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Image Credit: FairFoodProject.org

This carrot-wielding fist appears on the website housing “Fair Food: Field to Table” a multimedia presentation created by the Fair Food Project in cooperation with the California Institute for Rural Studies. The project draws on a visual iconography of labor and political activism as part of its educational outreach to university students. It also aims at turning students into educators with its three-part multimedia presentation and associated resources. More about the project,including video, after the jump.

Anyone who reads much about food culture or food politics has likely come across Barry Estabrook’s article (published last March in Gourmet, the now defunct food magazine at which he was a contributing editor) “Politics of the Plate: The Price of Tomatoes”  (I ran across the story and Estabrook’s new endeavor on Mark Bittman’s Bitten blog a few months back). Estabrook’s article focuses on enslaved migrant tomato harvesters in Florida and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers,a modern day (and East Coast) inheritor of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers mantle, that is working to protect these men and women from abuse. The Fair Food Project includes Immokalee workers along with farm workers from California and other US locations. Part one addresses the plight of enslaved and abused farm workers. Part two profiles several farms around the nation with sustainable labor practices. Here is part three, “The Advocates”:

Along with the website’s suggested reading list—including historical, fictional and photographic accounts of “Okie” migrant workers who made Californian agriculture possible during the nineteen-thirties—the Project’s visual iconography reveals a conscious sense of its own historical position(the Marxist in me wants to say “its historical struggle”). The worker’s raised fist graphically links the Fair Food Project to the long history of international labor movements, and the substitution of a carrot for the more traditional hammer or wrench makes a visual argument about the solidarity of farm workers with labor’s more traditional realm of industry. While some people may be most familiar with the fist icon through its later development in Socialist Realism,  it has a long history of use by labor movements in this country, particularly in the political imagery of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. The Wobblies’ political aim and motto—“One Big Union”—is graphically represented in this 1917 poster that prominently features farm workers (note the pitchfork) alongside their industrial counterparts.

Image Credit: "One Big Union" by Ralph "Bingo" Chaplin

The most interesting thing about the Fair Food Project is the way that it embraces and expands on this image of solidarity. While positioning itself squarely within the international and domestic history of labor movements, the Fair Food Project overtly extends this solidarity to consumers. The Project’s website is aimed largely at university students and includes information about a number of organizations students can join to collectively bargain with the people and organizations who make food-purchasing decisions on college campuses (dining halls, fast food companies, etc.). They even provide resources to help students “unionize” at colleges where such organizations don’t already exist. I find this demand-side unionization a remarkably savvy strategy for challenging agri-business corporations and the modern food-production/distribution industry. By attempting to forge solidarity between the farm workers who grow the nation’s food and the consumers who often have little control over what food choices are made available to us, the Fair Food Project and its associated organizations are reconceptualizing the IWW's “One Big Union.”