by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America On a drizzly April day in Washington, D.C., 60 food workers and labor organizers from across the country gathered in an office building downtown. There was an African immigrant street vendor from New York City; a black apple picker from upstate New York; a white, 20-something former bartender […]
by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America Last month, Chicago hosted two seemingly unrelated meetings. At the National Restaurant Association’s annual trade show you could check out workshops such as “Pickle Your Fancy” and “You Bacon Me Crazy,” while mingling with some of the other 63,000 attendees. Though the annual trade show is the NRA’s […]
REAL FOOD READS WITH AUTHOR TED GENOWAYS In this month’s #realfoodreads selection, The Chain: Farm, Factory and the Fate of our Food, Ted Genoways offers a powerful and important work of investigative journalism that explores the runaway growth of the American meatpacking industry and its dangerous consequences. I sat down with Ted to ask him some questions about the book, […]
There’s a great new report out from the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The report shows that the fast food industry could “fully absorb” a minimum wage increase from $7.25 to $15 over four years. “Fully absorb” is technical talk for: the industry can easily pay workers more without […]
by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America While my sister-in-law put the finishing touches on Thanksgiving dinner, I listened to her friend recount the losing battle her husband, a Vietnam veteran, fought with lung cancer. She explained her husband’s illness was caused by his wartime exposure to the toxic defoliant Agent Orange, produced primarily by […]
by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America Let’s say you are a waitress or waiter. Let’s say you worked the night of Jan. 28. And let’s imagine that somewhere in your restaurant a big-screen television beamed President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address while you were taking orders, delivering food and busing dishes. Like […]
by Anna Lappé for Civil Eats In 1993, six farmworkers gathered in a local Catholic church in Immokalee, Florida, two hours northwest of Miami. Seated in a circle of folding chairs, they began to recount the human rights abuses they had suffered and witnessed while working in the tomato fields of Florida. One of the farmworkers […]