Date of Lecture: February 2, 2017
About the Speaker: Margaret Gray is associate professor of political science at Adelphi University. She is author of "Labor and the Locavore: The Making of a Comprehensive Food Ethic," (University of California Press, 2013). Based on a decade of field research on farms in the Hudson Valley, the book won the 2014 Book of the Year Award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society and from the American Political Science Association Labor Project.
About the Talk: Gray asserts that romanticizing the local food movement has led many consumers to believe that farmworkers are treated more fairly on local farms than on factory farms. But the intimacy of the relationship between farmers and farmworkers on local farms actually leads to increasing levels of paternalism and labor control. These workers, largely non-citizen and undocumented migrants, are exempt from labor laws and fear speaking out at the risk of losing benefits.