This is a series on the business of sustainable agriculture by the folks at Bon Appétit Management Company, a company that provides café and catering services to corporations, colleges and universities. We invited Bon Appetit to lead this conversation because they want to focus on difficult questions to which they don’t have answers. We think it’s a bold step when a company puts itself on a line to seek answers to tough questions. We may not solve them all, but we hope we’ll make a start. To read the earlier posts, click here.

By Bon Appétit East Coast Fellow Carolina Fojo

Thanks to leaders like Michelle Obama and Michael Pollan, the U.S. public is beginning to realize that a large number of today’s social, environmental and health problems exist because of the modern system we like to call the food industry. And what people are learning to ask is: Where exactly does my food come from?

Read Full Article » Discuss This »

This is the this is the third post in a series on the business of sustainable agriculture by the folks at Bon Appétit Management, a company that provides café and catering services to corporations, colleges and universities. To read past posts, click here.

By: Carolina Fojo, Bon Appétit Fellow

People picking the food we eat everyday have been chained up, abused, forced to work, and left without pay. The 2004 study “Hidden Slaves: Forced Labor in the United States” found that 10% of documented, forced labor in the US is in the agricultural industry. You can imagine how, hidden as it is, the modern slave industry—yes, slave industry—is not easy to track. So if 10% is the documented statistic, how many more are actually enslaved? And how many more are “merely” exploited?

As a Fellow for Bon Appétit Management Company, I will be looking into labor practices at the farm level this year. The problem has existed for a long time; what I want to know is: Why?

It’s More than Just Money.
One admirable response to this problem has been the “penny per pound” initiative by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). However, while “penny per pound” is certainly a good start, I see it in some ways as a Band-Aid to a larger problem. These workers are not exploited because they are paid low wages; they are paid low wages (or not paid at all) because they can so easily be exploited. So we can make sure to pay them, and pay them more—and we should, because poverty is no trifling thing—but unless we address WHY the system is such that people can get away with cheating their workers in the first place, we’re not really addressing the problem.

Read Full Article » Discuss This »

This is the this is the second post in a series on the business of sustainable agriculture by the folks at Bon Appétit Management, a company that provides café and catering services to corporations, colleges and universities. To read the first post, click here.

By: Maisie Greenawalt, Bon Appetit Management

What does slavery look like in the United States in the year 2009? After visiting Immokalee, Florida, I know.

As we drove down a highway surrounded by swamps and passed signs warning people of panthers, I looked out the window trying to find evidence of the atrocious working conditions of tomato pickers about which I had read. We sped by orange groves and tract housing but no tomatoes.

Entering Immokalee, I saw a modern-day ghost town – dusty streets full of potholes, boarded up businesses, and rundown trailers. Had I been there at 4:30 a.m., it would have been a different scene. Each morning thousands of workers gather in the parking lot of an abandoned store to load onto buses that take them upwards of an hour away to the tomato fields. Calling Immokalee a city is really a misnomer. It’s a labor camp and, as a federal prosecutor called it, “ground zero for modern-day slavery.”

Read Full Article » Discuss This »