From the Huffington Post.

What’s the quickest way to get thrown out of a Publix supermarket? Is it a) to run naked through the aisles, b) to point and yell ‘horsemeat!’ at the deli counter or c) to query the manager about whether workers picking tomatoes are treated as well as she’d like. In my case, it was option c). As soon as I broached the question, I was told to leave immediately or security would be called. I was swiftly ushered out.

I wondered whether, perhaps, I’d committed a faux-pas. I speak English with a British accent, and feared that ‘tom-ah-to’ might mean something horrible and offensive in Florida. Further investigation suggests that I’d have been kicked to the curb whether I’d said tomahto or tomayto. There are some things one just isn’t allowed to do in a Publix supermarket. Asking politely about tomato farmworker justice is one of them.

Yet there’s good reason to wonder. Farmworkers have long faced brutal working conditions. Rampant violations of minimum wage laws, below-poverty annual incomes, pesticide exposure, sexual harassment, long days without overtime pay, and retaliation for reporting abuses aren’t just plot points from a Steinbeck novel. They’re a common part of agricultural labor today.

Agricultural and food corporations have successfully lobbied for farmworkers to be stripped of the workplace laws that protect most other Americans, and there’s little enforcement of the few legal protections that farmworkers are meant to enjoy. The result has led to actual cases of ‘modern-day slavery’ in which farmworkers have been threatened, chained, beaten, and held against their will in debt bondage.

There is, however, change in the fields. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is an internationally renowned farmworker organization based in SW Florida — where most of the winter U.S. tomato crop is harvested. They’ve worked with some of Florida’s growers to develop a ‘Fair Food Program.’ Workers and growers collaborate, under the eyes of third-party monitors, to make sure that rights for everything from overtime to bathroom breaks are respected. Buyers reward those growers who uphold the rights with business and withhold business from the growers who fail to.

Sound like some hippie plot? Hardly. Currently, 90 percent of the Florida tomato industry and 11 major food corporations, including McDonald’s, Subway, and Whole Foods, are currently part of the Fair Food Program. Few would consider McDonald’s a refuge for the great unwashed.

Publix’s polished advertisements laud their deep concern for their community. But if you’re a Floridian who picks tomatoes for a living, you’re clearly not part of that community. And if you’re a customer wanting to ask about this, it seems Publix don’t want you around either.

Yet here’s the irony. The Fair Food Program is all about building community. It enshrines the rights of farmworkers never before seen in the agricultural industry in partnership with buyers and grower.

Publix refuses to join the program, claiming that the Fair Food Program is a “labor dispute” and that the company will not get involved. Yet the Fair Food Program is a growing partnership that brings together various levels of the supply chain to overturn decades of sub-poverty wages and abuses that were, until recently, the norm. In fact, the Washington Post recently dubbed the Fair Food Program, “one of the great human rights success stories of our day.”

Why then does Publix still refuse to join some of the leading food retailers in making life better for the worst paid people in America? Publix spokesperson Dwaine Stevens provided a surprisingly frank answerafter a protest at a Publix in Alabama saying, “If there are some atrocities going on, it’s not our business”

In other words, Publix maintains the ability to buy from farms even if human rights abuses are rampant, no questions asked. It appears, the Publix solution to human rights abuses is to plug their fingers firmly in their ears. Workers rights will come second to a cheaper tomato, or more accurately, are not part of the equation at all.

Since they couldn’t ask for justice inside a Publix, 1,500 people arrived in Lakeland, home of Publix corporate headquarters, after a 200 mile march through Florida this weekend. Farmworkers like the CIW’s Gerardo Reyes will be there to insist that “though we are indeed poor, we too are human beings and we deserve respect and dignity.”

They weren’t asking for special treatment. They’re only asking to be treated like human beings. And surely that deserves our support. So, please, voice out your support when you next visit a Publix. And, take it from me, you can say tomahtoes or tomaytoes. Either way.

This essay first appeared in The Earth Island Journal special issue on The Anthropocene. More here.

My first earthquake happened at four in the morning, when some small god picked up my apartment building and shook it lightly before setting it down like a Christmas box that would, soon enough, be torn apart.

At the emergency preparedness class I took soon after, our instructor told us: “Some people get to learn of the storm hitting their town just a few days out. Too late! Not enough time to find water, board up, and make a plan. The good thing about an earthquake is you’ve got plenty of warning. Here’s yours: With certainty, you’ll be hit by a major earthquake in the next 30 years. It’s an ideal disaster.”

Let’s run with this for a moment. An “ideal disaster” has three characteristics. First, it needs to be small enough to do something about. So the sun exploding is not an ideal disaster. It’s paralytic, too big to do anything about.

Second, an ideal disaster is one that is sufficiently far in the future to be able to mitigate. When I was growing up in England we had something called the Three Minute Warning – the time between the detection of Soviet nuclear missiles and the moment when London would be incinerated. This, too, was not ideal.

Beyond being sufficiently clear and insufficiently present, the final and unspoken quality of the ideal disaster is that it be narratable as a disaster. Before we can set about mitigating the worst, we need to be able to tell stories about what “it” is.

There are plenty of avoidable things about which we have advanced warning. Consider the diabetes epidemic that will affect one-in-three children in the US. Although there will be millions of premature deaths, billions of dollars of cost, plenty of warning, and much that can be done, kids dying of diabetes does not have the narrative force of an apocalypse.

Which brings us to the Anthropocene and, more importantly, what we do with the idea. The Anthropocene is a way of telling a story about how humanity has affected the planet so profoundly that we’ve punted ourselves from one geological era to another.

As disasters go, the Anthropocene isn’t ideal. It feels too big. We can’t undo the mistake, somehow pulling the Holocene back over us. Nor is there a decent warning, for the Anthropocene has already happened. In that sense, it’s like being told the sun has exploded, and that the light you see is old news, to be updated as soon as the corona expands to boil our planet.

The worry about the Anthropocene is that it announces a catastrophe of solar proportions. We’re screwed, and there’s not much to be done about it. Perhaps the only response is the kind that the characters in J.G. Ballard’s Crash embrace – looking at the mangle of the modern world and shagging on the roadside while the world burns.

What would be a better way to meet this disaster? It’s a question that Sasha Lilley and collaborators explore in a recent book of essays titled Catastrophism. The outlook isn’t rosy. In Western politics, catastrophe has been used by the left and right as an alibi for misanthropic, racist, and cold-blooded policy. Stalinists and survivalists unite behind the idea that, before things get better, society has to hit bottom. After that, the guardians of post-apocalyptic knowledge can come to save the day. Impending catastrophe has been an alibi for everything from Year Zero to cult suicides.

Herein lies the danger. We’re surrounded by catastrophic narratives of almost every political persuasion, tales that allow us to sit and wait while humanity’s End Times work themselves out. The Anthropocene can very easily become the Misanthropocene.

Read more in our special issue exploring the consequences of a new geologic epoch: the Anthropocene.
If there’s good news, it comes from those who have lived in the new era for a while already: farming in greater harmony with natural systems, saving biodiversity, reducing their reliance on fossil fuels, creating more localized economies, recognizing the need for adaptation plans and resilient social systems. For those pioneers, the new geological age still comes with seasons and generations, just as the previous age did. The work of those seasons makes the task of change more manageable than a story of geology. Through a more human-scale conception of time and space – and through ecological invention – the Anthropocene is rendered more ideal.

We need those pioneers’ stories to be told in the metropolises that try to hide from ecology. The wisdom of peasants and Indigenous people can narrate an Anthropocene that tells the story of this disaster as one that we can, with rhythms and processes far from late capitalism, survive and from which we might even emerge better.

At the very least, we know this: We have been warned.

How do communities overcome local food issues like food deserts and big-box grocery stores?

The good folk at Canada’s Globe & Mail asked me to write a piece called “What I Did This Summer.” Never having written one before, I thought I’d channel my inner 12 year old.

Cuzco, Peru: This summer I started to write a book and film a documentary with my hero. His name is Steve James. He filmed ‘Hoop Dreams’ which was about basketball and hope and disappointment and race and inequality and America. Our film is called “Generation Food”. It is about how we will eat in the future.

So I went to Japan. People used to live long lives in Okinawa because of the traditional diet. Lots of people lived until 100. Now grandparents are burying their children. They don’t eat as they used to. When the Americans came with their military base, they brought fast food for the GIs. Everybody eats it now. I visited farmers who plant crops on US bases. They did it so often that the Americans gave up and just let them do it. I ate goat sashimi because it would have been rude not to.

Then I went to Cuba. I saw where Hemingway pickled his liver. I learned why the US bans Cuban rum. If they let it in everyone would drink it. The food isn’t very good. The Cubans blame the Spanish for making them want to eat beans and rice and pork. This is a shame. Cubans have some of the tastiest fruits and vegetables on the planet. I talked to Cuban cooperative farmers. Some of them talked about money in ways that would make a Wall Street trader blush.

We have been trying to raise money for our project. I learned why they call it ‘a campaign’. Every hour every day we work on finding new ways to share the things we have learned. I discovered that crowdsourcing isn’t about money but about building a community. Not many Canadians have joined in. I don’t know why.

Now I am in Cuzco in Peru. It is cold in the shade and hot in the sun and the air is so thin that the stars fall every night. The weather has changed. The indigenous people have lost quarter of their growing season because of climate change. Because we’re not in America any more, it’s ok to talk about climate change without people thinking you’re crazy. Indigenous farmers have figured out ways to grow food despite the weather we have made. They are scientists but people think they’re backward. The government likes the Incas because the tourists come to see the ruins. But they don’t like the indigenous people because they want to control their own land, and don’t want mining companies to evict them.

I have learned that: People are kind. Everyone has contradictions. Raw goat tastes funny, but it’s not as bad as Cuban food. The world is more beautiful than I imagined. There is more hope for the future of food than I dared to believe, against impossible odds. And it comes from unlikely places.

And after the summer, I was never the same again.

It has been months in the making, but I’m really pleased to be able to announce my next big project – Generation Food.

Everyone knows we live with a broken food system, but often it is easier to focus on the bad news rather than the good. In fact, we are surrounded by communities that already know how to feed the world for our generation, and for generations to come. From Malawi to Michigan, people and organizations are building better ways to eat today so that all of us can eat well tomorrow. This knowledge demands to be shared and spread.

Changing the food system couldn’t be more urgent. All signs point to that conclusion, whether you consider the droughts, floods and fires caused by climate change, the rise in global food prices, or that the health effects of our current food system is predicted to shorten children’s lives. Better, SMARTER ways of growing food, and feeding the world are needed, now.

That’s why we’re developing a new documentary, book and multimedia project, called Generation Food.

We want to show how ordinary women and men around the worldare overcoming obstacles and “setting the table” for themselves, their communities, and generations to come. Generation Food is our way of sharing the resilience and wisdom of these communities with you, and yours with them online, on screen, on paper and in person.

Our Team

Led by documentary-making legend and award-winning director, Steve James, of Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters, and best-selling author Raj Patel, of The Value of Nothing and Stuffed and Starved, our team of fourteen researchers has worked for over a year to find some of the most inspiring stories from across the world.

From a climate-change-ready farming system in Cuba, to a way of cooking and eating that transforms women’s lives in Malawi, there are amazing experiences to share across the table, and across the world.

Stories That Matter

In the Peruvian highlands, for instance, indigenous farmers have lost a quarter of their growing season to climate change. In response, communities haven’t just invented better ways to farm the 700 native varieties of potato at 11,000 feet, but also have markets with sliding-scale prices, to make sure that no one goes hungry for lack of money.

It is through sharing surprising ideas and deep knowledge that we can build the foundation for global food stability for generations to come. We are eager to launch Generation Food’s online content platform to share peoples’ ideas for action. We want to start filming a documentary. We want to work with communities around the world, including yours.

Get Involved

But all of this takes money. You’ve heard of fair trade food? Well, we want to practice fair trade film making, making sure everyone from our researchers to hired hands are paid properly. And we can’t do it without you. We’re looking for your support to launch this project at www.indiegogo.com/GenerationFoodProject

We are giving ourselves 6 weeks to achieve our fundraising goal of $50,000, today through August 17th.

Can you help us?

1. Support Us – go to our Indiegogo fundraising page. Watch our amazing campaign video, and check out our great ‘thank you’ gifts, which include lunch with Alice Waters, exclusive music, limited edition laser discs and- for the first week of the campaign only! – postcards from Cuba.

2. Join Us – become part of Generation Food. Connect with us online, let us know about your story, what you are working to change, and inspire more people.

3. Share Us – Help us by sharing Generation Food with your friends to help us reach as many people as possible. Post our campaign link: http://www.indiegogo.com/GenerationFoodProject, on Facebook, Twitter, or share a conversation over a meal. The simple act of sharing will help us raise awareness about our campaigns aims, catch the attention of more change-makers, and attract more money to get the project on the road. Best of all, it’ll help spark the conversations we need to transform the way we eat today.

4. Follow Us – Keep in touch with the project and the campaign. Steve and Raj will be sending updates from Japan, Cuba, Peru and the United States.

We’re @FoodGeneration on Twitter, and we’ve got some sample tweets to make sharing easier:

Help @_Raj Patel & Steve James, director of Hoop Dreams, tell stories abt the global food system in @GenerationFoodbit.ly/NxVRub

Fight climate chnge & feed world? @_Raj Patel & Steve James, Hoop Dreams director, want 2 show how @GenerationFoodbit.ly/NxVRub

Zero hunger, full enjoyment. Join @_Raj Patel & Steve James, Hoop Dreams director, 2 show better eats @GenerationFoodbit.ly/NxVRub

@_Raj Patel & Steve James, Hoop Dreams director, want to do fair trade filmmaking in @GenerationFood bit.ly/NxVRub Join us!

Your support will allow us to stop wondering “what can I do,” and start asking “when do we start?”