The Politics of Produce
Let's ReThink History |
18 videos |
Updated 2 weeks ago
Nothing an economy makes is fought over harder than the things that keep us alive — the crops we eat and the fibers we wear. This series follows fourteen of them, from the tea that sparked a revolution to the tomato at the center of a 2026 trade war, and finds the same story every time: a struggle between capital and labor over a plant that everyone must consume, settled again and again by force — slavery, massacre, coup, deportation — or by organizing — revolt, union, boycott, law.
Corn and the sacred grain of Mesoamerica against NAFTA and the GM-seed monopoly. Sugar and the Haitian Revolution. Coffee and El Salvador's La Matanza. King Cotton and the crop that built and broke America. Carolina rice and the African knowledge the planters stole. Grapes and the birth of the United Farm Workers in Delano. Lettuce in the Salinas Valley — "the Salad Bowl of the World." Tomatoes and the fight for a penny a pound. And the question under all of them: who picks it now, and what does the price on the sticker really cost?
Told evenhandedly — growers and workers, cheap food and its hidden price — and carried all the way to the fields of 2026. Your grocery bill is still a ballot.
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