Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Food Chain$

Director: Sanjay Rawal
Run time: 83 min.
Call number: HD1525 .F66 2014

"...Required to pick a minimum of 480 pounds of fruit per hour (hands moving so quickly that you would swear the film has been sped up), the workers average around $42 for a nine-hour shift. . . . “We live like animals in cramped housing,” one man says, as Mr. Rawal shows us jam-packed trailers and ragtag encampments. The ability to improve these conditions lies not with the farmers, we are told, but with the fast-food industry, restaurants and supermarkets whose contracts with buyers set the economics of the supply chain. But when a coalition of tomato pickers in Immokalee, Fla., began agitating for companies to pay a penny more per pound for their tomatoes, the state’s largest supermarket chain, Publix, refused to blink."


—Jeannette Catsoulis, N.Y. Times