JUST F D?
Feature Length Documentary
Proposal: Ilana Linden
Based on the book, Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail
By Deborah Barndt
Producer: Sylvie Van Brabant
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On the Tomato Trail
In the mid-1990s, Deborah Barndt, York University Professor of Environmental Studies, embarked on an extraordinary journey to tackle these fascinating questions by tracing the long and tangled route of a tomato as it travels from Mexi-can fields into Canadian supermarkets and fast food restau-rants. Along the way, she spoke to the women workers on the front line of tomato production—the most exploited and most invisible actors in the continental food chain. Her in-vestigation is captured vividly in her seminal book, Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail. It is the inspiration for our film.
A century ago, if our great-grandparents didn’t grow their own food, at least they usua-lly knew the people who did; but what about today? When we bite into a tomato, can we tell what production practices have transformed it from seed to fruit? What Indige-nous knowledge and cultural practices have been lost along the way? Whose hands have planted, cultivated, picked, packed, transported, inspected and scanned it? Who decides what is grown and how? How do these decisions affect our health, the health of the planet and our relationship to one another?
Where Does Our Food Come From?
Eating is the simplest most natural of acts, akin to breathing. Yet how many of us know the full story of how food gets to our table? When we take a juicy bite, are we aware of the double helping of global ramifications on our plate?
Where does our food come from?
Just Food? chronicles the journey of a corporate tomato from Mexican field to Cana-dian table through the stories of women workers and exposes the clash between the global, profit-driven corporate food system that views food and labour as commodity, and the powerful food sovereignty movement that views food as living and sacred, and is reclaiming traditions and crafting alternatives.
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Retracing Deborah’s Steps
Now, 20 years later, we travel from North to South and back again, to revisit the people Deborah came to know along the toma-to trail, from Jalisco Mexico, to Loblaws in Toronto, as well as those she has come to know more recently in her continuing re-search into food.
Our journey will trace not only the historical processes that created the complex glob-al food system that now feeds us, but the many changes that have taken place. We will discover that both the corporate strong-hold on food as well as the resistance to it is stronger than it was 20 years ago.
In the last few months, Barndt has revisited the women in the tomato food chain and has also connected with women, in parti-cular Indigenous women in Canada and in Mexico, who are reclaiming traditional practices and are joining a growing move-ment for food sovereignty. What she has
Deborah’s search exposed a global, corporate food system which is comprised of a long, twisty and largely inscrutable chain of transactions, most of which are invisible to us, the consumer; a system which is controlled by transnational corporations on all continents, leaving our bodies and souls largely at the mercy of agribusiness, and com-modity traders; a food system dependent on genetically modified seeds, chemical in-puts of all kinds, expropriated indigenous land, cheap peasant labor, the destruction of naturally bio-diverse landscapes, and the deprivation of local communities of their traditional food sources.
discovered is that the food system in its entirety is being questioned; Indigenous women are defending staple foods such as maize (corn) as they reclaim traditional practices; the voices of Indigenous peoples are being heard, through movements like Idle No More in Canada and transnational alliances like Via Campesina, provoking us all to rethink our relationship, as human beings, to other living things, including plants and the earth itself.
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Why a Tomato?
No other food product embodies the social, economic, political and environmental issues around food, like the tomato does; the tomato is central to the diets of all three North American countries; it can be grown in all three, at least seasonally; it is now the most widely grown fruit in the Americas and the most heavily traded; it has been the ob-ject of diverse technological interventions, from hybridization to biogenetic enginee-ring. Everyone can taste the difference between a ripe home-grown tomato and one that has been picked green and travelled thousands of miles in refrigerated trucks, so it is the perfect food to stimulate our growing awareness about the impact of long-dis-tance food production, and the marginalized workers who are its engine.
Women on the Front Line
We will travel from North to South and back again recounting the compelling stories of the women who work at various points along the tomato trail, from the pickers, to the cashiers at Loblaws.
Our journey begins in Sayula, Mexico where we will meet Teresa, a now retired tomato field worker who was featured in Deborah’s book. She has witnessed the tremendous changes in agriculture of the past 70 years and thus can compare current and past practices. Teresa’s granddaughter, Aleida now carries the family trajectory of working in a foreign-owned tomato agri-business.
Across the generations, and through the stories of other women workers in the tomato fields and processing plants, we gather two different and interrelated tales. One (the shorter tale), is of Tomatl, the original homegrown tomato whose indigenous name was given in Aztec times.
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This tomato is a living entity, with sacred meaning, produced through the relationship with the peasant/farmer, in a sustainable process that is healthy for the earth, the wor-kers, and the consumers. In our film, Tomatl is introduced by a contemporary Indigenous woman active in maintaining this local ecological practice in Mexico.
The other is the tale of Tomasita, the corporate tomato that is produced by chemical industrial agriculture; a commodity for market exchange and profit, built on a model of mass production, where sterility and uniformity are everything; a commodity identified by its PLU code or number at the supermarket checkout counter. The corporate toma-to, most likely having travelled thousands of miles from Mexico to Canada, is introduced by a Loblaws cashier.
A Corporate Cosmovision
For centuries, Tomatl was a native crop grown by Indigenous peoples in Mexico to feed their families. They grew it in endless varieties, interplanted it with other crops, and rota-ted crops from year to year, keeping their land fertile. The advent of the North Ameri-can Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, pushed countries like Mexico to produce more for export and less for domestic consumption; free trade also made it easier for foreign corporate agribusiness and retailers to set up shop there, thus increasing their power to dictate food production and consumption; in the past 20 years, McDonald’s has spread throughout Mexico and Walmart now owns the biggest supermarkets there.
The impact on the Mexican countryside has been devastating, as Indigenous and sub-sistence farmers have lost access to land. Indigenous campesino women, who can no longer cultivate their own plots, are reduced to picking tomatoes for export, while slowly losing the knowledge of generations that maintained sustainable agricultural practices. Desperate to feed their families, many have been forced to migrate north, contributing to an ever-rising flood of Mexican workers both within Mexico and into the U.S. and Canada. We have seen this in the recent debate about the burgeoning Tem-porary Foreign Workers Program. Few Canadian consumers realize that not only their imported winter tomatoes but also the locally grown summer tomatoes may have been picked by Mexican women’s hands, as more and more workers have been coming North in the last 20 years.
Former peasant farmers in Mexico now tend corporate tomatoes as salaried workers in agribusinesses. These industrial farming companies are built on Western scientific logic where each worker is relegated to a specific, routinized task, in large monocrop fields, or more recently, in greenhouses where the goal is to harvest thousands of tomatoes at the same time and in identical form, primarily for export.
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Monoculture, the practice of producing or growing one single variety crop over a wide area has eliminated many types of tomatoes, with 80% of varieties lost in the last century alone. An immense biodiversity as well as cultural diversity of Indigenous knowledge is threatened by the kind of global agricultural system that has resulted from this domi-nant Western science. This model of agriculture has also contributed to the burgeoning crisis of climate change, as it uses more water than any other industry, contributing to greenhouse gases through fossil fuel emissions, and weakening ecosystems.
Workers as Commodity
In Sinaloa, Mexico, massive, high-tech greenhouses are spread over 60 hectares. As we enter, we discover that it is primarily young women who plant the seeds and nurture them into seedlings. Women are preferred because they are considered gentler with the delicate fruit. They are also paid lower wages than the men, and are seen as more compliant. Aleida joins dozens of other young women, some of them as young as 15, to prune the young plants, tie the vines to strings that hold them up, and finally pick the to-matoes. In the fields, they often work unprotected from agrochemicals which compro-mise their health and safety. The appearance of the tomato is valued above all else.
Even though many tomato seeds originated in Mexico, they have now become the “intel-lectual property“ of multinational compa-nies, that claim patents on genetically modi-fied forms of the seeds, and demand a whole technological package (pesticides, herbi-cides, fungicides) be used with the seeds, to produce blemish-free tomatoes. There is of-ten neither training nor protective gear pro-vided for workers. Every year, an estimated 3 million workers are poisoned by pesticides. And ironically, Mexican producers must buy tomato seeds from foreign companies and use their entire technological package and production process. This includes adopting European and U.S. management and work practices which, among other things, have changed Mexican family culinary and eating habits.
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The impact of homogenization in the production of tomatoes exacts a heavy cost on the workers at both ends of the tomato trail; women working for corporate tomato pro-duction companies, are being deskilled by monotonous, routinized jobs; and Mexican women, packing greenhouse tomatoes in assembly-line production are numbed by repetitive motions, a process echoed in the scanning that dominates the days of super-market cashiers at Loblaws. Here, work practices are defined by highly computerized behaviour and scripted interaction; tasks are so completely determined and controlled by the computer system that job performance can be measured and monitored by the system itself. Marissa, a cashier featured in Deborah Barndt’s book, becomes a kind of cyborg, merging with the computerized system of identifying and pricing, recording, and ordering inventory, monitoring time and speed.
People working at every phase of food production, distribution and consumption, with women workers on the front line, are caught, in one way or another, in a global food system that puts profits above the health and dignity of workers. Similarly, the tomato itself has been reduced to a hyperreal object, solely for human consumption, while its cultural value and agency have been diminished.
Isabel Gomez, a Mexican migrant worker who came to Canada for two decades to pick our local summer produce, is perhaps a symbol of all those women workers caught within the system, as she had to leave her family behind to help feed us here, all in order to feed them there. Deborah has followed her story consistently, and recently found her retired in central Mexico, and ready to share her story with the world.
A Chemical Trip to the Supermarket
Once picked, the tomato is still far from our plates. On its way to the processing plant, the tomato is dumped into an agitated sea of chlorinated water, coated with wax, and sorted and according to grades, size, color and destination to fill specific orders by international brokers. The tomato may have to wait in a refrigerated room so it doesn’t ripen, while company owners wait for prices in the U.S. to rise, so it can be sold for more profit. When producers decide to fill an order, the tomato is gassed with ethylene to cause ripening. The doors of the storage rooms must be closed for 24 hours, as ethylene is dangerous for humans to inhale.
Precarious Border Crossings
Our camera will follow the tomato as it races on an intense journey of 30 to 40 hours from Mexico to Canada, on refrigerated trucks, with a stop at the Mexico-U.S. The bor-der patrol complex in Nogales is located in a sandy ravine with desert brush, competing with enormous spotlights and police cruisers. It is a veritable militarized zone.
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At several checkpoints along the way, USDA inspectors test not only for deterioration, defects, and concentrations of agrochemicals in the tomato that can threaten the health of consumers, but search the trucks for narcotics or Mexicans seeking illegal en-try into the U.S.
Tomatoes account for 56 percent of the cargo of the 900 to 1300 big trailer trucks that cross the Nogales border daily. A recent study estimates that transportation of toma-toes into North America emits 221 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while transportation of Ontario greenhouse tomatoes only emits 67 tons. These large truck trailers are key culprits in the ecological devastation wrought by a continental food sys-tem; digesting hundreds of litres of fossil fuel and spewing exhaust into rural and urban areas alike as they barrel across borders.
Once the trucks have crossed the border, the skids of tomatoes are stored in a ware-house, while brokers arrange sales by phone, fax and email throughout the day. In this final phase of its journey, the corporate tomato is the subject of feverish activity as bro-kers, buyers and wholesalers determine its final destination. Loblaws supermarkets in Ontario, brings up three truckloads of tomatoes daily from the Nogales border to their warehouse, National Grocers, near the Toronto airport.
Sowing Seeds of Hope in the 21st Century
While the forces that maintain the global food system have in many ways become more deeply entrenched, with corporate concentration and global competition intensifying, the voices that challenge its consequences are growing louder and the crafting of alternatives have become more widespread, some even mainstream. There are grassroots movements and multiple local initiatives both in the south and the north, as well as globally, that embody the struggle and the hope of Indigenous Mexi-can campesinos, average Canadians and immigrants alike, defying the profit-driven conventional food system that exploits both land and labour.
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A powerful and growing food movement emphasizing food justice and food sovereign-ty which value connections - between people and (agri)culture, between local ecolo-gies (land/water) and Indigenous knowledges, between historical practices and future generations - is influencing changes in the practices of agribusiness, supermarkets, and the fast food industry, while reclaiming traditions and creating new alternatives.
A growing consciousness of the unhealthy aspects of chemical industrial agriculture in the agro export sector in Mexico, has led local environmentalists to denounce the indiscriminate use of pesticides and the inhuman treatment of poor indigenous migrant workers. In this time of intensifying public awareness about climate change and the need for Indigenous perspectives that acknowledge ‘all our relations’, First Nations ac-tivists are leading the food sovereignty and environmental movements.
Challenging the corporate food system are the stories of Mexican activists like Leonar-do Lamas, a major force behind the efforts to improve the conditions of Indigenous sea-sonal workers, and co-founder of both Friends of the Earth, and Popular Health Group, a new ecological centre in Sayula, Mexico; Antonieta Barron, a feminist economist who has researched and advocated for migrant workers in both Mexico and Canada; Amado Ramirez of Itanoni promoting biodiversity of corn; Gustavo Esteva, founder of Mexico’s “Sin Maíz No Hay País” (Without Corn There is no Country) campaign.
In Canada, there is leadership coming from Dawn Morrison of the B.C. Indigenous Food Sovereignty Network; Debbie Field of FoodShare Toronto, the largest food security cen-tre in Canada; Evelyn Encalada of Justice for Migrant Workers; Lauren Baker , coordina-tor of Toronto Food Policy Council; Harriet Freedman, University of Toronto food expert; and Annette Desmarais, Canadian scholar of Via Campesina, a grass-roots organiza-tion of approximately 200 million farmers in 70 countries, that aims to dismantle cor-porate agri-business monopolies and reclaim community control. It is the transnational alliance that has most defined ‘food sovereignty’ as promoting an agro-ecological ap-proach which sees land not only as a resource but as reciprocal relationship between all living things, community controlled and with great cultural and spiritual significance.
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Our film will recount the stories of activists and ordinary people alike who are part of a broad movement to build alternatives to the dominant food system, one that respects the health of consumers, the land, the workers, and plants like the tomato. They are all part of a burgeoning movement that is transforming the world one bite at a time, and its story needs to be told.
Cinematic Approach
Deborah Barndt was born in 1945 in the United States and as such, she can trace, through her life, the dramatic post-war transformation of the global food system. The rural farm community where she grew up is now a ghost town and the dwindling popu-lation is fed primarily by the fast food outlets at the nearby exit from the super highway that carries tomatoes from Mexico to Canada. Deborah has spent the last 45 years in Canada and lived several years in Latin America, witnessing the impact of shifts in food production and consumption from both sides of the U.S., where most decisions and in-novations have originated.
As a single mother, she struggled to feed her son healthy food in the face of double workdays and fast food seductions. As an academic, she built on her long-standing re-lationship with groups in Latin America to research what historical forces brought us to this point. As an artist, she has produced photo exhibits, videos and illustrated books on the existing food system and efforts to transform it. As an award-winning educator, she has taught community arts and food justice in Ontario and Nova Scotia. As an activist, she has organized conferences and created visual tools for the local food movement.
Just Food? chronicles an exploration that spans 20 years and is ongoing. Deborah has kept in touch with many of the characters that will appear in our film. She is our guide as we go back and revisit the women in the tomato food chain. She will connect us with activists, in particular, Indi-genous women in Canada and in Mexico, who are reclai-ming traditional practices and are joining a growing move-ment for food sovereignty.
Just Food? will be a sweeping, visually stunning epic, using beautiful, wide cinematographic shots, that will capture the tension between two conflicting cosmosvisions: one that views the tomato, food, and workers as commodities, and one that views food as living and sacred. Food is more than “just food” when seen in this way, and when food pro-duction is ”just”, workers are also honored for their relation-ship with food.
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Our journey will take us from Mexico to Canada, and back again. It will interweave the compelling personal stories of the people along the tomato trail with evocative images and archival material, including photos taken by Deborah through her 20-year journey researching tomatoes. The voices of indigenous activists will be woven throughout the story; they will be links that move the story from one continent to the other.
Just Food? will take us into the fields, the greenhouses, the processing plants and pack-ing houses, onto trucks, through checkpoints and borders, into warehouses and super-markets Through the use of animation to help us visualize the multiple, complex and layered steps of the tomato’s journey, the tomato itself will become a character; a liv-ing entity that has travelled long distances and has a story to tell. Animating the story of the tomato will endow our film with humor while evoking the serious issues at stake, as Tomatl, the Indigenous tomato “engages in dialogue” with Tomasita, the corporate tomato.
Just Food? is a quest to understand where our food comes from; a timely, provocative film that will challenge us and engage us in a dialogue around a vital question: how do we create a food system built on BOTH sustainable production and just labour, and reclaim our patrimony—the capacity to grow, sell, cook, and eat food in a way that honours our relationship to our planet and each other?
Deborah Barndt with tomato workers and their family
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SYLVIE VAN BRABANTPRODUCERSylvie Van Brabant is at the head of Productions du Rapide-Blanc since 1984, a produc-tion company with a very clear mission: to seize the reality of important and relevant topics. This independent production company has become a platform for social, politi-cal and artistic works that are pertinent, eloquent and poetic; daring to tackle contro-versial issues as well as give the public films with deep cultural and social values, films that garner awards but that also bring about change.
Contact : 2525 des Carrières, Montréal, Québec H1Y 1N1 Tel : 514-388-0482 Mobile : 514-771-4984 [email protected]
ILANA LINDENSCREENWRITER/DIRECTORIlana Linden has been involved in the arts for over 40 years, as visual artist, dancer, ac-tor, theater director, writer and film maker. As the former artistic director of Bulldog Pro-ductions theatre company, Ilana garnered accolades and awards for her theatrical productions. As a film maker, Ilana hopes to tell stories that matter. These are stories that provoke, educate and offer an unflinching gaze upon our human condition.
DEBORAH BARNDTAUTHOR/NARRATORDeborah Barndt is an artist/activist/academic with over forty years of experience in education, photography, and social movements in Latin America and North America. Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University and part-time professor of Food Justice at the Coady International Institute in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, she has exhibited her photographs and published widely, with over ten books, including “Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization on the Tomato Trail” and “VIVA! Community Arts and Popular Education in the Americas.”
