Apples in America Apples have been a popular food for thousands of years across many cultures in history, including the Greeks, Romans, and Celts. However, apples are not native to America. The Native Americans only had crabapples before European settlers brought apples as we know them today to America. The Native Americans quickly spread and cultivated the “new” apples throughout America (Association 2017). In today’s industrialized world, apple production has become a billion dollar industry. Most people do not think about where their food comes from. They just go to the grocery store and buy what they want with little to no thought if a fruit or vegetable is in season or where it came from before the grocery store. For the purpose of this …show more content…
In it, Martinez talks about his life as a migrant farm worker who travels to Pennsylvania each year with his wife and five children to work on an apple orchard and the difficulties that he and his family face from not having a stable home or income. His five children must change schools each time they travel to a new location. His three year old daughter also has leukemia and requires medical care. His job is risky and he says that he wants to save up to settle down. They truly live a modern nomadic lifestyle. The article also says that nationwide, an estimated 70,000 workers pick apples every fall. Many are single men who live in "camps" right on the farms. Those rooms are basic, and cramped. Martinez and his family rent a small apartment (Charles 2015). It is a very difficult transient lifestyle that is hard for someone who has never lived that way to comprehend. My first husband was a migrant farm worker (mostly on dairy farms) and we moved with our three children more times than I can count. To this day I still have issues with security and it continues to affect my three oldest children as well even though they are now adults. My youngest daughter from my second marriage is fourteen and has only lived in three places her entire life because of my adversity to moving, my need for security, and simply wanting her to have a better life than my older children had. I digress, my point is that these workers, the apple pickers, live an extremely hard life and the effects trickle down to every member of their
she says, “In the Key West area, this pretty much confines me to flophouses and trailer homes-like the one, a pleasing fifteen-minute drive from town, that has no air-conditioning, no screens, no fans, no television, and, by way of diversion...The big problem with this place, though, is the rent, which at $675 a month is well beyond my reach” (Ehrenreich12). Ehrenreich explains how it was hard for her to find a house and what kind of house she can afford after she decided to live a worker life. She explains that although the house that she found doesn’t have fans, air conditions, screens or television and it is just a basic house to live in, she couldn’t afford it by the low income wedge. As a laborer, she doesn’t have the right for looking on more than her basic needs that can make her just survive and even if she looks for something more it will be hard for her to afford it. By the same token, Ehrenreich gives another example how labor relates to human basic needs. She explains how being a waiter with minimum wedge shows no sign of being financially viable lives. She mentions some examples from her coworkers’ lives by saying, “Gail is sharing a room in a well-known downtown flophouse for $250 a week. Her roommate, a male friend, has begun
The cost for places to live like hotels, motels, or trailer parks may be within reason, but not enough for a blue collar worker’s salary. The difficulty in securing a place to live is not uncommon, and many have made ways to work around it like sharing apartments. Ehrenreich details these types of situations in her novel like “Tina, another server, and her husband [who] are paying $60 a night for a room in the Days Inn…[or] Joan… [who] lives in a van parked behind a shopping center at night and showers in Tina 's motel room” (pg. 25). Examples taken from Ehrenreich’s novel shows us the struggles that many have had to go through to secure a place to live. It isn’t to say that these people don’t work hard, but, unfortunately, this is the best they get for the work they put in and the pay they receive.
It is hard when you are a middle class family, and eventually a good life passes to be a low income family. Not just a Paycheck from Unnatural Causes describes how unemployment, and change on class & income can transform people 's health. The film presents how a middle white family started seen discrepancies among being working class and the rich. In fact, they start to understand what mean being unemployment. Basically, the film briefly explains the reasons why companies have to move to different places not matter the wellbeing of their workers. Thus, what really matter in this industrialized world is profit, and that 's what company holders are seeking at cost of anything. Clearly, companies do not care what is going to be the life of an unemployment because chair holders never have to experience it generally. In reality, the closure of companies directly constitute to a negative impact on the rate of jobs and the stress level on the people who lose their jobs which is connected to the health of the US.
A lot of them could barely pay their rent. Her coworkers were typically straightforward about their personal lives. Usually, they would live with a roommate so rent could be split in half. Gail, a coworker from “Hearthside”, shared a room with a male friend for $250 a week in a well-known downtown flophouse (Ehrenreich, 2001). Additionally, she recognized how poor her coworkers truly were. Some of them did not even have enough money for lunch. They often bought the cheapest food to take to work, which was also not always the healthiest. Health insurance was completely out of the picture for some people. Sacrifices had to be made because there was not enough money to have everything. In certain circumstances, jobs would withhold the first check so that people could not quit right away. Benefits from work, such as paid vacation, insurance, and sick days, did not often come until someone worked at the same job for over year. Low-wage jobs are often manipulating because they need workers, yet they sometimes struggle to get them. Higher education is an extreme challenge for minimum wage workers because of it being so expensive. “Most good jobs require a college degree, but the poor cannot afford to send their children to college” (Baca-Zinn, 2009). Although people often say, “money cannot buy happiness”, it is often the factor that determines everything in life. How much someone makes ultimately regulates housing, food, education level, and overall
Whenever people bite into some food, they often forget how far that food has travelled to get to them. Each ingredient has its own story, some better than others. By tracking just two days of my food consumption I learned a lot about myself and my food. It is easy to forget, or not care about where our food comes nowadays and how we impact where that food comes from with our demands. Foods from different regions carry with them different sociological, economical and environmental impact; sometimes, outweighing the value of the food.
This shows that the Joad family’s tribulations result from inhumane treatment from the state and wealthy businessmen who send the poor into bankruptcy. As the family relocates to California, the officials there constantly force immigrants to live on roadsides and fail to help them acquire decent living quarters (Steinberg 130). This represents inhumanity.
This means that for all the other foods that I ate, I have no certainty of where they came from and who actually produced them. Some could have been sourced locally and could have been produced by immigrant farmworkers or they could have been produced across the globe by other farmworkers. The orange and the pear were the only foods that had a sticker demonstrating their country of origin and the company that produced them. The pear that I ate came from the US (place not specified) and the orange that I ate came from this family-owned farm from California. The website of the family-owned farm (Booth Ranch) highlighted its sustainable practices, its focus on freshness, its focus on community outreach, and the products’ nutritional benefits. The website showed an idyllic pasture full of beautiful orange trees being managed by a tight-knit white family. However, aside from a few photos, there was barely any mention of the farm workers and there was no mention in the website of treating their farmworkers
This object brings me back to the reading “The Search of the Primeval Apple Forest” by Frank Browning. For the reason that the apple is an object like the hot dog that is seen as a “quintessentially American” object. Since the apple is associated with the famous apple pie, candy apple, applesauce, and many more American culture recipes. However, when assigned this reading found out that the apple was not even grown first in America. It was grown in different parts of the world like Rome, northern Europe, southwest Asia and so forth (Browning in the reader, pg. 37). The apple started to be passed down by seeds and branches (Browning in the reader). Therefore, was able to get around to many other places as well and that is how it ended up here
In addition, Washington produces about seventy percent of apples in the United States. Which that it also provided 160,000 jobs for people and contributes thirteen percent to state’s economy. Also it helped the country economy as well. However, with all the apple that were harvested. It produces over 100 million boxes per year and more thank $15 billion in food and agricultural
The majority of low income citizen does not own a house, and the narrator falls into that category. Her family constantly has to move around due to the bad condition of the houses they moved in. She also states that each time they move, “there’d be one more of us” (147), explains that the size of the household grew each them they move. The rent of their previous apartment should be cheap enough since the landlord did not bother to fix it and said “the house was too old” (147). However, they picked another old house that is falling apart, but considered it as an improvement since at least they own a house now.
A typical example of the living conditions of the undocumented can be found in Seth Holmes Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. Holmes did a case study on the Triqui people, who risked their lives to cross the border to come to the United States. They are poor farmer, to be exact, poor berry pickers, who suffer from knee, back, and hip pain everyday. A study by the National Agricultural Worker Survey shows that 81 percent of farmworkers are immigrants, 95 percent of whom were born in Mexico and 52 percent of whom are undocumented (Holmes, 99). Fletcher emphasized that an employer often use cheap undocumented worker in order to reduce costs, but as soon as that worker shows support for a union, the employer will call the authority officer to have that worker deported (Fletcher,
Artic Apples were created by Neal and Louisa Carter in Canada. The Carter’s founded the Okanagan Specialty Fruits Inc. and began manufacturing their apples under this company name. Artic apples are analogous to normal apples, with the difference of browning. Usually, when you cut into an apple or one becomes bruised, there is slight browning inside of the apple right away. However, scientists have found a way to stop the chemical reaction that causes browning by a process called gene silencing. During this process, they silence the genes within the apple that produce the enzyme polyphenol oxidases that is responsible for the browning chemical reaction (Paul & Cummins, 2013). Since there are only four of the genes responsible for this reaction, it is easy to silence all of them (Xu, 2013). Using this
Wilson owned a small store where he saved every penny he earned in order to move west and start a better life for his family. No matter how hard he worked, George Wilson was trapped in a life where he was barely able to scrape by (Fitzgerald 124). Unfortunately, the low wages he earned were not ever enough to achieve his American Dream. In an article written by Studs Terkel, he explains the plight of farm workers through the eyes of a man named Roberto Acuna. Roberto shares the harsh conditions, physical effects, and low wage problem of being an immigrant working the fields.
For an American household of four, the average price of discarded produce is near $1,600 annually and globally, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that one-third of all food grown is misplaced or wasted, an amount valued at nearly $3 trillion (Chandler). The main cause is that food, such as corn, wheat, milk, and soybeans is wasted more in the U.S. anywhere else in the world (Chandler). According to Chandler, “The great American squandering of produce appears to be a cultural dynamic as well, enabled in large part by a national obsession with the aesthetic quality of food. Fruits and vegetables, in addition to generally being healthful, have the tendency to bruise, brown, wilt, oxidize, ding, or discolor and that is apparently something American shoppers will not abide,”
Apple Inc. was founded on April 1, 1976 in Cupertino, CA and was incorporated on January 3, 1977 (Apple, 2010). The company was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Jobs also asked his former colleague from Atari, Ronald Wayne to join them in their startup. Wayne designed the first Apple logo. In early 1976 Jobs approached a local company store, The Byte Shop, said they would be interested in the machine, but only if it came completely assembled (Foljanty, 2010). The shop ordered 50 Apple I computers which sold for $666.66. The three owners would assemble the Apple Is at night in their garage still managed to deliver the ordered Apple Is in ten days. In April of 1976 Ron Wayne resigned from Apple Computer because he felt the financial