Tomatoland, Third Edition by Barry Estabrook

Author:Barry Estabrook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Published: 2018-03-28T19:47:37+00:00

How was a grassroots organization with a limited budget, based in a poor backwater in South Florida, whose members could barely afford dietary basics, going to convince corporate executives in suburban Los Angeles to forgo profits by volunteering to pay a penny per pound more for the tomatoes that went into their salsa and salads? The answer was to hit them where it hurt the most—in the bottom line. In 2001, tearing a page from the successful grape boycotts mounted by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the second half of the 1960s, the coalition launched a boycott of Taco Bell.

From the outset, the coalition knew it would need all the allies it could get. One obvious place to look was the nation’s college and university campuses. Taco Bell’s core consumer target group was eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, whom the company cynically called the “New Hedonism Generation.” But the coalition saw entirely different traits in young people. They believed that the college students had shown that they felt deeply about social justice and would take action to bring it about, whether it meant refusing to purchase logo-emblazoned clothing produced in Asian sweatshops, supporting unionization efforts of blue-collar campus workers, or battling administrators intent on cutting back academic budgets while padding their own salaries and enlarging their staffs. Activist groups were already in place on most campuses and, better yet, were adept at communicating through the Internet and other new media. The coalition’s Web site became a crucial new tool in its battle for fair food.

In 2000 the coalition decided to sponsor a 230-mile protest march that culminated at the Florida governor’s mansion in Tallahassee. A couple of dozen college students accompanied the marchers to collect signatures on a petition that would be delivered to then Governor Jeb Bush. After the demonstration, the students formed the Student/Farmworker Alliance to put an end to what they called “sweatshops in the fields.” In mid-2001, when the Taco Bell boycott was announced, the alliance had branches at three Florida universities, but through the Internet, had established relationships with student groups at every major post-secondary institution in the state. Within a few years, that number grew to more than three hundred colleges and universities in all parts of the country, including the University of California Los Angeles, the University of Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame. The alliance also established ties with activist groups in fifty high schools. In 2004 hundreds of those students went on hunger strikes to “Boot the Bell” off their campuses, and in twenty-two cases, the schools did just that. Taco Bell managers learned the hard way that ignoring the ragtag workers coalition would carry a price tag, but they still stubbornly refused to accede to the coalition’s demands.

The struggle for workers’ rights can make for strange bedfellows, and while the students’ campaign was gaining momentum, the coalition reached out to religious leaders through a group called Interfaith Action of Southwest Florida. Eventually it gained the support of the Presbyterian Church (U.

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