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Blood sweat and takeaways
August 4, 2009
 I wonder how many people are watching BBC1's, 'Blood Sweat and Takeaways'? If you don't know about it already it shows six young adults going to Asia to work in the farms and factories where the food they love comes from. It's an epic journey for these six people as they discover the reality of life for the people who grow, catch and process the food that they eat every day, and discover an awful lot about themselves in the process. I suspect that it's also quite an eye-opener for many of us watching the programme too.
Last night was all about prawns, and the young adults worked in the filthy waters of the prawn farms, stayed with the farmers, and then tried to work as prawn processors in the factory in the town. It showed the incredibly hard life that these Indonesian workers lead for such a tiny amount of money. What it didn't show though was the effect of prawn farming not just on the workers but on the land that they live on, something I won't go on about here because it's in 'K is for Kippers' in the book.
What it leaves me wondering though is how do we respond back here in the UK, where so many of the prawns are consumed? I now haven't eaten prawns for quite a while (unless I can guarantee they come from organic farms) because I simply don't want to be part of a system that is so exploitative, to both people and land. But then what is the answer? What about all the people who depend on the prawn farms for a livelihood (although you wonder if it can really be called that)?
It strikes me that one of the main problems is the pressure that we put on the industry from our end, to have our food at cheaper and cheaper prices. That puts untold pressure on the workers in the factories to process a thousand prawns each an hour, turning them into little more than robots who stand all day on the processing lines, and puts awful pressure on the farmers themselves who take so little money from what they produce. It seems to me that we are urgently in need of ethical and fairtrade standards to come into the prawn industry.
I say in the book that we should get back to seeing prawns as an expensive and rare luxury, rather than a regular food. If we ate less of them, but paid more, then less of Indonesia's land would need to be destroyed to make way for the farms and fairtrade standards would ensure that the workers would see more of the money.
I'd love to hear if anyone else has any other ideas. |
Ruth Valerio, 04/08/2009 |
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