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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 , rig ht? An d o nly t he on es th at 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 structur ed program through which growers and tomato buyers could trans- form the industry. As just one measure, it’s meant more than $14million in bonuses paid to workers. And what did i t cost us who’ve bought and e aten t he toma - toes from restaurants and grocery chains in the Fair Food Program? A penny a pou nd. Over abou t a billion and a half pounds of tomatoes. In addition to the bonuses to workers, Fair Food means • a liv able 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 wo rk- ers help to determine their conditions • worker-to-worker education, on the clock, so everyone understands her/is rights • complaint resoluti on processes, inc luding a 24-ho ur hotline • ongoi ng auditi ng 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. T omato photo By Adityamadhav83 (Own work) [CC-BY -SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Who er Jun ior and the var iou s c or orate name s a re re istere d t radema rks . foldings by Barbara Kellam Scott Food week of action October 2014 day 3 — Tomatoes
