Posts by Peter Rothberg

Video: The Fight For Food
Posted by Peter Rothberg, The Nation on September 4, 2009 at 5:21 AM.

The emergence of food as a political and social issue worth organizing around is demonstrated by the abundance of projects, initiatives, blogs, campaigns and efforts to realign food production and consumption around goals of social justice, equality and nutrition.

Slow Food USA's Time for Lunch campaign officially kick-offs on Labor Day with a National Day of Action featuring more than 280 scheduled Eat-Ins in all 50 states. There'll also be a virtual march on Washington with citizens encouraged to send a clear message to Congress to protect children against food that puts them at risk. The campaign seeks to have Congress update the Child Nutrition Act, which is up for reauthorization later this month, to get legitimately nutritious food into school lunch programs. Slow Food USA chapter leaders have been working diligently to reach out to schools, PTA groups, churches, legislators, and community and fraternal organizations to bring as many people as possible to the table on Labor Day. More than 40 percent of local Eat-Ins are being organized by other organizations – or concerned citizens – that support the goals of the campaign.

In New Orleans, the scene of numerous innovative social programs in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, ReThink has been working with chefs, farmers, architects, and artists to create twelve recommendations for changes in the New Orleans public school cafeterias. The recs included the standard (though important): buy local food, increase vegetarian options and use food garbage for composting, to things like banning sporks, redesigning eating spaces and the elimination of styrofoam trays. The group also created a video food game, apparently the first of its kind -- The Ultimate Lunch Tray. In related NOLA news, Dayo Olopade's " Green Shoots in New Orleans" from The Nation's new special issue on food chronicles how a frustrating quest for food security has led some residents to start growing their own.

Meanwhile, in California, the Edible Schoolyard has been operating since it was founded by Alice Waters in 1995 as a garden and kitchen classroom affiliated with the Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. The program hosts over 1,000 visitors each year--from educators, to health professionals, to international delegates--and has inspired countless kitchen and garden programs coast to coast. In 2005, ESY launched its first affiliate program in New Orleans. Today, there's a small but increasing network of Edible Schoolyard affiliate programs in cities across the country.

The Healthy Corner Stores Network promotes efforts to bring healthier foods to small, neighborhood stores in low-income and under-served communities. Combating the tendency of corner stores (bodegas, as we call them in New York) to carry a surplus of unhealthy processed food products, liquor, and tobacco, the HCSN promotes innovative retail models, policies and programs like the Snackin' Fresh social marketing campaign.

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Is Your Cell Phone Co. Sponsoring a Climate Change Denying, Union Busting, Pro-Mountaintop Removal Rally?
Posted by Peter Rothberg, TheNation.com on August 31, 2009 at 11:15 AM.

Do 87 million Verizon Wireless customers know that the company is a co-sponsor of a major climate-change-denying, union-busting, pro-mountaintop removal Labor Day rally staged by Massey Energy in Logan, West Virginia?

I didn't until reading a post by writer and activist Jeff Biggers at Huffington Post -- and I'm one of those millions of customers! On its Green Press kit site, Verizon crows that "environmental stewardship is ingrained in Verizon's heritage, and the company prides itself on having a positive influence on the environment in which it operates." The site provides links to solar energy resources and generally touts its green street cred.

Massey Energy, the largest producer of Central Appalachian coal, holds out no pretense of pro-environmental sympathies. In a 2008 landmark settlement which it fought tooth-and-nail, Massey agreed to pay $20 million in fines to the EPA to resolve more than 4,500 violations of the Clean Water Act for polluting waterways in West Virginia and Kentucky with coal slurry and wastewater.

One of the country's foremost practitioners of mountaintop removal, a radical form of coal mining in which entire mountains are blown up, devastating hundreds of square miles of Appalachia and polluting the headwaters of rivers, the company has fiercely lobbied against Obama administration and EPA efforts to crack down on the practice.

These anti-environmental sensibilities will be well represented at the company's Labor Day "Friends of America" celebrations next weekend. The gala's featured speaker, Lord Christopher Monckton, a science adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is one of the world's most infamous global warming-deniers. Other "distinguished" speakers include Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent.

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Shameless: Exploitative Fast Food Chain Chipotle Sponsoring Free Screenings of Food, Inc.
Posted by Peter Rothberg, TheNation.com on July 20, 2009 at 8:10 AM.

All this week, Chipotle is seizing on the opportunity to promote its brand by sponsoring country-wide free screenings of the great new documentary Food, Inc..

There's just one problem here: Food, Inc.'s director, Robert Kenner, and co-producer, Eric Schlosser have been outspoken critics of Chipotle's exploitive production practices and just last month joined more than two dozen food justice leaders in signing a sharply-worded letter of protest to company CEO Steve Ells just last month.

Chipotle, the country's fastest-growing fast food chain, has resisted efforts by farm-workers demanding a lasting commitment to ending the brutal exploitation in Florida's fields. As the letter says, in part:

"We realize that Chipotle has announced that it's paying an extra penny per pound for tomatoes, but we have to ask: What has Chipotle done since that announcement to identify and cultivate growers who are willing to raise their labor standards and pass the penny along to their workers? Your company has shown admirable leadership in working with – and incubating – meat suppliers willing to meet your higher standards. But your failure to do that same hard work in the Florida tomato industry – together with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) – threatens to render your announcement an empty gesture aimed more at public relations damage control than an effort to make real change."

Chipotle has been able to successfully promote its "Food with Integrity" brand, and the company does adhere to sustainable practices when it comes to sourcing its meat -- that's why it got props in the film. But its regard for animals and the environment makes its lack of concern for the farmworkers who pick its produce even more glaring.

Lately, Chipotle has been coming under increasing fire from social-justice activists and the underwriting of Food, Inc. seems a smart and calculated PR maneuver to burnish the company's image at a time when it's receiving increasing criticism for its intransigence in joining Burger King, Taco-Bell and others in committing to ending the brutal exploitation in Florida's fields.

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Thinking Chipotle For Lunch? Read This First If You Care About Workers' Rights
Posted by Peter Rothberg, TheNation.com on June 29, 2009 at 11:30 AM.

Last week, leaders of the food justice movement -- including Eric Schlosser, Raj Patel, Frances Moore Lappe, and Robert Kenner, producer and director of the new documentary Food, Inc. -- sent a strongly-worded letter to Chipotle demanding that they "work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers as a true partner in the protection of farmworkers' rights."

The letter comes in the wake of a recent breakthrough for the Campaign for Fair Food -- Whole Foods' announcement that two of Florida's leading organic producers, Alderman Farms and Lady Moon Farms, will implement the company's agreement with the CIW, including the penny-per-pound wage increase and a strict code of conduct.

For decades, Florida's farmworkers have faced terrible abuses and brutal exploitation. Workers earn sub-poverty wages for toiling 60 to 70 hours per week in season, and some have even been chained to poles, locked inside trucks, beaten, and robbed of their pay.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has made great organizing strides and has succeeded in convincing numerous commercial giants, including both Burger King and Taco Bell, to increase wages, benefits and observe a strict set of guidelines outlining workplace safety rules.

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Screw Seth Rogen, Date Rape Isn't Funny
Posted by Peter Rothberg, The Nation on April 11, 2009 at 5:02 AM.

Is date rape funny? Seth Rogen and his crew apparently think so. Watch this video from Feministing.com for the far-from-comic story.

Even actress Anna Faris, Rogen's fictional date rape victim, was shocked with the film's treatment of this criminal act, as she told the AVclub website:

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Who Is David Paterson and What Kind of Governor Will He Be?
Posted by Peter Rothberg, The Nation on March 11, 2008 at 10:44 AM.

With the stunning Spitzer sex scandal looking like it can only end with the New York governor's resignation, Lt. Governor David Paterson is set to become the new chief executive of New York. (And in a serious karmic slap to Spitzer, the governor's arch-nemesis, Joseph Bruno, would become acting Lt. Governor.) Rumors are swirling that Patterson could be sworn in as early as tonight.

Who is Paterson? His two most obvious, if not salient, features are that he's blind and he's black, which would make him the first blind governor in the country and only the fourth African-American to run a state in US history.

Paterson was elected to the state Senate in 1985, representing a district that included Manhattan's Harlem, and rose to become New York's highest-ranking black legislator. The son of former New York Secretary of State Basil Paterson, who was the first African American NYC Deputy Mayor, the first to run for statewide office in New York, and the Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor in 1970, Paterson gained the post of Senate minority leader in 2002. In 2004, he became the first blind person to address the Democratic National Convention.

What kind of governor will he be? No one really knows but here's a video I found on YouTube of Paterson speaking at Albany's National Reform Day last April.

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