The Dr. Hyman Show - Who Is Growing And Picking The Food You Eat And How Are They Being Treated?

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

Who Is Growing And Picking The Food You Eat And How Are They Being Treated? | This episode is brought to you by Belcampo Most of us don’t think about food and farmworkers when we are eating or shopping for groceries, but this is actually the largest sector of workers in the United States. Unfortunately, these workers have historically been marginalized and are often unprotected and underpaid.  In this minisode, Dr. Hyman offers a brief overview of why food and farmworkers were not included in the United States Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. He also talks to Kerry Kennedy about a group of farmworkers who banded together to create the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to fight for better wages and working conditions. This coalition of farmworkers found a creative solution to injustice by creating the Fair Food Program, which mandates that growers provide basic protections for their workers. Kerry Kennedy is the president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. Since 1981, she has worked on diverse human rights issues including child labor, disappearances, indigenous land rights, judicial independence, freedom of expression, ethnic violence, impunity, women's rights, and the environment. Kerry is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Being Catholic Now, Robert F. Kennedy: Ripples of Hope, and Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World. Kerry founded RFK Compass, which convenes biannual meetings of institutional investors who collectively control $5 to $7 trillion in assets to address the impact of human rights violations on investment outcomes. She serves on the boards of the U.S. Institute of Peace, Human Rights First, Ethics in Action, SDG USA, Sustainable Development Goals Center for Africa, Health eVillages, Kailash Satyarthi Children's Foundation, Nizami Ganjavi International Center as well as several public companies.  This episode is brought to you by Belcampo. Right now, you can order Belcampo’s sustainably-raised meats to be delivered to your door using my code HYMAN at Belcampo.com/Hyman for 20% off for first-time customers.  Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Kerry Kennedy, “Is Your Food Grown by Oppressed Farmworkers?” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/KerryKennedy Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dr. Charles Modlin, Dr. Leonor Osorio, and Tawny Jones from Cleveland Clinic, “Why We Have The Worst Health Outcomes Of All Industrialized Nations” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/ModlinOsorioJones

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and that is an extraordinary organization that really has come up with a formula that has stopped exploitation and stopped abuse and stopped sexual assault, basically ended sexual assault among farm workers. And their model is now being used in Bangladesh for garment workers. It's being used in Hollywood for the Me Too movement. And it's being used in the upstate in Vermont for dairy workers. Hey, everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now there's so much debate in the diet world about eating meat, but whether you're vegan, paleo, or pegan like me, one thing we can absolutely agree on is that conventionally raised feedlot meat is dangerous for our health and the planet and just

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you eat. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, I'm Kea Perowit, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Most of us don't think about food and farm workers when we are eating or shopping for groceries, but this is the largest sector of workers in the United States. Without them, we wouldn't be able to eat,

yet they rarely make a living wage and are often subjected to unthinkable living and working conditions. Dr. Hyman spoke about this in a conversation he had about health disparities with his colleagues at the Cleveland Clinic. He also explored how one group of farm workers banded together to fight for better wages and working conditions in his conversation with Kerry Kennedy. And the other thing that people don't realize is that a lot of these health disparities

exist in food and farm workers, which comprise more workers than any other industry. There's 20 million food and farm workers, and they're often brown and black, and they're often unprotected. And the Fair Labor Act, which was in the 30s under Roosevelt, which was developed to protect workers, did not cover food and farm workers. Why? Because they were African-American for the most part. So they weren't protected. And that's why they often earn less than minimum wage. They have no health benefits. We have to cover them with Medicaid and food stamps.

And they're often at high risk for diseases such as pesticide related conditions. And they're struggling. And again, we're eating all this food, but what is happening to people who actually provide the food? That's a whole other level of health disparity that exists in those brown and black communities.

The real miracle story of farm workers in the United States over the last 50 years is, of course, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huertra and the United Farm Workers in California. But all of the progress they made in California did not impact other states. You have to go state by state by state because we don't have a federal rule. But there's an organization in South Florida, which you mentioned that you were marching against Wendy's. I was. And ran into my daughter, Maya, a few months ago on behalf of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

And that is an extraordinary organization that really has come up with a formula that has stopped exploitation and stopped abuse and stopped sexual assault, basically ended sexual assault among farm workers. And their model is now being used in Bangladesh for garment workers. It's being used in Hollywood for the Me Too movement. And it's being used in the upstate uh in in vermont for uh for dairy workers so um they've done an incredible job yeah it's an incredible story i'm going to go into a little bit but you know this is a group of uh farm workers from a number of different countries from i think jamaica and mexico and uh they were being really abused they weren't given shelter from the shade they weren't given water they weren't given you know proper. They weren't given shelter from the shade. They weren't given water. They weren't given proper breaks. They weren't given restrooms. They weren't given safe transportation. They had sexual abuse. There was all these injustices against them. They were paid not a living wage. the morning until eight at night. And they figured out how together they could band together to create a movement. And they sort of happened in fits and starts, but they finally figured out that

by boycotting not the farmers who were abusing them, but the purchasers of the farm products, like Wendy's or like Taco Bell, they were able to pressure the supply chain to change their purchasing practices, which then led to this fair, you know, fair trade, fair labor sort of practices. So can you talk a little bit about how that happened and how they were successful? It's a very compelling story. And it wasn't, you know't from the outside. It came from the inside. Yeah. Yeah, it's an amazing story of people, the lowest end of the supply chain, standing up and figuring out how to make things work.

But there's a guy called Lucas Benitez and Greg Aspett and a few others who came together and had had it with being exploited and figured out this program. successfully prosecuted 15 cases of slavery in the united states over the last decade 15 cases of people going to jail for enslaving farm workers picking tomatoes how about and what what does slavery look like because you know it's hard to imagine really buying and selling people or what are they what are they doing well i'll tell you'll tell you, in one of the cases they were, and this was of African Americans, primarily African American slavery, they were going into homeless shelters and saying to people, many of whom had intellectual disabilities, if you come with us, we'll give you food and shelter and a full-time job.

And people had gotten to this truck, which was basically a U-Haul, with no windows, and they're driven five hours and dumped out in a tomato field and told you to pick tomatoes now 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and they're not. You know, they're not. And they weren't paid. They're not paid, and they have no idea where they are,

and they have no idea how to get out of it. That was one of the cases. Wow. Another case was of immigrants coming up from, you know, seasonal workers coming up across the Texas border, looking for work. Yeah, we've got a full-time job for you. Just get on this bus and go to Florida. Again, they're taking, now, in that particular case,

they had, I think it was like 24 people in one mobile home. And they show everybody binoculars and show them how binoculars work. And then they pistol whip a couple of the workers and say, and they've got guns, and they say, if any of you tries to leave, we're going to shoot you, and we're going to kill you. And we've got binoculars on you all day long. You go into this field and work. And they were there for a year. The field adjoined a, what's the biggest bird watching association?

The Audubon Society? Yeah, it adjoined an Audubon Society. They did tons of people with binoculars looking at them all day long. Oh, wow. How about that? Can you imagine if anyone from the audubon society thought those people were being enslaved and being and that they were being exploited so that's what was happening but

what they did was they went to consumers yeah and then they got consumers on board, mostly on college campuses, starting in college campuses and generally. And then they went to the big buyers like McDonald's and Burger King and others, the fast food companies and now Walmart. And they said, you have the danger of slavery in your fields. All you have to do is comply with the Fair Food Program, and we will guarantee that you don't have the supply chain disruptions and that you're treating your people fairly. And so, you know, eventually almost all those companies came around, but Wendy's is still holding out. And Publix, right? Publix, they converted. What the Fair Food Program does is it's a worker-driven social responsibility.

Most social responsibility compacts are written by the CEO or the legal team or the marketing team. This is written by the workers. What do you need in order to feel safe? We need sanitation in the fields. We need to be able to wash our hands. We need to be paid from the moment we get on the bus, not the moment when we can start working in the field. All those types of things.

Then they have an agreement that they'll train all of the workers in those fields. They do trainings once every about two months so that everybody knows their rights. Yeah. And knows how to report the abuses. And then they can, you know, and then the abuses continue to happen usually in a field for another year but once everybody understands that they'll be held accountable for abuse the abuse has stopped yeah and that's what they've been able to prove so yeah I mean the fair food program is pretty amazing because it really was generated from the workers and they were and in

order for a company to say they are a fair food purchaser and be part of that and get the credibility with the consumer, they have to agree to do these things, including paying a penny more per pound, which doesn't sound like very much, but it doubles the wages of these farm workers. the consumers. And the amazing provisions are things that we would all think are just something we should already have in America, like no forced labor, no child labor, no violence, minimal wage, paid workers for all their work, no sexual abuse. I mean, these are things that we all should expect, freedom to report unsafe treatment, abuse, access to shade and clean water, and, you know, just like things that we take for granted, most of us, being transported in safe vehicles around many things that are going to fall apart, and actually how to actually leave the field if there's pesticide spraying. I mean, I think the data from a doctor's point of view is so striking to me, Kerry. When you look at the Chimaco study

in Salinas, California, the chemical exposures from the pesticides, even, I mean, though there were a lot of reforms in California, there's still tremendous exposures. The workers there are 59% more likely to get leukemia, 70% more likely to get stomach cancer. They're more likely to get cervical cancer, 63%. And what's really striking is in breast milk. So these kids are really born pre-polluted. You know, it's pretty scary. 40% more pesticides in the breast milk. These kids have neurological impairment.

They lost 41 million IQ points in this population. And they're using chemicals that are banned in most other countries, like atrazine, paraquat, nicotinamides, and dichloropropene, which is one of the most harmful ones in most white leaves in California. And it's like, wow, you know, we're living in a democracy where equal rights and human justice are, I mean, we're like the, you know, the sort of apparently the paragon of human rights. And we call it all these other countries.

And it's terrible, especially in these workers. That workers should have basic rights would seem to be a given. But for many food and farm workers, it's terrible, especially in these workers. That workers should have basic rights would seem to be a given, but for many food and farm workers, it's not. Part of how we can help fix this problem is by supporting restaurant and food retailers who agree to the Fair Food Program and by pressuring growers to adhere to basic tenets. If you'd like to learn more about anything you heard today, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversation with Kerry Kennedy, as well as his conversation on racial health disparities with his colleagues at the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Hyman also included a full chapter on this topic in his book, Food Fix. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with a

friend and leaving us a review below. Thanks for tuning in. medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.