8/10/2019 Food week of action day 3: Tomatoes

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I settled for a Whopper Junior.® My drive-through

favorite, though, has long been a Wendy’s nugget

combo — the chicken bits to eat as I drive, fruit tea, and

a side salad or chili, depending on the season, to enjoy 

after I get home. But I just couldn’t have enjoyed the

cherry tomatoes in the salad or the cooked ones in the

chili. Not since I found out Wendy’s is the last holdout of 

USAmerica’s big five fast-food chains, the only one that

hasn’t committed to buy their Florida tomatoes only 

from growers that respect the people who tend and pick 

their tomatoes.

 Well, it’s only tomatoes, right? And only the ones that

come from Florida, right? Well, “only” is 90 percent of 

the tomatoes eaten in the US in the winter. It’s a piece of 

the economy that’s recognized as one of our worst

human-rights embarrassments, conditions that amount

to slavery topped with abuse. But not so much any more.

That’s because of the Coalition of Immokalee

 Workers (CIW), which started in 1993 as

community organizing among the work-

ers in the Florida tomato fields. Their

Campaign for Fair Food developed

 by 2010 into a clearly structured

program through which growers

and tomato buyers could trans-

form the industry. As just onemeasure, it’s meant more than

$14million in bonuses paid to

 workers. And what did it cost us

 who’ve bought and eaten the toma-

toes from restaurants and grocery 

chains in the Fair Food Program?

 A penny a pound. Over about a billion and

a half pounds of tomatoes.

In addition to the bonuses to workers, Fair Food

means

• a livable wage;

• compliance with a code of conduct with zero tolerance

for forced labor and sexual assault;• a health and safety committee on every farm, so work-

ers help to determine their conditions

• worker-to-worker education, on the clock, so everyone

understands her/is rights

• complaint resolution processes, including a 24-hour

hotline

• ongoing auditing of the farms for compliance.

It hasn’t taken convincing a huge number of compa-

nies to change the lives of these workers. There were 12

of them by the middle of 2014, including restaurant

chains of various types (Subway, Chipotle Mexican Grill)

and grocery chains, most recently and notably Wal-Mart

The current grocery-chain target is Publix.

Oddly, the current CEO of Wendy’s in

2005 presided over Taco Bell signing as

the first of the fast-food chains to

commit to buying only Fair Food

tomatoes, even before the pro-

gram had that name. At the end

of May 2014, 24 leaders of faith

communities wrote an open let-ter on behalf of the CIW to ask

 why he didn’t lead Wendy’s to

make the same commitment.

I selfishly wish he would. I sup-

pose I could just not get a salad. But

that’s what makes eating fast food de-

fensible in other ways: those luscious

 year-round tomatoes.

Tomato photo By Adityamadhav83 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Who er Junior and the various cor orate names are re istered trademarks.

foldingsby Barbara Kellam Scott Food week of action

October 2014 day 3 — Tomatoes