“Seasonal Workers in Mediterranean Agriculture. The Social Costs of Eating Fresh“
Edited by Jörg Gertel & Sarah Ruth Sippel, Routledge, 2014
Over the last three decades there has been a rapid expansion of intensive production of fresh fruit and vegetables in the Mediterranean regions of south and west Europe. Much of this depends on migrating workers for seasonal labour, including from Eastern Europe, North Africa and Latin America. This book is the first to address global agro-migration complexes across the region. By revealing the story of food commodities loaded with implications of private profit seeking, exploitation, exclusion and multiple insecurities, the book unmasks the hidden costs of fresh food provisioning.
“This excellent monograph, based on exceptionally rich historical and ethnographic case studies, exposures the ugly underbelly and the radical precarity of a contemporary industrial agriculture operating in the long shadow of economic and social crisis. A tour de force.” – Michael Watts, Professor of Geography, Class of 1963 Chair, University of California, Berkeley, USA
“Proof yet again there is no such thing as a free, or even cheap, lunch! It is a sophisticated book with many important take-home messages, one of which being that we can’t afford to keep eating this way.” – Michael Carolan, Professor and Chair of Sociology at Colorado State University, USA
“The book demonstrates that while ‘eating fresh’ might engender visions of happy and healthy consumers, a more nuanced examination of the spatio-temporal dynamics of agri-food globalization reveals an underside of social disadvantage and ecological destruction…a ‘must read’ for all scholars desiring a critical understanding of current global food provisioning.” – Geoffrey Lawrence, Professor of Sociology, University of Queensland, Australia and President, International Rural Sociology Association.
