You might know that a lot of produce moves from Mexico to the U.S. But the infrastructure and economics of that system are incredibly screwed up—like throwing tons of ripe tomatoes into a landfill screwed up.
The winner of the Sundance Institute Short Film Challenge this year is a film called Man in the Maze, featured today on QZ, and it looks at the “food superhighway” that brings food from Mexican farms to American border towns, supplying as much as 30 percent of produce year-around.
It’s the “largest inland port of entry for food in the world,” and as experts in the short explain, it’s also a broken system. It’s here that millions of pounds of produce are regularly bulldozed into landfills because of stateside price fluctuations—yet a food insecurity and diabetes is rampant because the people who live and work in these regions are unable to afford fresh produce.
The treatment of the farmers themselves is horrible—but here’s a startling look at what happens when the food leaves the farm.
[Man in the Maze; h/t QZ]
