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Thursday, February 11, 2010
Food & Drink Chipotle gets it right, right?
Posted by Bryce Crawford on Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 12:39 PM
From the beginning, Denver-based Chipotle Mexican Grill has espoused a "Food with Integrity" theory, and has stuck to that in a lot of ways.
The chain serves more than 70 million pounds of meat annually, and all of its chicken and pork is naturally raised (fed strictly vegetarian diets, spared the antibiotics or artificial growth hormones, and given room to roam freely). Sixty percent of its beef is naturally raised. All dairy products are rBGH-free, and the company has even sponsored viewings of the revealing food documentary Food Inc.
A new article, however, details a lingering issue that the food chain has been unable to put to bed. Titled "One Company Thinks They've Created Fast Food With a Conscience — Are They Right?" Tara Lohan at AlterNet breaks down the good, the bad and the ugly of Chipotle and its issues with the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a worker protection group that contends its members work and live in virtual slavery. (Read more on the life of tomato pickers here).
Here's an excerpt from the letter CIW sent to Chipotle founder Steve Ells:
In the winter-tomato market, a small number of very large buyers dictate terms to the seven or eight entities that control land in tomato country; those growers, in turn, squeeze the workers in brutal fashion. Real wages have fallen dramatically in Immokalee over the decades and now hover well below poverty level; housing conditions would not be out of place in apartheid-era South Africa.These are the normal conditions, experienced by thousands of workers in south Florida. No one can be surprised that in some extreme cases, right now, some of the people who pick our tomatoes are living in what can only be called modern-day slavery: held against their will and forced to harvest tomatoes without pay. In this context, Chipotle cannot claim the same integrity for the tomatoes it serves as it does for its meat, much less guarantee its customers that the tomatoes in its burritos were not picked by slaves.
The issue has been dogging Chipotle for years. The Rocky Mountain News wrote a piece in 2006 that stated 5 percent of the company's tomatoes come from Immokalee farms.
Progress has been made, however: In September ’09, Chipotle began to purchase tomatoes from the East Coast Growers and Packers, who subscribe to the CIW's "Fair Food" program. Still, Lohan writes, "critics [have] blasted Chipotle's go-it-alone approach as lacking transparency, and its unwillingness to work with actual farm workers through CIW."
When reached by the Indy on its Facebook page for comment on Lohan's story, a Chipotle spokesman responded:
We have been working for more than a decade to improve the nation's food supply by using ingredients from more sustainable sources, and we have accomplished more than any other restaurant company (naturally raised meat, local and organic produce, and dairy from cows that aren’t given added hormones to stimulate milk production).But we have never claimed to be perfect. We have taken action on this issue, but this group seems to think there is only one way to solve a problem, and we don’t see it like that.
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Quick note- the CIW does *not* "contend its members work and live in virtual slavery." According to the US Department of Labor, Florida farmworkers make sub-poverty annual wages and are -- again in the words of the US DOL (not exactly a partisan champion of workers' rights) -- "a workforce in severe economic distress." These workers are not enslaved, only brutally exploited. As for the topic of slavery, that isn't a "contention" by the CIW either, and there's nothing "virtual" about it. There have been seven federally-prosecuted cases of slavery which have emerged from the fields of Florida since 1997; these cases meet the stringent federal guidelines for prosecution under anti-peonage, anti-forced-labor, anti-slavery law. These are cases in which workers were held and forced to work against their will for little or no pay, under threats and/or the use of violence; both US citizens and immigrants have been enslaved in these cases. In other words, the vast majority of farmworkers, who are "free," work in everyday conditions that can be reasonably compared to "sweatshops" -- poverty wages, powerlessness, lack of basic protections, etc.; it is these everyday sweatshop conditions that create the fertile soil in which actual slavery can and does take root in the 21st century. Visit http://ciw-online.org/slavery.html for more info.
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Posted by
Tom Joad
on 02/11/2010 at 1:04 PM
Tom Joad,
Fair enough. The term "virtual slavery" was used in the linked "Gourmet" article and seems an apt description for some of the challenges faced by Immokalee farmers, if not a technical description.
Either way, it seems like we both agree that conditions could and should be better. Thanks for writing.
Posted by
Bryce E. Crawford
on 02/11/2010 at 3:41 PM
