This piece was originally posted at The Guardian.

Over centuries, modern agriculture has bred the nutrients out of our food. The G8 will next week try to go one further – within a generation, they want to squeeze the politics out of hunger. If they succeed, they’ll have licensed an army of development technicians who’ll be free of democracy, accountability or history.

This piece was originally posted at The Huffington Post

Wendy’s, the world’s third largest burger joint, is having a makeover. From being “Wendy’s Old Fashioned Burgers” we’re now told it’s just “Wendy’s.” The ginger-haired befreckled Wendy remains on the logo, though in their TV spots she’s a hipper twentysomething. Yet behind the new facade lie some very old-fashioned attitudes.

CIW Protest outside Wendy’s (Credit:CIW)

Above all, like every corporation, Wendy’s exists for the sole purpose of bringing value to its shareholders. This is why shareholders at Wendy’s Annual Meeting in New York last Thursday found themselves in the company of Kerry Kennedy of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights, and Larry Cox, Executive Director of Amnesty International. Kennedy, Cox, and an interfaith group of clergy, joined the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to demand that the company join a program to eliminate the exploitation farmworkers in its supply chain.

One might imagine that Wendy’s cares little about conditions in its supply chain because it is, after all, a burger company. But, visit Wendy’s investor relations online and you’ll see that they care enough about their suppliers to ensure that their packaging is somewhat compostable, and that their animals aren’t treated too badly, before they’re turned into square burgers. The farmworkers who supply Wendy’s with the fresh tomato slices on those burgers appear, however, to be less important than the company’s ground beef.

Wendy’s might want to point to the other fast food companies, the number one and number two companies, for instance, and insist that it’ll cost Wendy’s too much to comply with decent treatment of farmworkers in their supply chain. Thing is, as Kerry Kennedy told the shareholders “The CIW has signed agreements with four of the five largest [fast] food corporations in America. All… except for Wendy’s.”

Wendy’s might want to claim that this whole thing is overblown. But,
I’ll say it again, things had been so extremely bad that multiple instances of modern-day slavery have been prosecuted in Florida’s tomato fields in recent years.

Finally, Wendy’s might sniff that there’s nothing it can do, since it can’t police hundreds of suppliers directly. But in the words of a major Presidential Advisory Report released last month concerning human trafficking, the CIW’s Fair Food Program is “one of the most successful and innovative programs” in the country today for preventing forced labor.

Rather than join their competitors in respecting farmworkers rights, the company ended up doing something different. They chose to mislead their stockholders and customers. When human rights activists asked Wendy’s CEO Emil Brolick why his company had refused to join the CIW’s Fair Food program, he said that Wendy’s was already purchasing its tomatoes from growers in the Fair Food Program. He also said that they were paying a premium for their tomatoes.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez of the CIW had this to say:

Wendy’s is not participating in the Fair Food Program …. Wendy’s has not signed a fair food agreement with the CIW. Wendy’s is not paying a penny premium to increase workers’ pay. And Wendy’s has not committed to using its purchasing power to eradicate abuses in the fields together with growers and farmworkers. Wendy’s refuses to commit to joining the Fair Food Program, undermining the concrete commitment and contributions of the eleven corporations that actually areparticipating and creates a misleading picture for its shareholders and customers.

So here’s where the new Wendy’s looks very much like the old-fashioned Wendy’s. The company is ignoring a program that has demonstrably helped workers, which has been joined by the likes of McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Burger King and Subway, and which has been embraced by people of all faiths, and recognized from the White House to the U.N. Working Group on Business and Human Rights as the way of the future.

It can have all the make-overs it wants, but without joining the Food Program, its claims are as empty as a fast food calorie, and its old-fashioned approach looks increasingly outdated.

From the Huffington Post.

What’s the quickest way to get thrown out of a Publix supermarket? Is it a) to run naked through the aisles, b) to point and yell ‘horsemeat!’ at the deli counter or c) to query the manager about whether workers picking tomatoes are treated as well as she’d like. In my case, it was option c). As soon as I broached the question, I was told to leave immediately or security would be called. I was swiftly ushered out.

I wondered whether, perhaps, I’d committed a faux-pas. I speak English with a British accent, and feared that ‘tom-ah-to’ might mean something horrible and offensive in Florida. Further investigation suggests that I’d have been kicked to the curb whether I’d said tomahto or tomayto. There are some things one just isn’t allowed to do in a Publix supermarket. Asking politely about tomato farmworker justice is one of them.

Yet there’s good reason to wonder. Farmworkers have long faced brutal working conditions. Rampant violations of minimum wage laws, below-poverty annual incomes, pesticide exposure, sexual harassment, long days without overtime pay, and retaliation for reporting abuses aren’t just plot points from a Steinbeck novel. They’re a common part of agricultural labor today.

Agricultural and food corporations have successfully lobbied for farmworkers to be stripped of the workplace laws that protect most other Americans, and there’s little enforcement of the few legal protections that farmworkers are meant to enjoy. The result has led to actual cases of ‘modern-day slavery’ in which farmworkers have been threatened, chained, beaten, and held against their will in debt bondage.

There is, however, change in the fields. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is an internationally renowned farmworker organization based in SW Florida — where most of the winter U.S. tomato crop is harvested. They’ve worked with some of Florida’s growers to develop a ‘Fair Food Program.’ Workers and growers collaborate, under the eyes of third-party monitors, to make sure that rights for everything from overtime to bathroom breaks are respected. Buyers reward those growers who uphold the rights with business and withhold business from the growers who fail to.

Sound like some hippie plot? Hardly. Currently, 90 percent of the Florida tomato industry and 11 major food corporations, including McDonald’s, Subway, and Whole Foods, are currently part of the Fair Food Program. Few would consider McDonald’s a refuge for the great unwashed.

Publix’s polished advertisements laud their deep concern for their community. But if you’re a Floridian who picks tomatoes for a living, you’re clearly not part of that community. And if you’re a customer wanting to ask about this, it seems Publix don’t want you around either.

Yet here’s the irony. The Fair Food Program is all about building community. It enshrines the rights of farmworkers never before seen in the agricultural industry in partnership with buyers and grower.

Publix refuses to join the program, claiming that the Fair Food Program is a “labor dispute” and that the company will not get involved. Yet the Fair Food Program is a growing partnership that brings together various levels of the supply chain to overturn decades of sub-poverty wages and abuses that were, until recently, the norm. In fact, the Washington Post recently dubbed the Fair Food Program, “one of the great human rights success stories of our day.”

Why then does Publix still refuse to join some of the leading food retailers in making life better for the worst paid people in America? Publix spokesperson Dwaine Stevens provided a surprisingly frank answerafter a protest at a Publix in Alabama saying, “If there are some atrocities going on, it’s not our business”

In other words, Publix maintains the ability to buy from farms even if human rights abuses are rampant, no questions asked. It appears, the Publix solution to human rights abuses is to plug their fingers firmly in their ears. Workers rights will come second to a cheaper tomato, or more accurately, are not part of the equation at all.

Since they couldn’t ask for justice inside a Publix, 1,500 people arrived in Lakeland, home of Publix corporate headquarters, after a 200 mile march through Florida this weekend. Farmworkers like the CIW’s Gerardo Reyes will be there to insist that “though we are indeed poor, we too are human beings and we deserve respect and dignity.”

They weren’t asking for special treatment. They’re only asking to be treated like human beings. And surely that deserves our support. So, please, voice out your support when you next visit a Publix. And, take it from me, you can say tomahtoes or tomaytoes. Either way.

This essay first appeared in The Earth Island Journal special issue on The Anthropocene. More here.

My first earthquake happened at four in the morning, when some small god picked up my apartment building and shook it lightly before setting it down like a Christmas box that would, soon enough, be torn apart.

At the emergency preparedness class I took soon after, our instructor told us: “Some people get to learn of the storm hitting their town just a few days out. Too late! Not enough time to find water, board up, and make a plan. The good thing about an earthquake is you’ve got plenty of warning. Here’s yours: With certainty, you’ll be hit by a major earthquake in the next 30 years. It’s an ideal disaster.”

Let’s run with this for a moment. An “ideal disaster” has three characteristics. First, it needs to be small enough to do something about. So the sun exploding is not an ideal disaster. It’s paralytic, too big to do anything about.

Second, an ideal disaster is one that is sufficiently far in the future to be able to mitigate. When I was growing up in England we had something called the Three Minute Warning – the time between the detection of Soviet nuclear missiles and the moment when London would be incinerated. This, too, was not ideal.

Beyond being sufficiently clear and insufficiently present, the final and unspoken quality of the ideal disaster is that it be narratable as a disaster. Before we can set about mitigating the worst, we need to be able to tell stories about what “it” is.

There are plenty of avoidable things about which we have advanced warning. Consider the diabetes epidemic that will affect one-in-three children in the US. Although there will be millions of premature deaths, billions of dollars of cost, plenty of warning, and much that can be done, kids dying of diabetes does not have the narrative force of an apocalypse.

Which brings us to the Anthropocene and, more importantly, what we do with the idea. The Anthropocene is a way of telling a story about how humanity has affected the planet so profoundly that we’ve punted ourselves from one geological era to another.

As disasters go, the Anthropocene isn’t ideal. It feels too big. We can’t undo the mistake, somehow pulling the Holocene back over us. Nor is there a decent warning, for the Anthropocene has already happened. In that sense, it’s like being told the sun has exploded, and that the light you see is old news, to be updated as soon as the corona expands to boil our planet.

The worry about the Anthropocene is that it announces a catastrophe of solar proportions. We’re screwed, and there’s not much to be done about it. Perhaps the only response is the kind that the characters in J.G. Ballard’s Crash embrace – looking at the mangle of the modern world and shagging on the roadside while the world burns.

What would be a better way to meet this disaster? It’s a question that Sasha Lilley and collaborators explore in a recent book of essays titled Catastrophism. The outlook isn’t rosy. In Western politics, catastrophe has been used by the left and right as an alibi for misanthropic, racist, and cold-blooded policy. Stalinists and survivalists unite behind the idea that, before things get better, society has to hit bottom. After that, the guardians of post-apocalyptic knowledge can come to save the day. Impending catastrophe has been an alibi for everything from Year Zero to cult suicides.

Herein lies the danger. We’re surrounded by catastrophic narratives of almost every political persuasion, tales that allow us to sit and wait while humanity’s End Times work themselves out. The Anthropocene can very easily become the Misanthropocene.

Read more in our special issue exploring the consequences of a new geologic epoch: the Anthropocene.
If there’s good news, it comes from those who have lived in the new era for a while already: farming in greater harmony with natural systems, saving biodiversity, reducing their reliance on fossil fuels, creating more localized economies, recognizing the need for adaptation plans and resilient social systems. For those pioneers, the new geological age still comes with seasons and generations, just as the previous age did. The work of those seasons makes the task of change more manageable than a story of geology. Through a more human-scale conception of time and space – and through ecological invention – the Anthropocene is rendered more ideal.

We need those pioneers’ stories to be told in the metropolises that try to hide from ecology. The wisdom of peasants and Indigenous people can narrate an Anthropocene that tells the story of this disaster as one that we can, with rhythms and processes far from late capitalism, survive and from which we might even emerge better.

At the very least, we know this: We have been warned.

How do communities overcome local food issues like food deserts and big-box grocery stores?