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Article ID: CBB893850274

“True Sustainability”: An Environmental, Worker, and Consumer History of Organic Strawberry Farming in 1990s California (2021)

Shana Bernstein (Author)

Agricultural History
Volume: 95
Issue: 3
Pages: 500-531
Publication date: 2021
Language: English

DOI: 10.3098/ah.2021.095.3.500

URI: https://doi.org/10.3098/ah.2021.095.3.500

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Organic farming Labor unions Agriculture Fruits 20th century, late United States California (U.S.)

In 1998 the United Farm Workers and Swanton Berry Farm signed the first contract between a union and an organic farm. Exploring this contract’s origins uncovers a previously hidden history of the 1990s as a time of possibility for coalitions among labor activists, environmentalists, and consumers. In the heart of the neoliberal decade usually remembered for its lack of activism, we see vital progressive coalitions. The contract reflects the merging of three reform threads—the farmworker justice, environmental, and consumer movements—and reveals an integrated vision for agriculture that transcends a zero-sum approach to food reform. Activists who recognized how exposure to toxic chemicals blurred boundaries between the bodies and health of workers, consumers, and wildlife joined forces in Swanton, which came to be a rare example of a farm trying to achieve what its owner in later years called “true sustainability”: environmental stewardship, good labor practices, and healthier food for consumers.

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