By Meghan Cohorst
As the majority of this country’s agricultural fields lie dormant under a blanket of snow, these cold months are the heart of the growing season in Florida. During the winter, 90 percent of this country’s fresh tomatoes are produced in the state, and workers who form the very backbone of our nation’s food system harvest each and every one of them by hand.
If you ate a tomato today, chances are that you can thank a Florida farmworker. But in all likelihood, you devoured that tomato without a second thought. Even if you’re concerned with what you put into your body and took a moment to contemplate your slice of tomato, chances are you wondered whether it was organic, or if it was grown from genetically modified seeds. Recognizing that there was no way it was locally grown at this time of year, you may have wondered where it came from and if, come summertime, you would be able to purchase your tomatoes from a small farmer nearby. Chances are, when you ate that tomato on your salad or sandwich, the hands that picked it were the furthest thing from your mind.
Every day, students across the country are becoming more conscious about what we eat. No longer content to blindly consume whatever is set in front of us, we are working to transform the face of campus food by demanding a change. Thanks to the hard work and dedication of many groups and individuals, an ever-growing number of school cafeterias serve hamburgers made from grass-fed beef, milk delivered fresh from a local dairy, and salad bars with organic vegetables. Increasingly, university dining services are working with students to heed the demand for food that not only tastes good, but is healthy and sustainable, as well.
But as we enjoy the fruits of our labor—this food that is good for our bodies, animals, the environment and small, local farmers—many times we’re forgetting one integral part of the “sustainable” equation. The farmworkers whose hard work made it possible for the vast majority of that food to make it from the fields to our tables. Those hands again.
Farmworkers feed the country. Yet for most of history they have been the forgotten link in our food system—a largely invisible work force held down by an oppressive agricultural industry that has grown all too comfortable with the status quo of continual worker exploitation. Let’s consider that tomato again. Florida tomato pickers have not received a significant wage increase in over thirty years, perform backbreaking labor with few or no protections or benefits, and have no right to organize to change these conditions. In the most extreme cases, workers toil in conditions of modern-day slavery.
The severity of these abuses is real, but there is hope. Corporation by corporation, a farmworker organization called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has set about transforming the agricultural industry. Through its Campaign for Fair Food, which seeks to eliminate the sweatshop conditions in the fields by urging major buyers of tomatoes—corporations that profit most from farmworker poverty—to work together with the CIW to end the cycle of worker exploitation. In the nearly eight years since the Campaign for Fair Food was launched with a boycott of Taco Bell, the CIW has reached agreements with five food industry giants (Taco Bell’s parent company Yum Brands, McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway and Whole Foods). All of these companies have committed to paying one penny more per pound for their tomatoes and ensuring that penny is passed directly to workers, and to working together with the CIW to develop and implement a code of conduct to guarantee that workers are being treated with dignity.
And we students are no strangers to the Campaign for Fair Food, either. When the CIW launched the Taco Bell Boycott, it was met with a healthy dose of skepticism as critics wondered how a small group of poor workers from a forgotten corner of Florida could ever move a corporate giant as large as Taco Bell. Four years later, those critics were silenced as the CIW won its first victory, not alone, but together with thousands of young people from over 300 universities and high schools across the country—organized in solidarity with the workers as members of the Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA)—who had identified their power as the target market of the fast food industry and used it to demand not just cheap and fast food, but fair food.
Today, the campaign continues, and the target has shifted from the fast food industry to supermarkets and university food service providers. Together, as members of the Student/Farmworker Alliance, the Real Food Challenge, Slow Food on Campus and other student organizations, we are redefining the way our institutions approach campus food. We must continue our work for sustainability, but as we do, also modify our definition of “sustainable” to include justice for farmworkers.
Only then, the next time we take a moment to consider that tomato before we bite down, will we be sure that it truly is good, clean and fair.
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For the latest developments in the Campaign for Fair Food, including how you can get involved, visit http://www.ciw-online.org & http://www.sfalliance.org
To learn more about SFA’s dining services campaign, send an email to organize@sfalliance.org
Great article! Keep up the good work.
The soy nut Gang
The style of writing is very familiar to me. Have you written guest posts for other bloggers?
[...] months ago we wrote about the exploitation faced each day by Florida’s farmworkers. Tomato pickers in the state haven’t received a raise since 1978, receive no overtime pay, [...]