The Daily Exclusive: Picking a fight
Latinos avoid Ga. over immigration law, leaving farms without labor
BY ERIK GERMAN
LESLIE, Ga. — In America’s ongoing battle over illegal immigration, there are few battle lines hotter than a cucumber field in a secluded corner of rural Georgia.
“Where are these cucumbers coming from!” Benito Mendez, 50, shouted at a row of stooped men. The sun-beaten crew boss angrily held up one of the offending vegetables, a yellowing specimen as thick as a baseball bat.
“These are no good!” Mendez said. “They’re already old!”
His crew of 14 pickers, sluggish and suffering in the 100-degree heat, paid little heed. These weren’t the seasoned Latino migrants Mendez usually employs, this was a stopgap crew — probationers and ex-convicts, mostly — few of whom had ever picked a vegetable before.
“I’m not discriminating against anybody,” Mendez said, frowning at the sweating men. “But if I used these guys all the time I’d be out of business.”
Until this season, thousands of Latino migrants descended on Georgia annually to hand-pick the cucumbers, cantaloupe and other labor-intensive crops that are a linchpin of the state’s $1.1 billion agriculture industry.
But farmers and crew bosses say many migrants are skipping Georgia this season, frightened off by a tough new anti-immigration law similar to those passed in Arizona and Alabama. Backers of the Georgia bill insist it will protect taxpayers from the costs undocumented immigrants and their children incur in schools, hospitals and courts. But farmers and their employees say lawmakers have unfairly targeted Latinos and suddenly choked off labor vital to the state’s biggest industry.
Yesterday, a federal judge blocked parts of Georgia’s law from taking effect until a legal challenge is resolved.
Judge Thomas Thrash granted a request to block parts of the law that penalize people who knowingly and willingly transport or harbor illegal immigrants while committing another crime. He also blocked provisions that authorize officers to verify the immigration status of someone who can’t provide proper identification.
“This is a 40-year-old situation and they’re trying to change it in 30 days,” said Dick Minor, a farmer who says about a third of his produce crop withered in the field because he lacked the crews to get it picked. “We just don’t have the labor and it’s gonna get worse.”
Gov. Nathan Deal, who signed the bill last month, has consistently defended the law, maintaining the economic benefits outweigh the costs and arguing that states must step in where the federal government has not. “We will continue to have a broken system until we have a federal solution,” Deal said in a statement. “In the meantime, states must act to defend their taxpayers.”
Among other provisions, Georgia’s law had required employers to use the federal E-verify program to check the immigration status of all prospective hires. It also authorizes police to check for citizenship during traffic stops and makes it a felony to hire undocumented immigrants, house them, or transport them in a car. Civil-rights groups have challenged the statute as unconstitutional.
Precisely how many migrants have bypassed the state is hard to know. But, in a survey earlier this month, Georgia’s Agriculture Department reported the state’s farmers have at least 11,000 job openings they can’t fill. While legal challenges sank Arizona’s anti-immigration bill before it had much effect, it appears that Georgia’s early harvest and nervous, transient work force has offered a unique window on what happens to an economy when migrants flee.
And those in the vegetable fields say the view isn’t rosy. To bridge the labor gap, Deal has proposed giving picking jobs to the approximately 2,000 people in southwest Georgia who are unemployed and on probation. In Dick Minor’s cucumber field last week, those who accepted the offer tended to be men with few other options, clinging to the bottom rung of America’s economic ladder after runs of bad decisions and worse luck. And few said they were in shape to keep up with the work for long.
“I hate it,” said Jermond Powell, 33, as he squinted under a hot sun. Powell, who’s on probation for missed child support payments, said he’d lost his truck driver’s license and his job. “I feel like it’s a military camp or something here,” he said. “I’ve seen guys fall down, throw up, get nosebleeds…”
A few rows over, a lean, unemployed cook named Johnny Profit, 40, tried to stay upbeat. “You can never get used to the heat, but you can adjust to it,” he said, tossing cucumbers into his bucket.
Profit said he’d been busted for cocaine possession, dealing, he said, to buy medicine for his wife. “She has M.S. and I had to hustle it up,” he said.
Several hours into his first day, Profit said he wasn’t sure how long he’d last, but he’d give his best. “We’ve got three daughters, and that was my motivation to come out here,” he said. “But you stand around long enough, you might see my head hit the ground.”
A two-decade veteran of the picking trade, Mendez kept frowning at the stooped figures. The crew boss said he didn’t fault the men for trying. He faulted them for picking bad vegetables, and for being slow.
“I got another crew, Latinos, picking on the other side of the farm and you see the difference,” Mendez said, pointing at the truck being loaded with cucumbers. “In a day, these guys pick one truck load. The Latinos pick six loads.”
Coverage of Georgia’s new law has been wall-to-wall on local Spanish-language news, Mendez and other bosses said. They simply haven’t been able to persuade their normal crews to work.
“This year was the worst,” said Manuel Delarosa, 66, another leader running a skeleton crew on Minor’s farm. “My people just don’t want to come to the state of Georgia.”
Among the migrants who’ve decided to come, the anxiety is unmistakable. Workers say they’re keeping the lowest profile they can, making only essential trips and driving as little as possible. “I just go from work to the house, house to work,” said Heraclio Martinez, 39.
Oscar Palacios, 17, said he’s picked in Georgia with his family for the last five years. They were worried about coming, he said, but they have no choice. “We have to make a living,” he said. “We left it up to God.”
In a field outside the town of Tifton, Jose Cruz, a muscular 22-year-old hefting cantaloupes alongside his mother and father, said, “everyone’s constantly looking over their shoulder, making sure there’s no immigration coming to get them.”
“I’m all right,” Cruz said, explaining that unlike his folks, he was born in the United States. Then, nodding at his parents, he added, “It’s them I’m worried about.”
The man whose produce Cruz is harvesting, a reserved, silver-haired farmer named Phillip Grimes, said it’s not just the pickers whom the law will put out of work. After they’re plucked from the fields, cantaloupes are trucked to Grimes’ 15,000-square-foot packing facility where several dozen employees wash the melons in chlorinated water and stack them into boxes sorted by size.
“I’ve got 40 people that’re legal here, and they wouldn’t have a job either,” Grimes said. “If we don’t have a work force for next year, I won’t grow produce.”
Plowing under the melon fields to grow peanuts or cotton would cut his profits in half, he said, but it’d be simple enough. “Easy, as a matter of fact,” Grimes said. “If we just grew row crops I wouldn’t need but four people instead of 120.”
Along with the lost revenue and jobs, farmers in the region said there’s also something less tangible at stake. William Brown, freckled and still brawny at 71, has been farming the gently rolling fields outside the town of Montezuma for four decades. He grows cotton, peanuts, corn, squash among other things. But he’s got a soft spot for his groves of Georgia peaches, 200 acres bearing fruit with 100 more on the way. He sells them from a farm stand in boxes whose golden aroma hits the nose from three feet away.
“I don’t know who I can get to pick them,” Brown said. The labor shortage has already caused him to renege on a contract to deliver a load of squash this season. If he can’t find the hands he needs by next year, Brown said he’ll be forced to give up on all his labor-intensive crops, plow under the vegetable fields, bulldoze the peach trees, “and pile ‘em up, burn ‘em.”
“I don’t get near the thrill out of planting cotton as I do looking at peaches,” he said. “I’d hate like the dickens to see pretty trees like these go.”
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SAVE OUR SCHOOLS: Downgrading homework
L.A. lowers weight given to student out-of-school assignments
BY NOREEN O'DONNELL TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 2011
Homework doesn’t count for much in Los Angeles.
Just 10 percent of a student’s grade, to be precise, under a new policy that takes effect Friday in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Until now, teachers have decided on their own what weight to give homework.
The change is meant to give a truer picture of how well students are learning, according to the policy. Grades should reflect knowledge, not effort or behavior, the rule states.
Los Angeles, whose many low-income students often have jobs and family responsibilities, joins districts elsewhere that are placing limits on homework — in the amount given, its contribution to a student’s grade or assignments on holidays and weekends.
“Those are the three things that are really catching fire across the country right now,” said Cathy Vatterott, an associate professor of education at the University of Missouri in St. Louis and the author of “Rethinking Homework.”
“It really doesn’t, for the most part, benefit kids to do excessive amounts of homework,” she said.
She and other educators cite as ideal the 10-minute rule: 10 minutes a day multiplied by a student’s class — or 10 minutes for a first-grader and 60 minutes for a sixth-grader.
Homework should not penalize students so much that they do not pass nor should it inflate grades, states Los Angeles’ new policy, reported yesterday by the Los Angeles Times.
Supporters say that a limit allows children to take part in sports and other activities. Critics argue that students could stop doing their work.
Other countries typically place much less emphasis on homework for grading purposes.
And some schools go so far as not to count it at all. Glenn Westlake Middle School in Lombard, Ill., will discount homework and classroom participation next year. School officials want a better measure of how well students are learning material and note that there is a gap between students’ grades and their scores on assessment tests.
In Los Angeles, the school district and the teachers’ union have waged battle over layoffs, school closures and the oversight of charter schools. Now, the discord extends to the subject of homework. The new policy was developed without the teachers’ input, said union president A.J. Duffy.
“These education dilettantes are going to tinker with everything, until eventually everything will be exactly where it was before they started tinkering,” he said.
Homework is an important way to reinforce lessons and should be part of a student’s grade, Duffy said, adding that he did not know exactly how much.
Uniformity on the amount of homework to assign made sense, Duffy said.
“You can’t have a math teacher giving three hours and an English teacher giving seven hours,” he said. “It’s got to be reasonable.”
It is important for parents to be a part of developing such policies, said Patty Scripter, the incoming director of legislation for the California State PTA.
The PTA thinks that part of what makes a successful school is "for parents to be involved in the educational process,” she said.
Noreen.Odonnell@thedaily.com
Military base schools under siege
Three in four schools on military bases across the United States are either beyond repair or require extensive renovation to meet minimum standards for safety, quality, accessibility and design.
An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity has found that tens of thousands of children attend military base schools that are falling apart from age and neglect, with conditions such as tainted water, fouled air and chronic overcrowding.
— Carmel Melouney
Georgia eyes reprieve for charters
Eleven charter schools in Georgia are a step closer to keeping their doors open after the state’s highest court ruled that a commission creating them was illegal. A state Board of Education committee OK’d applications for the schools; the full state school board is expected to grant approval this morning.
Meanwhile, Maine is poised to become the 41st state to allow charter schools. Both houses have already passed the bill once. Gov. Paul LePage has said he will sign the legislation.
— Associated Press
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Sneak Peek at Kinect Star Wars for Xbox 360
Growing up in the '70s and '80s meant one thing: watching "Star Wars." (The original, unadulterated versions, of course.) And as a youth of those times, I, like many, wanted nothing more than to be a Jedi. Later this year, LucasArts will make those dreams come true with the release of Kinect Star Wars for the Xbox 360. But, for now, here's a sneak peek.
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Have you checked out the News section in the App Store today? Not a bad day for News Corp news apps…
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Bill’s one-upmanship
Ex-president Clinton tries to outdo Obama on jobs
Bill Clinton is back. Again. The former president has written a 14-point plan for attacking America’s terrifying unemployment problem. He’s running, via his Clinton Global Initiative, a conference on the subject later this week. Clinton has returned in high-policy-wonk mode, talking about loan-to-capital ratios and the beneficial effects of painting your roof white. But there’s something else: Clinton is poking President Obama. With a big, sharp stick.
Obama and Clinton have had an uncomfortable relationship from the start. Part of Obama’s central narrative in 2008 was that the previous 16 years of American leadership were all of a piece — that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush practice the same old politics, in contrast with his new politics. (Of hope. And change!) Part of Obama’s shtick was borne of necessity. He was running an insurgent campaign against Hillary Clinton and needed an avenue of attack. But other parts of it suggested that he didn’t very much like President Clinton. So Obama didn’t just attack NAFTA and Hillarycare. He mused that “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that ... Bill Clinton did not.”
That was in January 2008, as the primary race was just getting started. The relationship got worse from there. Bill Clinton pushed back, telling reporters, “I thought he was running against me ...” By the time the campaign got to South Carolina, the former and future presidents were taking shots at each other every day.
Driven to distraction by the anti-war left’s support of Obama, Clinton took on Obama’s actual voting record and said of his anti-Iraq stance, “Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”
Obama sent his surrogates — including big hitters like Tom Daschle and John Kerry — out to kneecap Clinton. (Daschle called him “not presidential.” Kerry said that “being an ex-president does not give you license to abuse the truth.”) Others accused Clinton of race-baiting. Then Obama went nuclear, saying, “You know the former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling. He continues to make statements that are not supported by the facts ... This has become a habit, and one of the things that we’re going to have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he’s making statements that are not factually accurate.”
There was a minor media firestorm after that, with Clinton being tagged as a pandering, lying racist who was a drag on his wife’s campaign. It got so bad that Bill Clinton had to publicly confront the charges: “This is almost like once you accuse somebody of racism or bigotry or something,” he said. “The facts become irrelevant. There are facts here.”
There was more — lots more. Near the conclusion of the primaries, Clinton went on a tirade in front of California superdelegates, raising questions about the fairness of the caucus votes and attacking the media’s worshipful treatment of Obama. After Obama won the nomination, he kept taking shots at Clinton. He let it be known that Hillary was on his short list for VP, but that he considered Bill to be a problem. After the general election, Obama offered Hillary the State Department, but only on the condition that Bill accede to a host of humiliating concessions. (Among other things, he had to make public the donor list for his nonprofit and allow the Obama administration to review his personal speeches in advance.)
Since then, there’s been an awkward ceasefire. Shortly before the midterm election, Bill Clinton went on CNN and offered a pre-emptive defense of Obama’s critics, saying that you could criticize and oppose Obama without being a racist. Last December, after Democrats were shellacked in the midterm election, Clinton took over a White House press conference, fielding questions and defending the tax deal Obama had just struck with Republicans.
Clinton’s latest foray might look like help for Obama, too. But it’s not. The headline to his jobs plan is “It’s Still the Economy, Stupid” — the motto Obama’s eventual 2012 opponent will almost certainly use. And the optics of Clinton’s summit are unmistakable: He’s making “the pivot to jobs” that the Obama administration has promised for two years but never delivered. If you need any more subtext, Clinton’s conference isn’t being held on his home turf, in New York or Arkansas. It’s in Chicago.
Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard.
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MRS. MONEYBAGS
Australia mining mogul may soon be richest person in the world
BY CARMEL MELOUNEY
She’s on the brink of financial herstory.
Mining mogul Gina Rinehart, a 57-year-old widower whose name is little-known outside her home country of Australia, is poised to become the world’s richest person.
Nearly 20 years ago, Rinehart inherited Hancock Prospecting, a debt-ridden mining company from her father that she turned around, earning enough to become the wealthiest person in Australia.
And the industrial rise of China, which needs iron ore to create steel, has led to a commodities boom for Rinehart. Her fortune has more than doubled to $10.7 billion in the past year alone.
According to Citigroup, Rinehart is on course to overtake Mexican magnate Carlos Slim, whose worth is reportedly $70 billion, and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who is worth $56 billion.
Citigroup researchers estimate that three coal and iron ore projects Rinehart is developing will eventually vault her to the top spot. She would be the first woman to top the Forbes Richest People list since it began more than two decades ago.
Aiding Rinehart in this quest is the fact she owns her companies outright and has no shareholders.
“If Rinehart was a company listed on the Australia Stock Exchange and valued using the same 11-times price-to-earnings ratio as her partner, Rio Tinto, she would be worth $30 billion, putting her in the top 10 of the Forbes rich list,” said Australian business website SmartCompany.
“It is possible to see Rinehart’s portfolio of coal and iron ore production spinning off annual profits approaching U.S. $10 billion,” giving her a “personal net worth valuation of more than U.S. $100 billion,” it said.
Unlike some other billionaires, Rinehart does not covet publicity.
She has been married twice. Her first husband, Greg Hayward, with whom she has two children, was a taxi driver. Her second husband, Frank Rinehart, was an American lawyer. They had twin daughters before he died in 1990.
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Forcin’ it
Going full-body with the motion-sensing Star Wars game for Kinect
BY TRACEY JOHN
Kinect Star Wars
Platforms
Xbox 360
Publisher/Developer
Microsoft Game Studios/Terminal Reality/LucasArts
Genre
Action
Release Date
Late 2011
What we like: When Microsoft showed off its new “your whole body is the controller” peripheral Kinect at last year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, we saw a slick gameplay video of a Jedi taking down Stormtroopers just before locking light sabers with Darth Vader. With the hands-free add-on and its touted potential for 1:1 motion-sensing, gamers and “Star Wars” fans salivated at the prospect of becoming bona fide Jedi Masters. We finally got to try the power of the Force for ourselves at E3 earlier this month. In a closed-door demonstration, a friend and I played about 15 minutes of the Jedi story mode in two-player cooperative play, taking on the roles of the new Jedi recruit and the tentacle-coiffed Jedi Master Kit Fisto, respectively (another local player can drop in and out at any time as the computer-controlled character).
In the tutorial, Yoda taught us the ways of the Force: We held our arms out and raised them to lift a sunken starfighter; we swung our right hand to cut down enemies and block/return blaster fire with our imaginary light sabers (lefties will have the option to switch hands); we jutted out our other hand to cast away enemies with the Force; we lunged to dash forward; we jumped to send us quickly to the nearest attacker; and we kicked our legs out to, well, kick the bad guys.
With our newly learned Jedi powers, we headed to Bespin’s Cloud City, of “Empire Strikes Back” fame. While the Jedi portion takes place mainly between Episodes I and II, the entire game will span all six movies in the other modes, which were not detailed. As we arrived, we were greeted by a swath of Stormtroopers, whom we Force-fully flung aside or chopped down with ease. We made our way through the city moving “on rails,” meaning our route was restricted to a predetermined course as we progressed. Throughout the level, we used the Force to move aside a downed ship in our path and encountered various enemies from the “Star Wars” canon, like shielded Droidekas, who could only be defeated from behind, and stave-wielding MagnaGuards, who were only vulnerable to Force powers. The demonstration ended just before the boss fight, where we were taunted by two Sith ready to do battle.
What’s the catch? While the 15-minute demo didn’t have us out of breath, we’re not sure how long it’ll be fun to jump around and flail our extremities; we’re hoping for more variety in the gameplay and level design. New videos of the game show players piloting X-wing starfighters and podracers, and we expect audio commands to be used in some way, though details are still under wraps. However, the biggest concern is the game’s sluggish response to our actions. The gameplay on the screen didn’t quite mirror our commands, meaning it clearly wasn’t working at full 1:1 control. A LucasArts representative at the demonstration assured us that tweaks are still being made by the developers, but time will tell whether the Force is strong with this one.
Who’s it for: Hyperactive children, Star Wars fans who need a cardio workout, and people who don’t mind looking like Star Wars Kid.
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Cold water on juice
Health experts are dubious about the cleansing diet craze
BY FIONA J. KIRK
Gwyneth Paltrow raves about it on her blog. Sarah Jessica Parker does it. Salma Hayek even created her own line. The latest proof that you truly care for your health is to carry around bottles filled with a colorful, viscous liquid and tell everyone that you can’t possibly go to lunch — you’re on a juice cleanse. The theory is that by drinking only raw fruit and vegetable juices over a certain period of time, you’ll rid your body of toxins and cleanse your digestive system, dropping a few pounds in the process.
The benefits of a juice cleanse are clarity, energy, prevention (and even reversal) of disease, according to Denise Mari, founder and executive director of Organic Avenue, which offers five different juice cleanses ranging from $350 to $500 for a five-day supply. “You get everything from the basic weight loss to getting more in tune with your goals and ambitions,” said Mari. “Once you have that kind of energy, life is so much more enjoyable. When you’re fully vibrant and nourished, life becomes a game.”
Organic Avenue has six locations, with plans to open two more stores this summer. The menu includes raw solid foods like zucchini pasta and a Portobello wrap, but it’s best known for its popular LOVE cleanse (an acronym for “Live, Organic, Vegan Experience”), a liquid diet that can be delivered to the New York City or Greenwich, Conn., area.
“It’s food in the most natural state,” said Mari. “It’s all organic, fresh, ripe, raw ingredients. With a cleanse, you don’t have to think about what you’re eating and your body gets pure nutrition.”
Yet several experts say that doing a juice cleanse is not a good idea. “There are safer and more sustainable ways to keep your body healthy and lose weight,” said Sari Greaves, a registered dietician and spokewoman for the American Dietetic Association. “A lot of these types of diets appeal to people because they hear the words ‘cleanse,’ ‘detox,’ and ‘weight loss.’ You’re basically drinking juices from whole fruits and vegetables, with the goal of resting the digestive tract. But there’s no scientific evidence that you need to do this.”
Greaves allowed that a juice cleanse might benefit someone trying to make a dramatic lifestyle modification, a point which Mari also made. “In my experience, cleansing can be a jump-start to a healthier way of being,” said Mari. “It’s a period of time where you devote and commit yourself to health, and it ramps you up. You’re going to leave that five-day experience and maybe drink a green juice every day thereafter. You have to listen to your body.”
At BluePrintCleanse, customers choose which cleanse they’d like to do, with choices like Renovation, Foundation, or Excavation, and how long they like to do it. During the cleanse, six bottles of juice are delivered daily, with names like Spicy Lemonade and Cashew Milk, along with instructions on when to drink each. Costs range from $60 to $85 per day, depending on the delivery method chosen.
Each cleanse provides between 900 to 1,100 calories a day. “We try to communicate that this is about nourishing your body and not about deprivation,” said Zoe Sakoutis, who co-founded BluePrintCleanse with Erica Huss. “You’re probably getting more nutrients and vitamins in one day than you would typically consume in the standard American diet.”
The FAQ section of BluePrintCleanse’s website encourages juicers not to focus on the calorie count, stating that 500 calories of live juice can’t compare to 500 calories from a bagel with cream cheese. Not so, according to Greaves. “Let me put it this way, whether one prefers wine, beer, or a vodka martini at a dinner party, your body just recognizes it as alcohol,” said Greaves. “Similarly, when it comes to weight management, a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, regardless of the source,” adding that no one should dip below 1,200 calories a day for weight loss.
And there’s no need to do a juice cleanse in order to rid your body of toxins. “We have an organ called the liver that cleanses everything,” said Joan Salge Blake, a registered dietician, spokeswoman for the ADA and a clinical associate professor of nutrition at Boston University. “A lot of these cleansing diets are based upon the belief that there are toxic elements in the body that need to be removed. But assuming the liver is doing its job, there’s no need. Everything has to go through the liver anyway, whether it’s everyday food or a cleanse. There’s nothing magical about this.”
Huss and Sakoutis counter that in an ideal world with an ideal diet, the body can clean itself out, but most people are consuming processed foods that didn’t exist when the digestive system was developed. “Our lifestyle has shifted and we’re consuming a lot of things that our bodies don’t digest well and don’t read as food,” said Zakoutis.
Many products claim to eliminate toxins, but fail to mention which toxins are being removed and don’t provide any scientific evidence to support their claims, according to Dr. Brent Bauer, the director of the complementary and integrative medicine program at the Mayo Clinic. “Certainly, if the choice is between a sugary drink with no nutritional value and a fruit or vegetable juice, the answer is clear,” said Bauer. “Just watch out for hyperbole and hype when making a decision about whether or not to include raw juices in your nutrition plan.”
“In a way, if you want to cleanse on a daily basis, just eat a plant-based diet that’s rich in whole grains and fruit and vegetables,” said Salge Blake. “Do that, and you’ll be moving along just fine.”
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On today’s Fresh Air, how industrial farming destroyed the tasty tomato…and why we’re partially responsible, says Barry Estabrook: “It’s the price we pay for insisting we have food out of season and not local. We foodies and people in the sustainable food movement chant these mantras ‘local, seasonable, organic, fair-trade, sustainable’ and they almost become meaningless because they’re said so often and you see them in so many places. If you strip all those away, they do mean something, and what they mean is that you end up with something like a Florida tomato in the winter — which is tasteless.”
Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
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