"Concurrent Sessions 1: THE GLOBE: Plate-centric America: The Bottom Line is Social Good"
Our Direct Relationship with FoodBy MARI CENTENO, University of Miami
Educating the public about the importance of eating organic and locally sustainable foods — and creating socially-just environments for farm workers — is critical to Americans' relationship with food, a group of expert panelists told an audience at the Society of Environmental Journalists meeting held Friday in Miami.
"We care about food and the flavor of food," said Helene York, director of Strategic Sourcing and Research for Bon Appetit Management Co., a food service company that supplies colleges, corporations and special events with sustainable foods.
"The reason for creating this company was to get rid of mystery meat."
York emphasized that everything in the food industry is connected. The use of antibiotics or antimicrobials in meat leads to the bad welfare practices that produce genetic diversities in the food systems and create bad food products that look and taste the same. This also creates terrible work conditions for the farm workers.
In previous times, many farm workers across the country worked under unpleasant environments and were treated unjustly. Leonel Perez, farmworker leader for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an organization which helps eliminate the exploitation that exists in farming fields, expanded on the plans to create just working environments for these people. The organization began in 1993 when the workers at the time were being treated with violence, not being paid for weeks' worth of work, and also getting sick due to the pesticides used in some of the farming.
Throughout the 1990s, they discovered the huge influence bigger corporations and organizations have on these farms.
To improve unfair situations, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers contacted bigger organizations, such as churches and schools to ask them where their tomatoes came from; however, these organizations didn't know. "They asked these corporations to pay more money for their tomatoes so the farm workers could get one cent increase for each pound of tomato they farmed, and establish a code of conduct that protected workers' rights," said Perez.
However, the good food system isn't just about what we are going to have on our plate or which grocery store we will get our food from. It's more about our direct relationship with the food.
"It's combining the cultural relationships and the production of the food that we need to think about," said Kolu Zigbi, program officer for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems and Jesse Smith Noyes Foundation in New York City.
SEJ's 21st annual conference, October 19-23, 2011, was hosted by the University of Miami. Below you will find multimedia coverage provided by SEJ, volunteers and conference attendees. NOTE: This page is a work in progress, and will remain so for several days. For other coverage, see also:
- SEJ 2011 Unofficial Conference Blog with posts by conference attendees. RSS feed.
- Cubrimiento en Español.
- Public SEJ Miami 2011 Flickr conference photo group, where you can upload/share your own conference photos (thanks to SEJ member Christine Woodside!).
- Find attendee posts on twitter: search #sejmiami
The Miami Planet is an online newspaper from University of Miami's Knight Center for International Media and its School of Communication in collaboration with Florida International University and Miami Dade College. The Planet is being devoted to reporting the highlights of the SEJ Miami conference and publishing scores of stories on South Florida and its environment. RSS feed.For more stories:
0 comments:
Post a Comment