Tangled Routes: Women, Work And Globalization On The Tomato Trail

We have been mapping the journey of the corporate tomato from a Mexican agribusiness to a Canadian supermarket and U.S.-based fast food restaurant as a device for examining globalization from above (the corporate agendas) and globalization from below (the stories of lowest-waged women workers in these sectors). We met Irena during this tracing of the tomato’s trail, discovering a piece of the story that did not fit into any straight line or simple South-North axis. While most people are aware that our winter tomatoes are planted, picked, and packed by Mexican workers, few realize that our locally produced summer tomatoes are also brought to us by Mexican hands, borrowed for the summer as cheap labour. This is one of the less visible stories of trade within the new global economy (Source: Barndt 2002a, p.82).

Each chapter is framed by an analysis of ‘globalization-from-above’ in the form of corporate stories documenting the assembly-line production and consumption of tomatoes, and ‘globalization-from-below’ in the form of resistance at the individual and collective levels. This resistance is seen in community-based projects that provide food alternatives and the ‘broader mobilization of civil society across borders and around common visions of social justice and environmental sustainability’ (Source: Tunstall & Haley 2004 link).

With ‘Tangled Routes’, Deborah Barndt pioneers a method for demystifying the technologies of globalization with an extraordinarily well-crafted and lively ethnography of the transnational tomato chain. Along the way, we encounter not only the women working in the fields, factories and fast food outlets but also the variety of survival practices and resistances that constitute ‘globalization from below.’ These compelling stories counterpoint the spatial and social abstractions of the genetically engineered corporate tomato, its neoliberal trade regime, and its flexible workplaces. Barndt’s coherent framing of a series of situational accounts models an understanding of the underside of globalization that is instructive, empowering, and richly textured (Source: McMichael nd link).

In Tangled Routes, author Deborah Barndt uses an ecological and gendered analysis of the ‘global commodity chain’ to follow the production and consumption of the tomato, and the lives of the workers (predominately women) involved in bringing tomatoes from Mexico to Canadians. Her analysis focuses on four key themes: the production, distribution and consumption of tomatoes; the impact of the work and technology involved in bringing tomatoes to our tables; environmental and occupational health issues; and threats to biodiversity and cultural diversity (Source: Tunstall & Haley 2004 link).

Barndt develops a coherent description of the journey of the corporate tomato across space and time by means of global commodity chain analysis, augmented with formal gender analysis including ecofeminism, cultural studies, oral interviews with the workers, her own activist experience and popular education projects in which she has been involved. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, expanded by Leah Cohen (1997) and applied to the division of labor along the tomato trail, which distances both producers and consumers from the actual tomato, explains the alienation of indigenous workers and their disconnectedness not only from the production process but the land itself. What emerges from this combination of theory, methodological frames, and multiple collaborations is a layered narrative that is accessible at different levels of competency in the globalization field (Source: Bechtold 2007, p.437).

Borrowing Gramsci’s concept of ‘moments,’ each successive phase of agricultural production does not replace the former but rather draws from and depends on it. Every new ‘input’ links additional workers, production processes, and environmental impacts to the tomato. For example, cardboard boxes introduced for packing at the insistence of US buyers contributes to deforestation and insect infestation of Mexican tomato-growing areas. The reader learns to account for the social costs of production and the latter’s intimate link to consumption: from fuel-guzzling refrigerated transport trucks and cashiers’ carpal-tunnel to the decline of ‘commensality’ (the sharing of meals) and the homogenization of food practices in general (Source: Werner 2004, p.318).

One of the environmental activists advocating for the human rights of Indigenous migrant workers in the Mexican fields calls the tomatoes they pick the ‘fruits of injustice.’ We began to realize that not only have the tomatoes become increasingly commodified in the neoliberal industrialized food system, but the most marginalized workers are also commodities in this new trade game. In fact, tomatoes – a highly perishable, delicate fruit and one of the winners for Mexico in the NAFTA reshuffle – are often treated better than the workers (soucre: Barndt 2002a, p.82).

The Tomasita Project is by definition a feminist and an ecological project. First, it is a feminist act to make visible the women workers in the food system, redressing their invisibility in other studies of global agriculture and trade regimes as well as in the public consciousness. Beyond filling in the gaps left by male-dominated perspectives, this study benefits from the rich development of diverse feminist theories over the past decade. I have drawn from a wide array of fields, ranging from political economic labor studies to feminist ecological economics, from socialist feminism to feminist environmentalism, from gender and sustainable development to social ecofeminism. My own positions have also been shaped by three decades of research and activism in the U.S. and Canada, as well as in Peru, Nicaragua, and Mexico (Source: Barndt 2002a, p.84).

Working from a feminist historical materialist perspective, which sees knowledge as being built over time from experiences of complex relations, Barndt traces the tomato’s construction as a global agricultural commodity, from seed, to field, to store, to table. Often expressed in abstract technical terms, globalization can seem overwhelming; however, it is through such everyday moments and processes that individuals come to experience and understand complex phenomena (Source: Jubas 2010, p.3).

My search for the roots of this tomato story took me to Mexico. There I also found trees that expose their gnarled roots, crawling along the ground, wrapped around each other. “Tangled roots and routes” seemed a perfect metaphor for the process of analysis framing this book … I realize that I run the risk of simplifying a multilayered and contextually shaped global food system by focusing on just one commodity (the tomato), in one context (North America), and highlighting one particular social group (women food workers). These are not only concrete entry points for exploring broader processes that move beyond the particularity of the tomato. The metaphor of tangled roots and routes reminds us that these stories are neither simple nor one-dimensional but rather complex, messy, and very rich (Source: Barndt 2002b, p.3).

In my particular telling pf the tomato tale, the overall impression is of a long and twisty trail, a many-staged journey that no one understands in its entirety. We were most struck by the fact as we interviewed campesino and company vice president, cashier and chief buyer alike: no one person has the whole pictire; each actor in this complex chain perhaps has some sense of the steps that come just nefore and after his or hers, but sometimes not even that much. Of course each stage is perceived differently by each person engaged in it; these multiple subjectivities, in fact, make the story not only contradictory but also more human. It is a daunting task to piece together the puzzle. I have confronted roadblcosk and detours, discovered diversions and surprising openings. In this telling, I have chosen to follow certain tangiential paths and not others. This is a constantly changing process that I personally can’t hope to unravel fully (Source: Barndt 2002 b, p.9-10).

The strongest and most original contribution of Tangled Routes is its author’s creative mix of strong academic and activist work. The reader learns as much from the detailed historical analysis and theoretical approach as she does from the myriad of stories of actual feminist-activist practice. This book is one of several products of Barndt’s decade-long commitment to globalization education instituted through a multi-year, multi-disciplinary collaboration with 15 women academics from the NAFTA region. Drawing on examples from advertisement busting to transnational coalition work to a 6-week module on marketing analysis for grade-schoolers (including Barndt’s son), Tangled Routes  provides a compelling model of ways to resolve complex commitments to feminist theory and practice (Source: Werner 2004, p.318).

These are the stories of resistance, of the creation of alternatives, of the building of links of solidarity that have also been invisible in both academic works as well as in the public consciousness (Source: Barndt 2002a, p.88).

If you’re looking for the poster child for everything that’s wrong with modern industrial agriculture, you can’t get any better than a supermarket tomato. Supermarket tomatoes are generally tasteless and grown at a tremendous cost to the workforce (Source: Melander-Dayton 2011 link).

Tomatoes are especially rich objects of study because they have been subject to many forms of technology based needs and consumer-driven packaging such as stickers for product look up codes, the corporate demand not to be squishy and for them to be shapely and sliceable (Source: Genosko 2005, p.109).

Who could believe that the story of a tomato’s northward journey could reveal the true heart of corporate globalization? Women, that’s who – women whose toil speeds the journey and whose stories leap off the page to touch our hearts and our consciousness. Deborah Barndt’s Tangled Routes is a wonderful and important book (Source: Barlow in Beevis nd link).

You feel immediate emotional responses to the injustices and “backwardness” of the current food issues in Mexico. As Americans, we all must feel somewhat guilty because of our current demand for food causes the urgency for supply. This urgency fuelled by economic gains, ignores those social gains which benefit us all. I for one do not feel sympathy for the workers, because sympathy is not beneficial to them or me (Source: Adams 2009 link).

The connection of women to globalization, not only through agriculture but through world production in general, is also a real plus. The photographs are wonderful, and the activist pieces at the ends of the chapters offer students some concrete examples for responding to a corporate world (Source: Peterson nd link).

The strengths of this book are its organization and clarity, its skilful interweaving of global processes and local realities, and its attention to methodology. I definitely plan to use it again in my international studies course (Source: Ranchod-Nilsson nd link).