Blueberry-Peach Pie

When I was a child, vacation meant pie. Key lime pie, strawberry rhubarb pie, but most importantly, blueberry peach pie. In my memory, this was the perfect pie: not too sweet, just tart enough, with a flaky crust. We would pick it up from a pie stand on the side of the road and I would hold it carefully on my lap on the ride home, feeling the heat from the freshly baked pie through the container. That pie stand disappeared some years ago, but since then I’ve been trying to recreate this perfect pie. I’ve spent years trying out different crusts – all butter, with vodka, butter and shortening – but just one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar here makes all the difference. The filling is sweet but still a little tart, with no cornstarch and no frozen berries: just the best pie dough I can imagine with that perfect mix of blueberries and peaches. 

Blueberries are the focus today, since here in the Midwest we are at the height of blueberry season. The US is the world’s largest producer of blueberries, producing an estimated 690 million pounds in 2016. Despite the large domestic production, the US is actually a net importer of blueberries, due to the large imports during the winter months when they don’t grow in the US. In 2017, the US imported 137.8 million pounds of fresh blueberries, over half of which came from Chile.

Blueberries are an exceptionally seasonal crop. While in the US the season runs from April through September, the blueberry season in any single location is fairly short, usually about eight weeks. Blueberry pickers often follow the harvest, from state to state, traveling up the eastern seaboard, from Florida to Georgia to New Jersey and even up to Michigan. On the West Coast, blueberries have recently become big business, with large growers in California, Oregon, and Washington. 

Blueberry picking is seen as a “good” agricultural job. Blueberries are generally harvested by hand so that they don’t get injured during picking. (Machines are used to harvest blueberries for processed foods.) Although it’s tedious work, it’s still easier than strawberry picking, which requires stooping all day, and better than apple picking, which requires climbing up and down ladders. But there are numerous examples of child labor, withheld wages, and exploitation on American farms. About ten years ago, investigative journalists found four young children working on a blueberry farm in western Michigan that sold to Walmart and Kroger. More recently, state inspectors in New Jersey cited six blueberry farms for violating New Jersey’s Water Pollution Control Act and cited eight farms for using storage sheds as illegal housing for migrant workers.,

There have also been many instances of exploitation of workers on H-2A visas, visas granted to short-term agricultural workers to work for a specific employer. H-2A visas are used by berry producing companies to fill agricultural jobs when they can’t find enough American workers. In 2018, berry farmers requested the largest number of workers for any type of crop, 11 percent of the total visas. As the Trump administration has cracked down on undocumented workers, there has been an increase in H-2A workers. There is no annual cap on these visas, and the Trump administration has continued to issue them (in contrast to most other visas), making them an increasingly important source of agricultural workers. In 2018, the US government issued over 200,000 H-2A visas, accounting for about 10 percent of full-time crop agricultural workers. This is a significant increase since 2008, when the government issued only 64,000 H2-A visas.  

The H-2A program makes workers especially vulnerable, even though they have visas to work in the US. Although the practice is illegal, many workers pay agents to receive visas for work at a specific farm, which means that they arrive in the US indebted to the middleman. Once in the US, workers are tied to their employer since they can only legally work for that single employer. According to a 2013 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, workers are systematically cheated out of wages, have their passports and documents seized, are “forced to live in squalid conditions,” and are “subjected to human trafficking and debt servitude.” If workers complain, they can be fired, leaving them unable to work anywhere else and in a tenuous legal position. 

Because of the prevalence of H-2A workers in berry production, it is not surprising that there have been instances of large-scale exploitation in the berry industry. In 2017, the Department of Labor issued a $3.5 million fine to one of the largest fresh blueberry producers, Munger Bros. LLC (and its affiliated companies, Crowne Cold Storage LLC and Sarbanand Farms LLC) for underpaying workers, providing workers with unsanitary housing, and discriminating against US workers in hiring. The farm came under scrutiny after a worker collapsed and died while working on Sarbanand Farms in Washington in 2017. In a consent judgment, the court ordered the company to pay $2.5 million in back wages to workers and $1 million as a civil penalty. It also prohibited Munger Bros. from participating in the H-2A visa program for three years. In 2018, the Washington state Department of Labor and Industries fined Sarbanand Farms $150,000 for its refusal to grant workers rest and meal breaks. 

Problems with the H-2A visa system are not unique to berry production. These types of labor and human rights violations permeate the system. We need better enforcement of labor and employment laws (as well as stronger labor and employment laws to enforce) and a system in which companies are forced to care about their workers. So what about blueberries? This week I bought blueberries and peaches from the local farmer’s market. While I don’t know what the labor conditions on those farms are like, it’s still a better bet than buying from grocery stores that source from industrial farms. 

If you want to learn more about working conditions at one of the affiliates of Munger Bros., read this article in Mother Jones. To learn more about the H-2A visa program, check out this article in Civil Eats, as well as this report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.