Local gastronomy, transnational labour: farm-to-table tourism and migrant agricultural workers in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada

Each year, migrant workers from Mexico and the Caribbean travel to Canada via a bilateral agreements to provide labour essential to the agricultural sector. One destination for these workers is Niagara-on-the-Lake (NOTL), a microclimate in which labour intensive crops such as tender fruits and grapes are grown. These local crops form the basis of a significant gastrotourism industry. This industry turns on the narrative of an historical idyll in which producer and consumer share a close relationship, one manifested in the farm-to-table discourse that permeates NOTL. Yet agricultural production in the area is entirely dependent upon a globalized labour force, a dependence that is inconsistent with the narrative of locality. The structure of this transnational labour program and the requisite aesthetics of tourism in NOTL render migrant workers and their labour invisibility and this invisibility, in turn, exacerbates the precarity of transnational workers within global capitalism.