Food justice pioneer Frances Moore Lappe and many more endorse the Alliance for Fair Food; CIW to address upcoming Slow Food Nation gathering!

New endorsements are flooding into the Alliance for Fair Food, the network of human rights, religious, student, labor, sustainable food, environmental and grassroots organizations who work in partnership with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

New AFF endorsements include such sustainable food leaders as author and activist Frances Moore Lappe (“Diet for a Small Planet”) and her daughter Anna Lappe, leading food blogs ethicurean.com and grist.org, and top NGO’s including Food & Water Watch, the
National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, the
People’s Grocery, and CATA (Centro de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agricolas), whose visionary work through the Agricultural Justice Project has obliged the sustainable food movement to confront the issue of farmworker exploitation, even on organic and small-scale farms.

For the full list of endorsements, go to the Alliance for Fair Food website now!

And in the coming week (August 28-31), the CIW will plunge headlong into the Sustainable Food movement with a keynote panel at the massive Slow Food Nation gathering in San Francisco. The panel, part of the “Food for Thought Speaker Series,” is entitled “A New, Fair Food System,” and will feature Lucas Benitez from the CIW. Long-time CIW friend Eric Schlosser will be moderating the panel.

What will the CIW’s message be?

Well… Chipotle is a company that prides itself on its efforts to “revolutionize the way America grows and gathers its food.” Yet for more than two years, the CIW has sought to work with Chipotle — the self-proclaimed leader in “food with integrity” — to improve the unconscionable wages and working conditions of Florida farmworkers. And for more than two years, Chipotle has sought to distance itself at every turn from the human rights crisis in Florida’s fields, seemingly content to hide in the shadows of larger companies as the Campaign for Fair Food focused on McDonald’s and then Burger King.

You can be sure that part of our message will be to introduce thousands of food activists from around the country to the ugly reality of farmworker exploitation that Chipotle would prefer that its customers, and its friends in the world of sustainable agriculture, simply ignore. In fact, why wait until next week? Here’s some reading you can start now:

Click here to see a recent article from The Nation on the glaring contradiction behind Chipotle’s food, entitled “Want Some Basic Human Dignity with that Burrito?“

And click here to read our own analysis of the fast-food leader’s growing “Chipocrisy.” See you in San Francisco!