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...a famous television programme in which for the first time british viewers were confronted with their most popular supermarket Tesco actually running a farm in Zimbabwe that supplies its mange tout and increasingly restricting what it accepted from the farmers as its perfect vegetables (Source: Miller nd, np).
[From the previous photo in this series...] Cut to the farm’s ‘caterpillar examiner’ explaining how she tried to kill herself. It ended up saying that the growers earn a penny for every [amount] of mange-tout they pick- on which Tesco would make something like a 46p profit, and the exporter 30p ish. It was sickening. Sickening that multinationals have such power over these people and are exploiting them so much (Source: O’Malley 2005).
In theory the link between the Shona woman picking mangetout and a consumer buying it could hardly be more direct. The vegetable takes a matter of hours to get from Zimbabwe to the UK. You would not believe the love that goes into getting these peas from the soil to the shelf. Temperature-controlled, constantly monitored, the mangetout is a newborn baby, a VIP travelling first class, a donor organ being rushed to its destination. ‘Flown for freshness’, boasts the marketing blurb on the label. ... Grannie Chabvundira, a 25-year-old mangetout caterpillar inspector on Chiparawe, is faced every morning with six gleaming washbasins in the concrete pack house and the injunction to scrub up. Above her head, crackling blue insect-killers protect the peas. Two hundred yards down the track, she and hundreds of other women workers live in mud huts or barracks with no electricity and one water tank that they must share. How difficult would it be to earmark some of the farmer's profit or the supermarket's profit or even increase the cost to us the consumers, as a contribution towards improving that infrastructure? (Source: Phillips 1997, p.18).
The previous photo in this series: www.flickr.com/photos/followthethings/13903870713/
See our page on this film, www.followthethings.com/mangetout.shtml
Made in the Idea Zone at the Geographical Association Annual Conference, April 2014.
Legoing by Ian Cook