Pigs and workers unite at Chipotle “Cultivate” Festival in Chicago…

… call for “Food with Integrity” that includes respect for farmworkers, too!

A funny thing happened at Chipotle’s “Cultivate” Festival in Chicago last weekend.

Chipotle organized the event — “bringing together food, farmers, chefs, artisans, thought leaders, and musicians,” in the words of the Cultivate website — to celebrate the company’s vision of “Food with Integrity”. But that vision has always lacked one element essential to the food industry, one link in the supply chain without which there actually is no food, and that element is the farmworkers, the people whose undervalued labor gets the food from the fields and onto the trucks that carry it to Chipotle restaurants across the country every day.

Well, despite the fact that there was no booth highlighting the grueling, dangerous work farmworkers do, no “celebrity farmworkers” addressing the crowd, no songs celebrating their labor inside the Chipotle festival, farmworkers and their Fair Food allies still managed to make their presence known. A lively, creative and colorful event celebrating the CIW’s Fair Food Program set up shop just outside the Cultivate Festival gates, and CIW allies Just Harvest USA were there to chronicle the day-long alternative to Chipotle’s worker-less vision of integrity.

Go to the Just Harvest USA website today to see a complete photo report, with pics and a first-hand narrative from the event. And get ready for Round Two as the Just Harvest crew heads over to Denver to join with allies at the Denver Fair Food Committee with plans to set up shop again at the next Cultivate Festival, which will be held in Denver on October 6th!