Walking through grocery store, a $4.99 box of ripe strawberries calls to you with a good deal. You add them to your cart with the other fresh produce you’ve picked up along the way. But what are you paying for? Or, more importantly, what aren’t you paying for?

This question is what motivates anthropologist and physician Seth Holmes. As a professor in the Division of Society and Environment as well as Medical Anthropology and Public Health at the University of California Berkeley, he has devoted his work to social hierarchies, health inequities, and the ways in which such asymmetries are naturalized, normalized, and resisted in the context of (im)migration, systems, and health care. For his graduate dissertation, Holmes researched the suffering of migrant farm workers in the U.S. After five years of delving into the legal, medical and social components of the migrant labor experience, Holmes has presented the transformative book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. It is a story about—or rather, the reality of—migrant laborers and in the U.S. farming industry.

Holmes transports his readers into the life of migrant laborers by joining them. He chronicles his experience living, working, and learning alongside them, from the village of Triqui in Oaxaca, Mexico to the berry fields of California and Washington. His encounters include the dangerous and harrowing experience of illegally traversing the U.S.-Mexico border—navigating rattlesnakes, cacti, intense heat, blinding darkness, robbers, and border-patrol who agents. Holmes and his cohort were caught by border patrol in Arizona and thrown in jail with little to no acknowledgement of their U.S.-given and basic human rights. He paid a fine. His companions were deported.

Posters at a Mexican outpost, just before the border, ask: “Is it worth risking your life?” The answer is yes, but the reasoning is anything but simple.

This book challenges the belief that migrant farm workers choose this life: the back-breaking manual work under the scorching sun, the perpetual risk of exploitation by government workers and farm owners, and the lack of equitable health care and livable wages. Often times, U.S. citizens believe that the only reason migrant labors gravitate to the U.S. is to make a living. While this is true, Holmes asks why and answers it by putting structural forces that drive the disparity between advantaged and disadvantaged communities—at local, national, and international scales—at the center of the conversation.

Holmes explains: “the reality of survival for my Triqui companions shows that it would be riskier to stay in San Miguel without work, money, food, or education. In this original context, crossing the border is not a choice to engage in a risk behavior but rather a process necessary to survive, to make life less risky.”

While life in the U.S. might be less risky for migrants, it is hardly easy. The political forces in the U.S.—ones that dictate who can and cannot cross the border legally, who is or is not allowed to work, and who does or doesn’t have a say in regulations and repercussions—have turned their back on the people who grow its food. Yet American agriculture would collapse without cheap migrant labor. These oddly clashing political and economic forces hinge on “the inability of the migrants…to influence the institutions that subordinate them to the other fractions of the labor force and to the employer.”

These structural flaws underpin what Holmes calls “an ethnicity-citizenship hierarchy” that dominates agricultural landscapes. This division between indigenous Mexicans, Mestizo Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and U.S. born among farm laborers, managers, and owners leads to a “highly structured hierarchy of ethnicity, citizenship, and suffering.” The structural and political violence manifests itself in illness. What’s more, migrant workers become invisible in health care system. The physical and mental strain put on farm laborer is ignored by the people who benefit, and the laborers are not afforded the opportunity nor the right to health care to treat or prevent it.

This book is a powerful call “to listen to migrant laborers, enact solidarity with their social movements, and work toward equality” from the fields of the U.S. to national and international policy arenas.

A combination of autobiography and ethnography, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies is a work that is full of powerful research, writing and storytelling that will make you, as a consumer, think of the hidden cost the next time you pick up that box of strawberries.