CALIFORNIA FARM TO SCHOOL PROGRAM - PART 3

A MARXIST WORLD-ECOLOGY ANALYSIS
By: Marcelo Brasil

7. The ideological veneer: Erasure, marketing, and cultivation of future consumers

The procurement policies and labor supply chains examined in previous sections are not merely operational details; they are sustained and legitimized by a powerful, multi-faceted ideological project. This section deconstructs that project, analyzing how Farm to School literature and promotion material strategically erase labor, cultivate future consumers, promote individualist myths, and deploy greenwashing to naturalize the program’s dependence on imperialist appropriation.

7.1 The strategic erasure of labor

Obscuring the material realities of migrant farmworkers is central to California’s school food procurement and to capitalism in general. According to the 2024 national review of the Farm to School program, California's program is explicitly focused on profit and “growth,” noting that farms are “benefiting from significant growth in their business revenues.” (Udasin, 2025) A 2025 study on Farm to School summarizes: “The kids are getting better food. The farmers are getting more money. It’s just a win-win for everyone.” (USDA, 2025) The report details that school sales represented over 25% of total farm sales among participating producers. Farmers benefited from US$1.9 million in grant funds spent on local food. (Berkeley Food Institute , 2025) Moreover, “[t]he grant program has positively impacted growers’ economic opportunities, with over half of producer grantees making school sales within the first six months of the grant (California Farm to School Incubator Grant Program Evaluation Team, 2024).…57% of producer grantees made school sales in Apr–Sep 2023, averaging 33% of farm revenue”(CDFA, 2024) – evidence that public dollars are actively building monopolised markets. Not once do these documents mention a migrant or cafeteria worker.

This growth obsession is central to the program’s official rationale. The 2024 review states that “farm to school activities led to increased sales.” Gail Feenstra, a professor in “sustainable agriculture research” at University of California Davis (UCD), credits this growth to the state’s “investments in the entire farm to school supply chain.” (Berkeley Food Institute, 2024) Her profile on the California Farm to School website describes her work improving “the environmental impacts of agriculture, the health of rural communities and profitability for farming operations in California.” (The California Farm to School Evaluation , 2025) The review’s “key takeaways” highlight “improved economic opportunities for a range of California producers” and that “increasing sales from producers to schools, school districts and [Early Child Education Centers] is a key activity for this grant…will fund California food producers to increase production, processing, and/or distribution of whole or minimally processed foods for the school food market.” (CDFA, 2024) Similarly, researcher Tim Bowles of University of California Berkeley (UCB) notes they are “seeing farms actually expand their acreage in order to sell to schools, suggesting this is a desirable market.” (UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, 2024). Another report states “[t]he grant has enabled producers to invest in infrastructure improvements, hire additional staff, and access new school markets.” (CDFA, 2024) In essence, the literature prioritizes growth, yield, and farmer profits while systematically erasing farmworkers and the material realities of migrant labor. Farm to School functions as a subsidy for corporate farms with an imperial arrangement, guaranteeing a market at the cafeteria line.

The program’s own documents frame “labor” as a capacity issue instead of a rights issue, listing “price, processing capacity, and staffing” as the three most common barriers (CDFA, 2024). In a promotional video shared by SDUSD’s Farm to School specialist, Janelle Manzano, the interviewees are the farmer and the Chief Operating Officer (Sandi Coast Cafe, 2014). While there are brief cuts to people picking fruit, there are no worker testimonies, no discussion of working conditions, and no engagement with material realities. Similarly, the program’s conceptual graphics of the supply chain omit crucial steps, erasing the migrants who arrive and whose labor picks the food served at lunch (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Illustrates how Farm to School views its supply chain as four linked actors: (1) producer, (2) aggregator, (3) supporting organization, and (4) school, that invisibilizes the conditions and testimonies of workers. (CDFA, 2024)

SDUSD will promote a “local” contractor like Kingsburg Orchards as “a family orchard of five generations located 300 miles north of San Diego, whose fresh produce, including golden plums, nectarines, Asian pears, and apricots, often ends up in the school salad bar,” and how students “learn the benefits of the orchard’s various fruits and how California is the nation’s largest agriculture-producing state.” (SDUSD Food & Nutrition Services, 2025) However, this narrative omits the 251 labor violations attributed to Kingsburg Orchards and their reliance on seasonal, exploited migrant labor (UC Davis RMN, 2021 and American Immigration Council, 2025). It erases descriptions of the work as “the most brutal work I’ve ever done” (Montalvo, 2024) or how injury rates at another contractor, Pitman Farms, exceed those in other industries and its dependence on migrant labor (Bacon, D. 2018a, June 6). Throughout Farm to School literature, liberal language about “diversity” and “climate smart” agriculture abounds, yet there is no mention of farmworkers’ material conditions. As Maciot Robles Padilla, a 41-year-old mother of three in Costa Rica states: her family is constantly sick from pesticide use. “We are all ill with asthma, coughs and allergies…They see us as a resource to be exploited. What is the benefit for the community? None. What remains here is destruction and ill people.”(Manisera, 2024)

Farm to school champions itself as providing “....partnerships between local farms and school districts keep local dollars within communities and ensure increased and more reliable profits for small and medium-sized California farms,” (State of California, Governor’s Office, 2023) but it is also clear as Raj Patel (2007: 70) reminds us, “[eating local doesn’t] mean ethical” and that reliable profits are realized through an imperial arrangement.

7.2 Cultivating markets

The statement by SDUSD’s Head of Nutrition, Fred Espinosa–whose $233,276 salary places him firmly within the professional‑managerial class (Transparent California, 2026)– reveals another layer: students are conditioned as a future market. As Susan Ferguson (2017: 112) argues, “The market in consumer goods and services owes its very existence to the ongoing availability of another market: a market of potentially exploitable labor power.” Students represent that future, potentially exploitable labor power and are taught to be consumers. This is evident in school food contracts with corporations like Domino’s, Papa John’s or Pizza Hut – the latter documented as using cheese from suppliers like California-based Leprino Foods that have relied on prison labor. (Brown, 2021) This also implicates California’s dairy suppliers, where, as UC Merced documents, “[m]ost dairy farm workers are Latino, immigrant, and undocumented with low wages. Andrea Freeman (2023: 160) notes: “For corporations, their privileged position in school lunchrooms is a gift that keeps on giving. They profit first from their original sales and then many times over across the lifespan of students who form their dietary habits and preferences in childhood.”

This corporate cultivation is already promoted by the district to maintain the imperial metabolism. SDUSD’s Farm to School account posted for “World School Milk Day,” featuring a child drinking milk and with phrases like “Drink Milk,” “Grow Strong,” and “Let’s celebrate.” (See Figure 2) This aligns with the political economy of dairy, personified by Congressman Jim Costa, who receives significant campaign funds from the dairy lobby and has helped corporations like Hollandia Dairy (an SDUSD contractor) increase their profitability. Costa also received over US$130,000 from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in 2023/24, linking dairy interests to broader U.S. imperialism. (“Rep. Jim Costa - California District 16,” 2024) He voted for the “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act of 2023”, which aimed to allow schools to serve whole milk, making the promotion of “World School Milk Day” strategically coherent. Costa also co-sponsored (D-CA-18, 2023) the “Farm Workforce Modernization Act”, which proposed “[r]eforming the H-2A program to provide more flexibility for employers” and “[p]roviding up to 20,000 H-2A visas per year (for 3 years) for dairy and other year-round agricultural employers,”(Lofgren, 2023) thereby facilitating access to controlled, cheap labor, even though most of their labor is from undocumented migrants. While the bill claims to “ensure critical protections for workers,” it also stipulates that “there is no strike or lockout at the place of employment.”(Lofgren, 2023) This demonstrates the state’s complicity in an imperialist arrangement that trickles down to school district procurement.

Figure 2. SDUSD promotion of World School Milk Day

Furthermore, the USDA’s Farm to School rubric, “Selling Local Food to School,” advises “creating future customers while getting to build relationships in a new potential marketspace.” (USDA, 2023) This cheerful marketing obscures supply chain realities. In a tweet promoting the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, Jim Costa wrote: “Dairy plays a critical role in children’s nutrition, serving as a leading source of essential nutrients that support growth and development. Our schools must be equipped with nutritious milk options for students. Because when kids enjoy their milk choices, America succeeds.” (@RepJimCosta, 2025) The Act had bipartisan support, praised by figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Secretary of Agriculture Brook Rollins, who stated “nutrient dense foods like whole milk are an important part of a healthy diet.”(USDA, 2026) In other words, students’ consumption of school meals or milk provides the caloric intake to reproduce their capacity to labor – a capacity that will later be exploited. Their education trains them to maintain the very system that depends on appropriation and super-exploited migrant labor, thereby serving capitalism’s imperative of economic growth and capital accumulation.

Moreover, Farm to School cultivates markets not only by shaping students’ tastes as future consumers, but by stabilizing supplier demand. Because schools purchase large amounts every year, they provide guaranteed demand that helps suppliers profit.. For example, in Humboldt County, it collaborated to launch a new food hub in their rural community. Farm to School celebrated this project as “...the food hub created.a profitable and functional system for all parties. In the food hub’s first six months of operation, 95% of sales were to regional schools.”(CDFA, 2022-2024) As Luxemburg demonstrates, “Capitalist production is not the production of consumer goods, nor is it merely the production of commodities: it is pre-eminently the production of surplus value,” and students—as future workers and consumers—are central to the reproduction of surplus value.

7.3 The organic simulacrum and the mobility myth

A stated value of Farm to School is to support “certified organic producers or producers transitioning to certified organic.” (CDFA, 2022) While there are benefits to organic foods, the label has historically functioned to justify premium prices. (Patel, 2008) When a corporation like Heinz sells organic tomato sauce, it does little to support farmers and primarily captures more surplus value. As Raj Patel (2007:245) argues, “Never having experienced a direct connection to the people who grow our food, we’re tricked by the simulacrum, mistaking the dead green ‘Certified Organic’ packaging for a living connection.” Farm to School represents this simulacrum, aiming to “increase equitable financial opportunities, economic growth, and market diversification for local producers by opening the doors to a billion-dollar institutional market.” (CDFA, 2022) It is not a system that ceases to rely on imperialism; it is, effectively, “organic” imperialism.

The program also promotes an ideology of individual mobility that erases collective labor. It celebrates “small farmers” and “creating market opportunities for small and mid-sized farmers”(BFI, 2025), advancing a “pick yourself from your own bootstraps” narrative where people can start small and become capitalists. Figures like Javier Zamora are highlighted: “born across the border but have grown from farm work to management to ownership and becoming respected producers of high quality food. They are an important, major part of the changing face of farming in the USA.” (“The Changing Face of Farming-Javier Zamora, JSM Organics - Farm to Table Talk,” 2017) Zamora, who now owns JSM Organics, goes on to state: “I have benefited from this grant so much…It has helped me grow more things that schools serve like cherry tomatoes, blackberries, and strawberries. I have easily increased my revenue by 15% with these new sales to schools.” (BFI, 2025) This success story overshadows the migrant farmworker’s exploited labor and instills a myth of class mobility over class consciousness. As geographer Richard Walker (2003: 297) notes, “many workers see themselves not as working class, but as potential members of the capitalist or at least small owner class. Farm workers…have often pursued the agrarian dream of becoming farmers, and have left the workforce for green pastures rather than fight for better wages and working conditions for someone else….It appeals to many workers who desperately want to own a little land and be their own boss.” This ideological masking requires the deliberate erasure of labor.

7.4 Greenwashing, technological frontiers and Finance Capital

This system is cloaked in an “eco-friendly” facade. Farm to School claims to promote “climate-smart agriculture,”(CDFA, 2022) a green veneer for the neoliberal and imperialist logic of its supply chain. As Jason Moore (2017) argues, such concepts are contingent on the widening and deepening of both appropriation and commodification. For example, Secretary Karen Ross acknowledges challenges like “changing weather patterns, the implementation of SGMA (Sustainable Groundwater Management Act), and ongoing immigration and labor issues,” (CDFA, 2025) but her solution is to “continue to invest in science and technology to improve sustainable production practices, reduce inputs, and improve the economic viability of farmers at all scales.”(CDFA, 2021) “Economic viability” is coded language for endless capital accumulation. This supports farms like HMC farms which seek to use drones for picking (webmasterhmc@peargate.com, 2022) – a technical innovation that raises labor productivity but depends on appropriating unpaid energy and externalizing nature, relying on minerals extracted from places like the Congo or Venezuela.

As the history of capitalism shows, the decreasing availability of frontiers prompts the creation of new ones – quantitatively or qualitatively – to appropriate the biosphere’s work/energy through technology, much like fracking, with the goal of accumulating capital. Karen Ross believes that agricultural production and tech are places to strengthen, in that “the engine of all of that productivity is, in a word, innovation.” She believes it will solve the changing climate, markets and meet consumers expectations. (CDFA 2018) This aligns with Moore’s (2017) observation that “organizational revolutions achieve their qualitative shifts in response to—and on the basis of—the accumulating (quantitative) contradictions of the previous era.” (Moore, 2017). Ross is transparent about the need for exploited labor: “We’re all here to serve farmers and ranchers [and capital] and make sure that the American people have healthy, nutritious food,”(CFBF, 2025) and supports “[expanding] the use of the existing H2A program for seasonal agricultural guest workers.” (CDFA, 2017) She champions California’s “scientific institutions…investors, the Silicon Valley ecosystem of innovation and technology,” (Houston, 2024) demonstrating a commitment to accumulation by capitalization that aligns schools with agri-business and tech capital – all dependent on accumulation by appropriation. This demonstrates using new methods (qualitative) to extract more from existing places.

Ross’s alignment is clear in her thanks to the Western Growers Association (WGA), which has built an “Innovation and Technology Center” in Salinas, California focused on robotics and automation. (Office, 2022) (Western Growers Center for Innovation & Technology, 2025) The WGA funds politicians like Congressmen Jim Costa and David Valadao. (Open Secrets, 2025) Valadao, notably, voted against removing U.S. troops from Venezuela (Vote Smart | Facts for All,” 2025), recognizing that “the ouster of Venezuela’s president could spur export opportunities for U.S. ag products”(Brooks, 2026) and secure access to cheap oil – unpaid energy for Global North transnationals serving agro-interests. Oil and gas are necessary to transport food, it is important to note that not all food in California’s Farm to School program is “local” – over 70% in the SDUSD is not. (USDA, 2024). Moreover, Jim Costa–a farm to school supporter–has also voted for the H.R. 1366: Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, which opens public lands to private mining companies. Such legislation expands extractive frontiers, enabling the continued appropriation of cheap nature that underwrites California’s agro‑industrial supply chains.

The agricultural industry understands that cheap energy, labor, and metals enable “innovation.” Returning to Farm to School’s obsession to growth, as Jason Hickel demonstrates, “economic growth requires energy. For the entire history of capitalism, growth has always caused energy use to rise….it requires an extraordinary amount of energy to extract and process and transport all the material stuff the global economy devours each year.” Therefore, it is no surprise Valadao receives campaign funding from Energy Transfer Partners (“Rep. David Valadao - Campaign Finance Summary,” 2024), which is the owner operator of over 140,000 miles of pipelines for transporting oil and gas – resources central to synthetic fertilizers and powering farm infrastructure. (“Energy Transfer,” 2024.). Valadao’s support for projects like the Hanford Hybrid Energy Center (Lundy, 2025) extends this support to the metabolic functioning of the school. The goal, as stated, is to “ensure these programs (like Farm to School) continue making progress toward fresh, local foods in school cafeterias and classrooms.” (CDFA, 2024) It is no wonder Karen Ross identifies collaboration with education and technology as key to California’s farming future. In CDFA’s 2025-2030 strategic plan, it is made clear to “invest in programs that engage the next generation in agriculture such as the Farm to School Grant Program” under the banner of “Facilitate development of next generation talent and technology.” (CDFA, 2025) This need for talent and technology is central to the industry’s priorities reflected in STEM fields in education receiving between 33% and 67% of their funding from federal support, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023). As Moore highlights, “If capitalization rises faster than the appropriation of unpaid work—the accumulation process will slow,” furthering the need to invest in “technology” and “innovation,” therefore the ideology of Farm to School is to reinforce this arrangement.

The capital for this energy infrastructure flows from global banks like Citigroup, Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ and TD Bank, which provide loans to firms like Energy Transfer Partners. (Tabuchi, 2016) U.S. energy firm debt grew to US$1 trillion in 2006 to US$2.5 trillion in 2014 due to a declining ecological surplus (Moore, 2017), raising production costs and driving further appropriative frontiers (e.g., blockades of Cuba and Iran, plus overthrowing governments in Palestine, Syria and Venezuela), alongside annual U.S. fossil fuel subsidies of US$ 31 billion. (Noor, 2025) This demonstrates how capitalism organizes relations, allowing actors to perform neo-malthusian environmentalism while defending the system. It shows where capital investment ultimately flows and how capitalism organizes nature – from banks to classroom instruction (Especially since SUHSD’s textbooks are distributed by McGraw Hill, which is owned by Private Equity company Platinum Equity). Consequently, the school becomes an underfunded space served by constant doses of capitalist realism (Fisher, 2009), designed to function as a node of imperialism.

Through this Capitalist realism, finance capital is central to the production and reproduction of school districts like the San Diego Unified and to compensate for underfunding, in 2024, SDUSD sold bonds to an investment firm, Jefferies LLC. (“Bond Purchase Contract (SDUSD Spring 2025 GO Series) (Jefferies)-V2,” 2025) These funds could have been used to purchase shipments of Citrus from Wonderful ;however, as noted earlier, even with these funds, layoffs were still dealt to essential workers like cafeteria staff. Jefferies LLC, like the agribusiness vendors analyzed in this thesis, is deeply embedded in imperial relations. They are currently profiting off of the military industrial complex, big tech, all tied to Israel’s current genocide in Gaza and war in Iran. Part of Jeffries’ goal is “dismantling Hezbollah in Lebanon, a new government in Syria, the attack on Iran’s nuclear threat…” and their mission is to provide “investments for…..Israel’s long-term growth potential in both traditional business and particularly in tech with standout areas in Cybersecurity, Fintech, AI and Defense.” (Jeffries LLC, 2025) Just as Farm to School depends on the trinity of capital: appropriation, exploitation, and primitive accumulation, so do certain school districts (to attain additional funding from investors) depend on actors who follow a similar capitalist imperialist arrangement for endless capital accumulation. Without this financial capital, how would the school district be able to fund administrators?

This dependency on finance capital is not separate from the ecological crisis; it is its flip side. As the Energy Returned on Capital Invested (EROCI) for fossil fuels declines, new appropriations target energy sources like lithium. This is why figures like Karen Ross champion “innovations” and “technology,” which depend on appropriating unpaid energy/work from places like Argentina, Bolivia or the Congo. One can recall Thomas Friedman saying “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” The same goes for Farm to School, in that US military power is needed to secure the conditions for imperial supply chains. Congressman Jim Costa has stated that “America, as the leader of the free world, with our partners in Europe, must come together with a long-term policy to support fledgling democracies within Africa, to deal with the problems of corruption and to try to build support.” This is a bold claim, given the history and current reality of Global North transnationals depending on the appropriation of the Global South (for a history of Africa and Latin America, see Galeano, 1971 and Rodney, 1972). Thus, the Farm to School program is materially dependent on these global circuits of energy, finance, and extraction, even as it presents itself as ‘local’ and ‘sustainable.’

8. The Epistemic Rift: Alienation in the Cafeteria Line

If the accumulation of capital entails the proletarianization of labor, it also involves the production of knowledge aimed at controlling, mapping, and quantifying the worlds of commodification and appropriation (Moore, 2017). Nowhere is this more evident than in the school curriculum that echoes what Nancy Fraser (Fraser, 2022) calls an neoliberal common sense. This includes becoming a walking CV, optimizing one’s “human capital,” mastering self-management and “resume-ready” skills – all of which mirror neoliberal values. This logic is represented in IMF’s and UNDP’s framing of remittances as improving the income and well-being of individuals, as well as being vital in expanding ‘human freedom’ through granting people the capacity to choose where to live across the planet. (UNDP 2009: 15) (Atoyan et al., 2016) This concept of “freedom” exemplifies the imperative to optimize one’s “human capital,” an idea boomeranged back into school curricula.

Curriculum frameworks for economics courses instruct that “to better understand the choices that the store manager, manufacturer, and executives make in response to limited resources, students can consider the daily trade-offs they make in their own lives. For example, students may ask themselves, “How many hours will I use my human capital to study, and how many hours will I use it to work for pay?”(California Department of Education, 2017) Every hour becomes a private investment, a “choice” on using one’s time, reinforcing the Cartesian, capitalist emphasis on time management and maximization. This mentality is reflected by a student in my fieldwork who said that farmworkers have the “choice” to work in abhorrent conditions (at a Dole plantation from Section 6) or not; and that it’s better to have that job than none at all. The curriculum had done its work. The neoliberal project redefined “freedom” as an individual’s right to buy and work wherever desired – a “right to work” that is inherently anti-union, stemming from the 1947 passage of the Taft-Hartley Act that allowed “right to work” to exist (see Schuhrke’s Blue Collar Empire, 2025). Studies show that “in the five states that adopted right-to-work laws in 2011–17, unionization and wages both declined, particularly in construction, education, and public administration.”(Fortin, Lemieux, & Lloyd, 2022) Mirroring the H2-A visa, Neoliberalism made self-investment the epitome of “freedom.”

Moreover, the curriculum that is being promoted at the Sweetwater Union High School District, and generally, the San Diego area is represented in the San Diego Community of Economic Education and California Council on Economic Education (SDCEE) (Sweetwater Union High School District , 2025) is financial literacy. To make a clear understanding of capitalism as a world ecology, in a recent 2026 article in the San Diego Union Tribune, it reported how students were taken to a farmer’s market, promoted by Farm to School, and that “Students learned lessons in financial literacy, mathematical thinking and nutritional awareness as they calculated totals using variables and bonus incentives.” Furthermore, The SDCEE put on an event titled “Economics in Real Life” (San Diego Center for Economic Education, 2025) in 2025 sponsored by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), which is an American conservative, libertarian economic think tank rooted in Frederick Hayek, one of architects of Neo-Liberalism. Therefore, to invest in oneself, economics is taught as a series of private calculations where care and the environment appear as externalities – spaces to be measured and capitalized. This individualization makes it easier to ignore the hidden appropriated unpaid work/energy and exploited labor that make the school function. This labor comes from people who are deemed not to “matter” or who are still “developing.” Farm to School materials highlight “markets built,” “growth,” and “climate-smart branding” – not the expropriated labor making it possible. This rebranding turns imperial supply chains into feel-good “local” stories, masking the extraction that makes meals affordable and securing consent for imperial reproduction. This is capitalist realism in the cafeteria line.

The logic of individualism and meritocracy mirrors the imperialist or banker’s ontology of binary thinking. Capital’s logic enables private investment (with a banker’s help), assisted by state laws that privatize the commons, viewed as “empty” and ready for maximum production by dispossessed peasants seen as part of “Nature.” This Western ontology of dualism – winner/loser, civilized/uncivilized, man/nature – becomes pertinent when students aspire to enter real estate, assimilation into a structure that alienates them from the land and labor sustaining their lives, viewing land merely as a commodity. When migrants serve them food, students internalize that this work is disposable. This trains them to see accumulation as virtue while obscuring the migrant and reproductive labor that makes their schools run, advancing the thesis of imperial reproduction in education. Private property becomes the student’s goal, where “the key to wealth is property…explained public space in terms of rational self-interest, while regarding social concerns as springing from (non-rational) feelings of sympathy” (Davis, 2003:148). This ideology is not merely taught; it is materially enforced through political alliances, as seen in Californian Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond’s campaign contributions from real estate developer Gerry Kamilos.(“Tony K Thurmond Money Profile,” 2026).

These abstractions materialize in daily classroom discourse. During my fieldwork, a twelfth-grade English teacher, in a lesson on artificial intelligence (AI) and smartphones, stated: “school is there to figure out what you love, and also develop some human capital.” He added that if someone wanted to become an architect, it might take two months to draft a blueprint, whereas AI could do it in two hours, conclusion: “the company is going to choose AI because that’s how the economy works – to economize on your investment.” This parrots the district’s procurement logic of awarding the cheapest bid. It represents the normalization of maximizing personal gain as capitalist “common sense,” painted as the only reality. It also demonstrates the need for “flexibility” within the changing dynamics of industries, in this case being A.I. The State Board President of Californian Education echoes this logic of developing human capital and flexibility by addressing “what employers…really want….” by “[focusing] on skills like flexibility,” which “...serve students in an evolving workforce.” (Staff, 2025) The curriculum never asks: evolving for whom? Benefitting whom? This arrangement is central to Neo-Liberal ideology. John Smith's analysis of Bangladesh's garment industry applies equally to students and to California's agro-industrial sector: attracted by the flexibility of the workers, the absence of independent unions, the relative ease with which they can be forced to submit to working days as long as those described.” (Smith, 2016) The Bangladeshi worker is adaptable too, adaptable to longer hours, to union absence, to wages that don't sustain life; all expressions of the “freedom” of the market.

While speaking about doing what you love, this English teacher also devalued certain work: “No one really wants to serve acai bowls for the rest of their life…and even if you want to you would want to at least get up to management.” This normalizes a capitalist hierarchy, devalues service labor, implies less money to certain populations, and suggests that climbing the “managerial ladder” requires relying on “cheap” exploited labor to realize surplus value. This English teacher – possibly unknowingly – parroted the California economics curriculum: “There are far more low-skilled workers who are willing to work for lower wages than highly skilled workers. As a result, low-skilled jobs, such as food service and retail, often pay lower salaries than highly skilled jobs, such as computer engineering…”(California Department of Education, 2017) That an English teacher espouses this shows the logic pervades all disciplines. Devaluing certain labor–including farm workers and cafeteria labor– is central to capitalism and its Cartesian logic.

All of this logic is foundational to Capitalism, as the school mirrors a plantation, with the emphasis on labor productivity and labor hierarchies. Another brief classroom vignette illustrates this: with thirty minutes left in a period, a principal distributed random worksheets “so students would be working,” reinforcing that being in school means being productively counted. This originates in the beginning of Capitalism, echoed by Hutcheson– a student of Adam Smith– where a “Sloth should be punished by temporary servitude at least” (Hutcheson, 1755, 2:318–19). Also, according to a 1572 statue [a measure to prevent peasants from drifting into “vagrancy”], beggars over the age of fourteen were to be severely flogged and branded with a red hot iron…Moreover, in a movement that Foucault has termed ‘‘the great confinement,’’ institutions [like schools] were founded to take charge indiscriminately of the sick, criminal, and poor (Foucault 1965, 38–65). The purpose was not to better the conditions of the inmates but rather to force them to contribute more to the national wealth.

This logic did not stay in the 16th century. It persists in the mundane routines of the contemporary school, as I discovered firsthand. When I was employed as a teacher in 2024, I was asked as a teacher to oversee lunch detention–which also resulted in material compensation. The students in lunch detention were there because they were tardy to school, exemplifying this abstraction of time as linear and disciplinary. Students were there eating their lunches, ingesting the needed nutrition to continue their education and production. Painting this picture should demonstrate the school as a factory, not so different from the “dark satanic mills” of Liverpool. As a newly employed teacher, extra cash meant a long way to my material realities, however, as I realized later, all of this was premised on the Capitalist mode of production and its dependence on the dual nature of appropriation and exploitation.

These processes demonstrate the reinforcing of Capitalist common sense and how removed these decisions are from students’ realities, creating an epistemic rift where students are materially alienated and misinformed about what they consume. This is central to capitalism as a world ecology as “capital needs instrumentalized workers who are alienated not just from the products of their labor but also from each other, and from their own sensibilities and sensualities” (Bhattacharya, 2017: 120). Students are unaware of José Aranda, who works for Stehly farms and has not seen his daughters in 10 years due to exploitative border regimes. Yet, all this is marketed as “farm-to-school,” “local,” “fresh,” and “climate friendly.” An SDUSD Instagram post markets oranges from Wonderful Citrus (See Figure 3), ostensibly educating about origin while omitting who picked them and how the company operates resulting in what Marx called “commodity fetishism.”

In questionnaires provided to forty students, all replied that teachers do not discuss their school food’s origins. One student wrote, “I've only ever seen food come from big trucks so maybe from big companies or factories or something” When asked “do you know who grows and picks the food that comes to school?” 96% said no. The one student who did reply said “the blacks,” demonstrating the normalization of racism and “cheapening” that capitalism relies on, and reflects the school’s ideology and knowledge production by normalizing devalued and invisible exploited labor–typically from black and brown bodies–who are the ones picking and mostly serving food to these students. Moreover, I have entered so many different classrooms as a visiting teacher, over one-hundred, and I have never seen anything posted up, or any lesson or connections made to the origin of the food of the school the students consume. Being removed from those realities further cements the Man vs. Nature managerial dualism, and is central to the epistemic rift and the accumulation of endless capital; in other words, nature becomes “out there,” “wild”, or as “waste,” which again are represented in certain work and bodies as “wasting” becomes about “sorting out what has value and what does not.” (Armiero, 2021) This type of waste becomes a form of othering, which is inherent to the colonial project, seen represented in the US constitution with its Lockean sense of private property, and how the land left to "Nature" without cultivation, “improvement” (another word of innovation), or husbandry is considered “waste.” Therefore, not only does the food students consume depend on “wasting” other parts of the world and people, as well as appropriating their unpaid energy/labor, they are also naturalizing this order where students do not know where this “waste” comes from, but they also ingest this waste (or privilege) in their food and was in the curriculum itself.

Figure 3. Illustrates commodity fetishism, omitting the imperialist supply chain, or exploited farm labor. This echoes Elmer Davis, former Director of the Office of War Information in 1941: “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.” (Alford & Secker, 2017) Entertaining by using Instagram, with its colorful background and use of emoji’s, as well as describing them as “Sweet as can be.”

Moreover, in the same questionnaire, when asked whether it is “‘fair that some countries are richer because they worked harder than others,’” 100% affirmed it. This naturalizes capitalist imperialism and the vast inequalities produced by centuries of enclosure, colonial extraction, financial imperialism, H-2A visas, and structural adjustment. The students’ consensus reflects a pedagogical failure to connect their consumption to the exploited migrant hands that picked it – a failure by design, the logical outcome of a curriculum celebrating “free markets” while erasing the “imperial arrangement” they depend upon. Finally, in the questionnaire, most students described countries as “poor” due to internal government problems, rather than citing the capitalist-imperial framework designed to keep countries poor, as structural adjustment and trade deals demonstrate. This abstracts all countries onto an “equal playing field,” legitimizing an ideology of “winners” and “losers” and further naturalizing an order of exploitation.

Clearly evident of this is demonstrated in SUHSD’s 10th grade World History and Cultures 5.3 Content Target where wants students to: Investigate the totalitarian methods used in a modern society (i.e. North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, etc.). This logic goes along with David Valadao, Jim Costa, AIPAC, Karen Ross, Wonderful Farms, Palantir and Farm to School, because the only solutions to problems are the ones found in the “free market” with the help of Silicon Valley, and its “innovations.” The question that isn’t asked is the totalitarianism of the Capitalist Imperialist system, and what is enforced undemocratically by the IMF, or the World Bank (the US having veto power) onto the Global South for the benefit of the ruling classes.

California Schools may push back against this analysis with logic rooted in Capitalist Realism, responding: “in capitalism, there is nobody on whom one can pin guilt or responsibility, things just happened that way, through anonymous mechanisms….this isn’t our fault, we are simply just actors of the ‘free market.’” There is reason to celebrate the provision of free lunch and on-site gardening tied to food sovereignty education. However, without a deep analysis of how the school food system organizes, procures, metabolizes, and governs – especially its dependence on cheap nature – this language functions as coded neoliberalism, and ultimately a node within the capitalist imperialist world-ecology.

VIDEO: MARIE MENGES - PATRICE MOULLET (2009)