Slow Food Nation: Whole Foods to pay up for tomatoes

Benitez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers says deal imminent with Whole Foods 4

I'm a lame blogger when it comes to breaking news at conferences, when my brain typically reaches explosion point with all the information zooming in.

I should have live-blogged this Saturday, while I was taking in Slow Food Nation's "Toward a new, fair food system" panel: Coalition of Immokalee Workers leader Lucas Benitez revealed that Whole Foods is on the verge of agreeing to pay an extra penny per pound for the Florida-grown tomatoes it buys.

As part of its "Campaign for Fair Food," CIW is urging all major corporate buyers of Florida tomatoes to agree to the extra-penny-per-pound deal. Wages in Florida's vast tomato fields -- home to virtually all winter tomatoes consumed in the U.S. -- have declined steadily over the past two decades, pushing hundreds of thousands of workers into poverty and at times slavery. By paying an extra penny that goes directly to pickers, big buyers ensure something approaching to a living wage for farm workers.

After years of intense pressure involving consumer boycotts and considerable legal backlash on the part of industry, several industrial-food giants have agreed to the raise in recent years: Taco Bell, McDonald's, and most reluctantly, Burger King. (As Eric Schlosser showed last year, by pinching a penny per pound of tomatoes, BK was saving itself $250,000 a year -- a rounding error in terms of annual profits and a fraction of annual executive pay.)

It's significant that Whole Foods is ready to pay up. As any Whole Foods shopper knows, the "natural foods" giant peddles plenty of out-of-season, conventionally grown produce, for which it charges a hefty premium.

Also, CEO John Mackey has repeatedly expressed virulent anti-union views; he trumpets the allegedly "free market" as the guarantor of worker well-being par excellence. Well, a quite-rigged market has led Florida's tomato pickers into poverty and even slavery. Shame on Mackey for holding out so long. Will Chipotle Grill be the next domino to fall? It's good to see social justice crashing the natural-foods-industry party.

Grist food editor Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Follow my Twitter feed; contact me at tphilpott[at]grist[dot]org.

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  1. Tasermons Partner Posted 9:45 am
    04 Sep 2008

    That's nice and all, but......should we really be encouragin' the growth and massive transport of industrial-scale agriculturally raised tomatoes by the millions to begin with?

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  2. bharshaw Posted 1:22 am
    05 Sep 2008

    Problems With Math?I wonder about the math here.  If there are "hundreds of thousands of workers" (call it 250,000), and BK saved $250,000 by not paying the penny more, that's a dollar a worker.  I'd call that a symbolic gesture, not something that makes a difference to the workers.

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  3. catarina Posted 1:30 am
    05 Sep 2008

    Crisis must be addressed, even if it's not idealThat's a valid concern, TP, but at the same time we have to realize that industrial agriculture is not going away anytime soon. If we want to eat tomatoes for a large chunk of the year in the US, there's only certain places where they could grow. And if we want to eat said tomatoes at, for example, national restaurant or supermarket chains, well, there's only a certain scale of production that could meet that demand. Granted, I think we all want to eventually see a world where all agriculture is local, small-scale, organic, and so on. But until that happens, we can hardly sit idle as tens of thousands of people are subjected to just heinous working conditions and grinding poverty. The situation of farmworkers in industrial agriculture (and, more often than not, even on 'small' and organic farms) is dire and it needs to be addressed in the here and now.

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  4. Tom Philpott's avatar

    Tom Philpott Posted 1:48 am
    05 Sep 2008

    Bharshaw,Well, Burger King doesn't buy all the tomatoes. The $250,000 refers only to that one company's purchases. But by holding out, Burger Kind threatened to derail the penny-a-pound deals signed with Taco Bell and McDonald's -- which would have cost workers lots more than $250K.  

    Victual Reality

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