Day 3: Fasting as Moral Appeal
The Rev. Noelle Damico, Associate for Fair Food, Presbyterian Hunger Program
For years now, Publix has been responding to the reality of farmworker poverty and exploitation with statements that attempt to insulate the company from its moral responsibility.
Marches, rallies, letters to managers, postcards, telephone calls, emails, deliveries of pennies and receipts and still the same mechanical response to the urgent moral problem that Publix’s purchasing practices have a hand in creating farmworker poverty and exploitation. In 2010 a Publix spokesperson even went as far as to say: “if there are some atrocities going on, they’re not our business.”
In light of these repeated fallacies and callous responses, received over and over from company spokespeople, farmworkers and their allies have turned to fasting as a moral appeal.
"It's time for them to give us an answer that makes sense to what we're asking," said Gerardo Reyes Chavez of the CIW. "We, as workers, are willing to sacrifice our own bodies to bring about the point."
Through fasting, farmworkers and their allies call upon the leaders of Publix to recognize the humanity of the men and women who harvest its tomatoes. And to sit with farmworkers face to face and address whatever real concerns they have so that they can join the Fair Food Program.
Unlike the ten corporations who are participating in the Fair Food Program and using their purchasing power to create a successful business procurement process that elevates the wages and rights of farmworkers, Publix has remained mired in the past, its ears stopped to the clarion call echoing all around them.
This fast for fair food is a moral appeal to Publix leadership that is founded on the bedrock assumption that when we work together as human beings, we can create the systems we need in order to achieve well-being for all. Indeed that system, the Fair Food Program has been created and it is proven – supported by 10 corporations and 90 percent of Florida growers.
When recently commending Trader Joe’s for Joining the Fair Food Program the Rev. Gradye Parsons, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly and Linda Valentine, Executive Director of the General Assembly Mission Council said:
The supermarket industry buys most of the tomatoes harvested by Florida farmworkers. And so it is imperative that leading supermarket chains use their power to undergird the Fair Food Program. We take this occasion to call, yet again, upon Publix, Ahold and Kroger to stop standing on the sidelines. Inaction the face of generations of exploitation and a proven model for change is not neutral. Your refusal to join the Fair Food Program threatens to undermine these important gains. The time is now for you to join Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods Market and the eight other major food retailers who are working with the CIW and Florida growers to eliminate exploitation and slavery in the tomato fields.
By refusing to join the Fair Food Program and commit ONLY to purchasing tomatoes from Florida growers who uphold the fair food standards, Publix is actively supporting an alternative to the advances in human rights that are dawning now in Florida’s fields. And that “alternative” is the business-as-usual, no questions asked, that has resulted in farmworker exploitation for generations.
For the leaders of Publix, may this Lent be a time of reflection and repentance, a turning-away from business practices that exploit and a turning-toward business practices that are upholding the rights and dignity of our sisters and brothers in the field
Scripture
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mark 12:39)
Question for reflection
How does fasting help us recognize our common humanity and build human community?
Prayer for peace
(Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1971 reprinted in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)
O Lord, we confess our sins, we are ashamed of the inadequacy of our anguish, of how faint and slight is our mercy. We are a generation that has lost its capacity for outrage. We must continue to remind ourselves that in a free society all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty, all are responsible. Amen.
