Hot take: Making modern American problems into products of some original national sin only reinforces them — and lets everyone off the hook for not solving them. The reason independent farmers and food-system workers aren’t paid a decent living today isn’t because “cheap food in this country has always been based upon having an exploitable workforce.” It has not, in fact, always been this way. The dire situation that farmers, farmworkers, and food processing workers find themselves in today is a result of policy choices — specific decisions — we made starting in the 1970s. Before the turn of the century 20th, most people were farmers, and most people — whether they lived in cities or in the countryside — raised all or a substantial portion of their own food. Yes, of course, slavery existed before 1865, and sharecropping existed long after 1865, and they were both evil systems that exploited millions to enrich a handful of land monopolists. But those evil systems were primarily used in the production of cash crops — cotton, tobacco, sugarcane, etc. — not in the production of food crops for commercial distribution. After most people moved to urban centers and the mass market developed, there was a time between the 1880s and 1920s when we really did have a madly exploitative food system. It was dominated by monopolies upstream and downstream from the farm, and those monopolies wielded their power to extort America’s grain and livestock farmers with one hand, and rob America’s consumers with the other — mostly for the benefit of East Coast financiers and capitalists. The injustice of this era did not last forever, however. In the wake of the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration enforced the antitrust laws to destroy food-system monopolies, recognized and protected the right of food processing workers to organize and bargain collectively with their bosses, and assured fair prices to all of the nation’s food producers through supply management programs. Until the early 1970s, this mix of antitrust enforcement, labor protection, and supply management made affordable food available to all Americans at reasonable prices — at prices that both farmers and consumers, and everyone in between, could live on. Things turned in the 1970s. Instead of continuing to uphold these pillars of farm well-being and food security, we started taking a sledgehammer to them. By the 2000s, we had essentially turned back the clock to the 1920s — empowering monopolies, land-monopolizing plantation owners, and financiers to run our food system at the expense of farmers, workers, and consumers. That’s how we got to where we are today. Through bad choices. Those choices need to be unmade — not reified into implacable products of original sin.