle
Speaker 3: threshold value, where essentially you're going through these cycles of
Speaker 3: amplifying the genetic comsion cereals and this CT value there's
Speaker 3: a cutoff and where it counts as positive or negative.
Speaker 3: My guess is there has something close to that cut off.
Speaker 3: And because didn't have somebody who's really familiar with this
Speaker 3: particular pathosion, it wasn't clear whether it was a positive
Speaker 3: or negative. It was probably an indeterminate and there was
Speaker 3: just maybe pressure to get something out fast, and so
Speaker 3: they said, oh, we found it.
Speaker 4: Then Taylor Farms came back. It's like that wasn't the
Speaker 4: bashes of lettuce.
Speaker 3: It's causing people to get sick, and it's a threshold value.
Speaker 3: It's like on the cusp in an interminent value, so
Speaker 3: you can't actually say it's there. Then there's probably political
Speaker 3: pressure and things like that that was happening.
Speaker 2: There certainly might be some political pressure.
Speaker 4: Rep.
Speaker 2: Robert Garcia, ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and
Speaker 2: Government Reform, wrote to Taylor Farms, saying in.
Speaker 6: Twenty twenty five alone, Taylor Farms donated more than two
Speaker 6: million dollars to political action committees tied to President Donald
Speaker 6: Trump and other Republicans, and spent over eight hundred and
Speaker 6: ten million dollars on lobbying related to food safety regulation.
Speaker 6: Last morn, Taylor Farms donated one million dollars to MAGA, Inc.
Speaker 6: President Trump's Superpack. This massive donation occurred less than one
Speaker 6: week after the Trump administration agreed to delay implementation of
Speaker 6: a critical food safety rule that would make it easier
Speaker 6: to trace contaminated produce back to suppliers and remove it
Speaker 6: from the food supply.
Speaker 2: Taylor Farms went on social media after the FDA rescinded
Speaker 2: its false positives and claimed it had received an quote
Speaker 2: apology from the FDA. The FDA denies this, says strong
Speaker 2: evidence still points to Taylor Farms. As I said earlier,
Speaker 2: I think this points more to an overstretched agency than
Speaker 2: active complexity. But let's look a little deeper in the
Speaker 2: food safety rule. Garcia mentions he's referring to the Food
Speaker 2: Traceability Rule, and that is part of the Food Safety
Speaker 2: Modernization Act FSMA.
Speaker 3: For sure.
Speaker 2: The original compliance date for the Food Traceability Rule was Tuesday,
Speaker 2: January twentieth, twenty twenty six, The FDA proposed to extend
Speaker 2: the compliance date by thirty months in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: quoting from a document the Bipasser and Congressional Research Service.
Speaker 2: In September twenty twenty four, a stakeholder round table report
Speaker 2: published by the Reagan Udah Foundation for the FDA indicated
Speaker 2: that industry stakeholders may not be aware of or prepared
Speaker 2: to be in compliance with the rule by January twenty six.
Speaker 2: In March twenty twenty five, the FDA announced its extension
Speaker 2: to extend the compliance date by thirty months, and in
Speaker 2: August twenty twenty five publish a Notice of proposed rulemaking
Speaker 2: to provide additional time to cupboard entities to coordinate across
Speaker 2: the supply chain to fully implement the rule. Records do
Speaker 2: show that Bruce Taylor, Tailor Farm's CEO really likes to
Speaker 2: donate to Republicans and packs of support them. Taylor Farm
Speaker 2: supports these packs as well, and love is pretty hard.
Speaker 2: But I don't think this points to a direct quid
Speaker 2: pro quo, because, in a sense, I think it's more
Speaker 2: than that Taylor Farms has a million reasons to support
Speaker 2: Trump beyond this one rule they like to use threats
Speaker 2: of ice enforcement to treat their workers like shit. They
Speaker 2: benefit from the tearing down of the federal regular infrastructure
Speaker 2: and the idea that corporations can self regulate instead, in
Speaker 2: the same way that Elon Musk also benefits from it.
Speaker 2: They want to abuse labor in Mexico and make sure
Speaker 2: those workers can't come here for a better wage and
Speaker 2: a better life, so they support Trump's border regime. There
Speaker 2: is not a little quid pro quo conspiracy here, in
Speaker 2: my opinion. There is a big, broad, and very open
Speaker 2: alignment between capital and the state against workers, farmers, and
Speaker 2: ultimately against your food safety. Anyway, here's some stuff you
Speaker 2: can buy. Last week, I was in Washington to day
Speaker 2: covering the wildfires. The sky was so smoky you couldn't
Speaker 2: see the sun at night. Ridgelines glowed red with the
Speaker 2: approaching fire, and the moon looked orange in the smoky
Speaker 2: sky like a levitating jack O lantern for a time
Speaker 2: early Halloween, the air quality index was high and being
Speaker 2: outside was dangerous for people with respiratory conditions. But not
Speaker 2: so far away in an even worse Aqi area, farm
Speaker 2: workers were picking, weeding, irrigating, and taking fruit and veg
Speaker 2: for a minimum wage. Many of them were not provided
Speaker 2: with masks. Some of them needed inhalers to breathe. According
Speaker 2: to UfW post detail in their conditions, These people work
Speaker 2: long hours, even if it's hot or wet or smoky
Speaker 2: or cold, so that you can buy a big thing
Speaker 2: of letters for five bucks, and Bruce tailor of Tailor
Speaker 2: Farms can make an obscene amount of money in Mexico,
Speaker 2: where it grows most of its lettuce tailor farms can
Speaker 2: pay even less. A whole food chain relies on these
Speaker 2: massive corporations, and they in turn rely on workers sacrificing
Speaker 2: their health for very little money. Although it might not
Speaker 2: seem like it by the time your food gets to
Speaker 2: the supermarket. Everything we eat comes from the soil, the sun,
Speaker 2: or sometimes the water. If we want the food we
Speaker 2: eat to keep us healthy, we need to invest in
Speaker 2: the people who grow it and the people who check
Speaker 2: it safe, the places has grown and the way it
Speaker 2: comes to us. We need to think about safety and
Speaker 2: solidarity not as distinct issues, but as things that go
Speaker 2: hand in hand. Groups like UfW work to protect and
Speaker 2: organize farm workers, and we should support them, but we
Speaker 2: should also think about how we can build a food
Speaker 2: system that decouples sustenance from mega capitalism and that insures
Speaker 2: nobody goes hungry and nobody has to be afraid of
Speaker 2: their food making them sick. I hope you'll subscribe. As
Speaker 2: we talk to more farm workers and organizers, we'll be
Speaker 2: dropping new episodes every Monday in If you subscribe, they'll
Speaker 2: drop onto your phone wherever podcasts are given away for free.
Speaker 2: I hope if you're listening to this in the fields,
Speaker 2: you'll reach out. You can email us at Natural Causes
Speaker 2: pod at proton dot me. If you want that email
Speaker 2: to be encrypted, you'll need a proton mail address as well.
Speaker 2: Next week, I want to talk about what took me
Speaker 2: to Washington in the first place, and the thing that
Speaker 2: has allowed people to feed themselves for thousands of years
Speaker 2: on this landscape. Because the world's on fire right now,
Speaker 2: and it turns out the places to look for help
Speaker 2: might not be the people who want to put the
Speaker 2: fire out, but the people who've learned to live with it.
Speaker 2: I want to break our fire coverage down to a
Speaker 2: couple of episodes. What to do with the fire comes
Speaker 2: to you, and we'll do that first, because we're only
Speaker 2: just beginning our slightly too Hot Person Summer, and then
Speaker 2: we're going to do a second episode on indigenous fire
Speaker 2: knowledge and how we can learn to live with fire.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to our first show. I do
Speaker 2: want to say that when you listen to one of
Speaker 2: these podcasts, you hear my voice. But there's a whole
Speaker 2: team of people who make these things, and I want
Speaker 2: to acknowledge all of them. So Sophie Lichtmann is a producer,
Speaker 2: Aboo Fire has also produced a show and has got
Speaker 2: me to use a spreadsheet for the first time in
Speaker 2: my adult life. And Adam Wand has done an incredible job.
Speaker 2: I think you'll all agree editing the audio here, So
Speaker 2: thank you very much everyone.
Speaker 1: Natural Causes the production of cool Zone Media. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from call Zone Media, visit our website Coalzonemedia dot com,
Speaker 1: or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources
Speaker 1: for Natural Causes listed directly in episode descriptions.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening.