For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Health Issues page, Appetite for a Change page, Organic Transitions page, and our Texas News page.
Construction workers may not be the most obvious constituency for a preacher of the locavore gospel. Yet in the airy stretches of Austin’s Pecan Springs neighborhood, Kandace Vallejo is making inroads from her perch in a bright blue building set on two acres. As membership programs coordinator at the Workers Defense Project (WDP), a workers center founded in 2002 to help construction workers — many of them undocumented immigrants — battle against rampant under- and non-payment of wages, Vallejo launched a food-themed education project for the children of WDP’s members in early 2010. Drawing on experience with the Student Farmworker Alliance and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in south Florida — and with support from a hyper-competitive Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Food and Community Fellowship — Vallejo is building a compelling case for the idea that everyone cares about their meals. I caught up with Vallejo recently to hear how a pitch for local food plays with the children of day laborers.

Q. What made you decide to bring food justice education to a group of construction workers?

A. Our membership asked us to. We bought a building in 2009 with a couple acres of land, and when our membership voted on what they wanted to see happen here, having a garden was one of the top priorities. In terms of doing youth programming around food issues, it just became apparent that it was something kids could really grasp because food is something that everybody interacts with. You can use it to talk about issues of access and economic inequality with a high schooler, and for a five-year-old we can talk about why it’s not fair that they don’t have a grocery stores in their neighborhood. That’s one way to talk about food. Another way is to get kids to appreciate their own cultural practice and use that appreciation to see and appreciate other cultural practices. It’s a good way to teach kids about difference.

Q. What are the biggest challenges around food faced by your group’s members?

A. The folks we’re working with definitely have issues with food access. Construction workers in Austin tend to work 10- to 14-hour days, and usually get paid a daily rate of anywhere from $60 to $90. Other folks are paid a weekly rate of $150 or $200, on the high end. So we know it’s drastically below minimum wage. And most of the folks we serve live in east Austin: a predominantly low-income, historically African-American and Latino or immigrant [neighborhood]. One of my first nights in the youth program, we were busting out some snacks for the kids — crackers and peanut butter — and I was asking if they had eaten dinner yet, and one of the kids said, “We don’t eat dinner.” And I was thinking, “Is that [because of] a religious practice”? And he said, “My dad has been out of work so we just don’t eat dinner, we don’t have money for that.”