“Food security is about a lot of things,” says Teresa Mares in an interview with Vermont Public Radio. Mares is an anthropology professor at the University of Vermont and the co-director of Huertas, a community-based food access project that facilitates the planting of kitchen gardens on rural dairy farms in Vermont with Latino/a migrant farm workers.
Photo: Flickr
This week VPR aired a story about Huertas (Huertas is Spanish for garden). Vermont’s immigrant farm workers experience hunger and food insecurity at a higher rate than the rest of the population. Near the Canadian border in Franklin County, many still avoid leaving their farms because of the presence of federal immigration enforcement agents.
“The way that we typically understand it is that food insecurity is a result of poverty,” Mares says. “What we’re seeing is that farm workers often will have the money to buy food, but it’s about having that broader access, whether it’s transportation or access to culturally familiar foods.”
