opinion@dailylobo.com
When Chipotle Mexican Grill opened in Albuquerque last December, people lined up out the door in the winter cold just to be some of the first to eat at the new restaurant. Many wondered why there was such excitement over what is essentially a fast-food restaurant chain. One answer to this question seems to be, as one food blogger put it on UrbanSpoon.com, that Chipotle “represents the responsible food movement” by trying to use organic and local ingredients. It does indeed seem that Chipotle represents a certain picture of a more responsible and sustainable food movement. However, it also represents a number of flaws in this food movement as well.
Chipotle has become the most recent target of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a farmworker justice organization, and its Campaign for Fair Food. This group represents approximately 4,000 farmworkers in southern Florida, an area that at times provides about 90 percent of the U.S. tomato supply. This organization has been campaigning to improve the working and living conditions of farmworkers in Immokalee. These farm laborers, who are overwhelmingly Latino, are paid piecemeal for the tomatoes they pick: 50 cents for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they bring in. This rate has remained virtually unchanged since the ‘80s, and means that to make minimum wage, each worker must pick 2.25 tons of tomatoes every day.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has banded together and created the Campaign for Fair Food, which asks big tomato buyers, such as Chipotle, to demand a number of things from their suppliers. These demands include better pay for farmworkers, creation of an enforceable code of conduct for produce suppliers and making the purchase of produce more transparent. After beginning this campaign in 2001, the coalition has already pushed large tomato buyers, such as Taco Bell, McDonald’s and Trader Joe’s, to sign on to their agreement. Yet Chipotle, which touts its fare as “Food with Integrity,” has remained steadfast against the pressure to sign with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
This disconnect, between organic/sustainable food and fair food, seems to be one that reaches beyond Chipotle. Indeed, many products seen on the shelves of local supermarkets labeled as “organic” may still have been picked, packaged or processed by a worker making a sub-poverty wage. While the market share for organic and sustainable foods has increased, a recent study by the Food Chain Workers Alliance shows that of all of the workers in the food industry, only 13.5 percent make a living wage, and more than 60 percent make a wage below the poverty line or below minimum wage.
While talking about this issue in the context of the Chipotle campaign, Gerardo Reyes-Chavez, a staff member of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, put it this way, saying that in the question of which food is or is not sustainable, one “has to include who works in the fields.” This cognitive dissonance is one that needs to be swiftly corrected in order to make way for a broader definition of sustainable food. A new idea of what sustainable means could create a stronger food movement that provides a better food system not just for the consumer, but for the farmworkers and food workers as well.
