My rabbi chose an odd topic to discuss on this Yom Kippur: food.
For those of you who miss the irony, Yom Kippur is a Jewish holiday that requires a 24-hour fast. So, when your rabbi is speaking about how concepts such as environmental sustainability and social justice relate to what you eat, your stomach isn't really focusing on the message.
Which, unfortunately, strikes me as the norm when it comes to food options on and around campus. We'd like to eat healthier, support sustainability or buy Fair Trade, but when dinner time comes around, we're just focused on what would best satisfy our taste buds. After all, it's not like we have a lot of options for food. When we are rushing between classes, or trying to get in a quick bite during an all-nighter, we value convenience over quality. We eat what's offered, whether it's McDonald's at 2 a.m. or whatever happens to be in the fridge. Existing restaurants have a monopoly of convenience: our own hectic lifestyle forces us to eat what's available and not what's preferable.
This is one of the reasons, I think, why some students are so upset about Panda Express's presence on campus. The new fast-food restaurant will succeed by sheer virtue of the fact that it delivers quick food in a convenient location on campus. Whether we like Panda Express or not, whether we think the food is good for us or not, we're inevitably going to end up eating there at some point during the year.
This is not a column bashing Panda Express; we've already had enough of those. Instead, we need to reevaluate our eat-first-think-later mentality. It's a lot easier not to pay attention to what goes into our food, where it's from or who grows it. Case in point: Most people don't realize that food giants Chipotle and Subway are currently under attack for their perpetuation of substandard wages for Florida tomato pickers.
Farmworkers in Florida and the Carolinas often work in near-slavery conditions, with some vegetable and citrus pickers being forced into literal slavery. This year saw the seventh farm labor operation to be prosecuted for slavery in the past decade, in Florida alone. Some of the indicted employers used schemes in which they sold crack cocaine to addicts, forcing them to work in order to pay off their debt. Meanwhile, large food chains thrive off a system where a mistreated labor force supplies cheap produce, at the cost of human rights. It's something that most consumers don't think about when eating their oranges or tomatoes.
Recently, farmworker organizations, under the banner of The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, have started fighting for a fair wage, asking for just an extra penny per pound of tomatoes picked. Currently, farmworkers receive between 40 to 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they fill. A penny a pound, in this case, means very little to large food chains, but represents a better quality of life for those who supply us our food.
Already, Burger King, Whole Foods and McDonald's have acceded to the Coalition's demands. But Chipotle and Subway haven't yet decided to pay fair wages to its farmworkers. The Coalition isn't calling for a boycott, but has started a national campaign to change the minds of both restaurant chains.
As students who so often advocate for change in our own environments, it's clear where we should stand on the issue. But it's difficult; Subway and Chipotle are two of the more popular places for us Dukies to eat, and we don't have that many solid options to begin with.
It's easy to accept our lack of control over what we consume. But perhaps I'm being overly fatalistic. After all, this week heralds the re-opening of Duke's Coffeehouse, a brilliantly rendered symbol of the possibility for student empowerment at Duke. Three students took it upon themselves to create a space to meet, chat and even have something to eat or drink in an atmosphere that's very different from what you might find at Panda Express or Chipotle. The new Coffeehouse goes to show that we do have a choice on where and what we decide to eat.
So if you believe in social justice, make sure you're eating Fair Trade food, produced by workers who receive a living wage. If you believe in environmental sustainability, make a commitment to eating local. And if you believe in human dignity, make sure to treat your servers with kindness and respect. When we're rushing from class to class, or just trying to get our fix of coffee for the night, it may be inconvenient to focus on what we're eating. But food isn't just something you put in your stomach; it's a fundamental aspect of life. What we eat has ramifications for our health, the earth and other people. So for your next meal, challenge yourself to go beyond what's convenient. Demand more from your food.
James Tager is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Wednesday.
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