When A Stranger Resides With You - Migrant Farmworkers and the Gift of Food
Matthew Whelan graduated from the University of Virginia in 2000 with a BA in Religious Studies and English. After two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in central Honduras—where he supported community groups working on sustainable agricultural projects around the El Chile Biological Reserve—Matthew returned to Charlottesville to work as an outreach paralegal for the Virginia Farmworker Legal Assistance Project. Whelan subsequently earned a Masters degree in agronomy at the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center in Costa Rica and a Masters in Theological Studies from Duke University.
Eating is more complex than a nutritional exchange between an eater and food or a commercial transaction between a buyer and seller. It is also participation in a vast system of relationships in which we occupy a privileged place and through which the transmission of our food is anything but neutral. In this paper, Matthew Whelan presents eating as part of a story. He asks, who and what counts as part of it? He presents the story in Christian terms when he describes food as a gift. We become participants in a story in which it is not just my daily bread that matters but our daily bread.
At the center of Whelan's narrative are migrant farmworkers. Called by many the poorest and most disadvantaged group of laborers in the US, farmworkers work for low wages, with minimal benefits and under hazardous conditions. Farmworker poverty in the US is a complex, self-reinforcing dynamic. The story of a promised land that many farmworkers have heard before their arrival clashes with their experience in the US agriculture sector. As one farmworker, Salvador Moreno puts it, "You remember your friends who told you that the US was like paradise. You wonder why they never spoke about the pain."
Whelan considers farmworker poverty in terms of the marks it leaves on bodies—both physical and communal—of farmworkers. As farmworker Karen Benson puts it: "We are caught up in the economy ... we are getting squeezed." When the pressure—the squeezing—is intense enough, bodies break. While the most extreme mark of their poverty is death, more often this mark is broken bones or severed body parts like hands, fingers, and feet.
Whelan presents his topic as inherently Christian, because Christians believe food is a gift, which we acknowledge when we pray before a meal. To speak of food as a gift means we are not its creators. We are not in ultimate control of our nourishment; our food was not something acquired through "the power and might of my hand" (Deuteronomy 8:17). To believe that our food is a gift means we depend on others, the land, and ultimately, upon a God, whose gift of love infuses these relationships and sustains them.
Whelan concludes will a call for repentance and forgiveness, among the distinctively Judeo-Christian practices that seek to heal damaged relationships. While there is no sure path to healing, the way is characterized by great risk and much difficulty, for the repentant ones must recognize their complicity in the offense, and the offended ones must forgive those who have wronged them. But despite the difficulties in performing these practices, they testify to the faith that relationships are not destined to remain damaged, but can emerge healed and even strengthened. There is still hope that a story different from the dominance of the present one is possible.
Full text of Mr. Whelan's paper (208k, doc): When A Stranger Resides With You