Russell-ing the leaves | Food Week discussion for thought

Bon Appetit introduced us all to Food Week with the clever pitch: “We eat food every day. This week we’ll talk about it.”

Now that the week is just about over, did we really talk about food?

Well, yes. We did.

But I want to go beyond the issue of food and discuss another question that surfaced at the Food Week event on Monday evening.

In a small, rather packed room in Houston Hall, Bon Appetit East Fellow Carolina Fojo spoke about the lives of the workers on tomato farms in the town of Immokalee, Fla. The contractors who hire people to work on the farms “control wages, food and transportation,” and so “they can exert near absolute control over the worker’s lives,” she shared, emphasizing a system that is based in exploitation. The arrangement, according to Fojo, has meant that workers are held in an oppressive cycle similar to indentured servitude and often slavery.

To begin to improve these conditions, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is partnering with a number of important purchasers of tomatoes, like Bon Appetit. Last fall, Bon Appetit signed an agreement with CIW, stating that the food service provider will only buy tomatoes from farms that have pledged to guarantee workers’ rights.

We can all support a commitment to human rights. But the conversation on Monday night showed that when it comes to solutions, we’re not all on the same page. To the idea of raising workers’ wages, Wharton and Engineering sophomore Federico Nusymowicz asked, “Isn’t that going to take jobs away in the long run too?”

This is a valid question, though it turns out that Bon Appetit has pledged to absorb the increase in cost instead of passing it on to the consumer. Even so, Nusymowicz’s question about the economic feasibility of our short-term solutions is one that should be asked.

But his question raises another point as well; when it comes to long-term solutions, we must also challenge the assumption of our current economic system. To vastly generalize, we use the word “capitalism” to label the status quo and the inevitability of human rights abuses. But there are many ways to think of capitalism, and it is possible to support both a free market and human rights.

Take, for example, the assumption of a “free market,” in which everyone knows the full cost of what they pay for.

If our policies were to advance such a system, when consumers picked up a tomato and paid its price, they would know about the history of the product and the lives of the workers who picked it. At the same time, when the workers entered into a contract to pick the tomato in the first place, they would do so as independent economic actors without fear of fraud or coercion. All costs would be reflected in price, and so the workers would receive the actual value of the wealth that they create. In such a system, the human rights abuses in Immokalee would be impossible. Which leads us to the question: Why do these injustices still exist? The answer is clear, but often unconsciously forgotten: we have an economic system that serves some interests while ignoring others.

We can work to remedy the tomato farm workers’ situation by joining other students at Penn who are working with CIW to target Aramark, which has not yet promised to purchase from growers who support the rights of their workers. But as long as there are conditions of oppression in Immokalee, Fla., we should also question the purpose of an economy that allows for these conditions to occur. I don’t want to claim that we naively agree with the status quo. But if we do not have a fair and rational economic system, what kind do we have?

Russell Trimmer is a Wharton sophomore from Lexington, Va . His e-mail address is trimmer@dailypennsylvanian.com. Russell-ing the Leaves appears on alternate Fridays.

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