Watch the trailer for the upcoming “Food, Inc. 2,” featuring the CIW and the Fair Food Program as a model solution to our nation’s broken food system!
The much-anticipated sequel to the Oscar-nominated 2008 documentary “Food, Inc.” recently premiered at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival. “Food, Inc. 2” provides an in-depth analysis of the US food chain – from the factory farms squeezing workers at the very bottom of the industry to the corporate behemoths squeezing suppliers to their breaking point at the very top.
The story of the CIW’s struggle for dignity in agricultural work is brilliantly told by the CIW’s own Gerardo Reyes Chavez, himself a farmworker for nearly two decades. Through extended interveiws, Gerardo walks the viewer through the Campaign for Fair Food, the birth of the Presidential Medal-winning Fair Food Program in 2011, and the urgent need to expand this worker-driven program as far and wide as possible today. With an eye to practical, proven solutions to the food system’s many ills, “Food, Inc. 2” champions the Fair Food Program as the answer to preventing forced labor and other extreme abuses in farmwork, with a long and documented track record of results. The acclaimed documentary even names those major food giants who have refused to join despite all evidence that it would both greatly benefit workers in their supply chains and be good for business: Wendy’s, Publix, and Kroger.
For the millions of consumers who will watch the documentary once it is released in theaters nationwide later this year, “Food Inc, 2” is an excellent entrypoint into the tireless efforts of farmworkers and allies alike to join forces in the fight for a more modern, more humane food system. For growers concerned for the safety of their workforce, the documentary is an opportunity to learn about the only documented solution in the world of agricultural certification programs, a landscape otherwise littered with countless audit-only schemes that charge growers dearly for their services but fail miserably to protect them and their crews from the human rights risks so rampant in US agriculture today. And for buyers, it is a clarion call to get on the right side of history by joining the FFP, and to stop propping up the long-discredited model of corporate social responsiblity that relies on woefully inadquate, voluntary mechanisms to monitor conditions in their suppliers’ operations and so leaves them open to unchecked reputational harm as prosecution after prosecution for modern-day slavery and other extreme abuses flow from their supply chains and tarnish their brands.
We’ll keep you updated about when the film will release widely, but in the meantime, check out the trailer and an excerpt from a write-up of the movie. To help promote the film, Pan Cooke, a talented artist focused on social justice, illustrated a short comic telling the story of the CIW and the FFP, and we are overjoyed to share that with you as well.
Enjoy!
