We sat down with Norma Flores, who sweated and toiled in the fields while her peers spent their time doing homework and having childhoods. Here’s what she told us about the shockingly modern face of backbreaking child labor…

5 Awful Things I Learned as a Child Laborer (in the USA)

#5. Your Food is Harvested by Children (and It’s Perfectly Legal)

"I started working full time when I was 12, but I’d been working in fields since third grade. There’s no daycare out [there], so parents bring their kids … [The kids] start by bringing buckets, water, picking up apples that had fallen off the tree. Casual, light stuff. And they gradually do more and more. It’s not uncommon to meet kids who have been working since they were able to walk."

Don’t pretend that slaughterhouses and the meat industry don’t use child labor. Slaughterhouses have always been one of the most dangerous places to work. If you buy and consume animal products, you are funding them and their continued cruelty towards humans and animals.

Plant agriculture and animal agriculture exploit children and force them to work for pathetically little pay in extremely dangerous field. The children that are forced to work are almost always children whose families live in near absolute poverty. The poorest have always been exploited under capitalism, and it is no surprise to anyone that this includes the agricultural industry.

NOW

“We put far more energy into animals per unit of food than we do for any plant crop. The main reason is that cattle consume 16 times more grain than they produce as meat, so right there we have 16 times as much energy just to grow those crops, just so we can waste them on livestock.”

There is 16 times as much labor and resources going into a pound of meat than a pound of grains. Children are exploited 16 times as much because the Western world eats so much meat.Some sources may vary on the exact amount, but its crystal clear that meat requires significantly more resources than animals. After all, even though most “food” animals are only kept alive for a few short years to reach maximum size, they need to be fed a lot in order to reach that. 

The overwhelming majority of the plants that grow on farms is fed to animals, which are only much later fed to humans. This is an incredibly inefficient waste of our resources, including water, land, grains, and fossil fuels (in transporting plants -> animal farms -> slaughterhouses -> people, rather than just plants -> people). This inefficiency is directly related to poverty and starvation of the poor.

If we took the plants used to feed all the cattle in the United States alone, we could feed 1.4 billion people. 

If the United States drastically reduced its consumption of animal products, there would be more land and resources (though we would have to use much less!) available to grow plant foods instead. The key to lowering the rates of poverty—and subsequently, child labor—is in global veganism. 

"Laws to change the system go nowhere because, ultimately, this is what society wants. Whether it’s from a fast food restaurant, a Walmart, or the food truck out behind your work that got a "D" on its last health inspection, we want our food cheap, and in rib-shattering quantities. Farmers need to keep their costs low if they want to keep their farms, and so they turn to the same source of cheap labor that powered the Industrial Revolution and that train in Snowpiercer: children.”

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