Watch the mind-blowing skills of the farmworkers harvesting your Thanksgiving dinner

By Adele Peters

November 23, 2020

If cooking Thanksgiving dinner involves a lot of labor, harvesting the ingredients is harder. In a Twitter thread, United Farm Workers—the largest union for farmworkers in the U.S.—shared short videos showing what it takes to pick, say, brussels sprouts or celery. The speed and skill of the workers is astounding.

Here’s a woman picking a bunch of parsley every two to three seconds:

A skilled worker can harvest turnips even faster:

Celery, along with carrots (and squash, which has prickly stems), can harm the skin, so workers have to stay covered even in extreme heat:

The tweet about cranberries doesn’t mention the wolf spiders that sometimes crawl on workers when bogs are flooded:

The UFW says its thread is to let people know the intense labor that went into their produce before it arrived at their grocery store. The videos also highlight the difficult work environments that many of its members work in, from shadeless fields to chilly cranberry bogs.

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