I Say Tomato, You Say Food Justice! 

We don’t need heavy headlines to know our pocketbooks are lighter. Wages and benefits have not come close to keeping pace with the costs of basic needs like food, housing, and our already abysmal health care options. For example, the price of groceries on average has risen an astounding 30+ percent over the past handful of years and no relief is in sight with ongoing, disastrous attacks on Iran and gamesmanship around tariffs being used to only enrich multi-billion companies further.  

More people are going hungry and going into debt simply for want of this most basic need and right.  

Food safety inspections are being stripped away or abandoned by the current Administration, and dangerous outbreaks seem to lurk in most major food groups we do consume at any time. And the populations of people who predominantly pick our food, themselves tax-payers, are under threat, targeted, and deported with fascist vigor. 

These are all the results of policy choices manifested by malevolent people in power. 

Where, then, can we find hope? Where can we commit our support and show our solidarity for a food system, economy, and with our human siblings experiencing marginalization and oppression within both?  

The answers are in neon lights throughout our sacred texts and illuminate our path right now: transformation and new life is led by those most threatened and abused by the greed and violence that undergirds this entire racist, imperial, capitalist project of ours. 

For decades, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), based out of southern Florida, has organized, advocated, developed, and fought for a transformed system that uplifts and protects those who harvest our food and ensure our grocery stores are stocked year-round. The work began in the 1990s in Immokalee’s tomato fields, which typically provide upwards of 90% of all off-season (non-summer) tomatoes east of the Mississippi River. Due to abject racism, some of the most basic employment rights and protections that many of us have (and perhaps take for granted) were explicitly withheld from farmworkers and domestic workers in the seminal New Deal-era National Labor Rights Act (1935), Social Security Act (1935), and Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) – rights like the ability to organize without fear of retaliation, to count on security from the taxes all laborers pay, and rules around overtime and minimum wage. 

And for decades, student groups and myriad religious organizations nationwide mobilized in solidarity with the CIW, leveraging their own moral, financial, and people-power to pressure these companies to act justly and treat their workers as the humans they are, not as an expendable bottom.  

Through our faith and conscience, millions can now buy much more produce with a clearer conscience and trust that abuses will not be tolerated. 

Thanks to the successes of this Campaign for Fair Food, several big grow operations and massive corporations are now committed and bound to giving farmworkers where they buy produce higher wages, regular hours, safe reporting and accountability for verbal, sexual, and physical harassment and abuse, and zero tolerance for forced-labor slavery (Immokalee was at the beginning of this century dubbed “ground zero for modern-day slavery” in the U.S.).  

With CIW’s groundbreaking Fair Food Program in place as a proven “worker social responsibility” model that measurably empowers these incredibly skilled, hardworking laborers without impacting consumer prices, a few important items come into sharper focus for us. 

The United Church of Christ (UCC) is one of those faith bodies who has stood with many farmworker efforts, including the CIW for these many years. The UCC passed a resolution in support of their original boycott (Taco Bell), and congregations nationwide acted accordingly until Taco Bell’s parent company Yum Brands became the first corporation to join. More recently, we did the same with one of the last fast food holdouts from the Fair Food Program: Wendy’s. There are also still major grocery holdouts, most notably the second largest in the country: The Kroger Co, which *continues* to have documented cases of forced-labor slavery in their supply chain (Kroger, beyond their namesake stores, also owns several other well-known grocery chains nationwide).  

And what of various foodstuffs and other industries not yet protected by the Fair Food Program and similar programs? The work for us continues.  

As we mark the Labor Day weekend, and move into a season filled with holiday feasts, our faith and consciences animates us to revitalize and focus our efforts: for a more just economy and food system that uplifts and empowers all who need food on the table and those who make sure it gets there. 

Ensuring the Fair Food Program’s proven outcomes become universal will have the opposite effect of the current financial squeeze wrought by inflation. The economy thrives when all are given what they need to thrive. Right now, new wealth is only being created for the already-wealthy, who are juicing the markets by “creating” job-destroying, inedible slop. 

We have the tools to manifest that which is real, and light-years better.  

Resources to learn more:  

▷You and your congregation can support the existing gains, and make sure they continue by pledging regular financial support by becoming Fair Food Sustainers.
▷Learn about more farmworker solidarity opportunities through the National Farmworker Ministry network.
▷And if it helps first for building your power, wherever you are, spread the word and deepen awareness by screening Food Chains and/or doing a reading group of Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rev. Seth Wispelwey (he/him) is the Minister for Economic Justice with the National Ministries of the United Church of Christ.