Header image: Fabián Tomasi, photographed by Pablo Piovano in Basavilbaso, Entre Ríos province, Argentina, 2014

This article originally appeared on Medium

The post The Death of Fabián Tomasi appeared first on Real Food Media.

January 30, 2017

RE: Nomination of Andrew Puzder as Secretary of Labor

Dear Senators:

Our organizations urge you to oppose the nomination of Andrew Puzder as Secretary of Labor. This nomination represents another in a string of Trump administration appointments that betrays the President-elect’s promise to improve the lives of working people.

As CEO of CKE Restaurants, which operates Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, Puzder’s nomination to an agency charged with protecting working people is rife with conflicts of interest. Puzder’s company has faced numerous Department of Labor violations for failing to pay the minimum wage or overtime: Sixty percent of inspections of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurants found labor law violations and Puzder has opposed both raising the minimum wage and enforcement of overtime rules and mandatory sick leave. Puzder’s confirmation would ensure that the interests of the fast food industry—and its large meat and food industry suppliers—would prevail over the needs of hard-working people in the food system who face some of the highest rates of food insecurity due to low wages and poor working conditions.

Contrary to what Puzder and other corporate leaders at the National Restaurant Association say about good working conditions in the restaurant sector, the majority of restaurant workers are women and people of color, making as little as $2.13 per hour and rely on tips to survive. These workers face disproportionate rates of poverty, discrimination, and sexual harassment and deserve a Labor Secretary who believes that, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “All labor has dignity.” Instead, with the National Restaurant Association’s champion heading the Department of Labor, workers will have to rely on vocal opponents of labor regulations to protect their basic workplace rights.

On behalf of the many people and groups who are working for a better food system that provides nutritious food and livable wages and treats the land, farmers, and animals with respect, we the undersigned urge you to oppose the nomination of Andrew Puzder to Labor Secretary.

Puzder would be yet one more nominee working for the interests of big business over the interests of working people.

Signed:

ActionAid USA

African American Cultural Center (Us)

Agricultural Justice Project

Alliance for Fair Food

Beyond Pesticides

Black Community, Clergy and Labor Alliance (BCCLA)

Black Urban Growers

Brandworkers

Brighter Green

California Institute for Rural Studies

Center for Biological Diversity

Center for Food Safety

Center for Science in the Public Interest

Center for Urban Education for Sustainable Agriculture

Climate Justice Alliance

Coalition of Immokalee Workers

CoFED

Common Ground Community

Community Alliance for Global Justice

Community Food and Justice Coalition

Compassion in World Farming

Corporate Accountability International

Dakota Resource Council

Domestic Fair Trade Association

Earthjustice

El Comite de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agricolas, The Farmworkers’ Support Committee

Family Farm Defenders

Farm Forward

Farmworker Association of Florida

Farmworker Justice

Food & Water Watch

Food Chain Workers Alliance

Food Democracy Now!

Food Empowerment Project

Food First

Food Shift

Food Tank

Foodstand

Foundation Earth

Friends of the Earth

GMO Inside

Grassroots Gardens WNY

Greater Grand Rapids Food Systems Council

Green America

HEAL Food Alliance

Health & Medicine Policy Research Group

Health Care Without Harm

Idle No More Duluth

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

International Labor Rights Forum

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement

Just Food

Land Stewardship Project

Laundry Workers Center

Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy, Teachers College, Columbia University

Lucid Food

Midwest Pesticide Action Center

MomsRising.org

National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice

National Black Food & Justice Alliance

National Family Farm Coalition

National Young Farmers Coalition

Natural Resources Defense Council

NC Environmental Justice Network

New Mexico Public Health Association

Ninjas for Health

North American Climate,Conservation and Environment

Northeast Organic Farming Association of

New York

Northwest Arkansas Workers Justice Center

Nutiva

Organic Consumers Association

Other Worlds

People’s Climate Movement NY

People’s Grocery

Pesticide Action Network

Phat Beets Produce

Pioneer Valley Workers Center

Real Food Challenge

Real Food for Kids

Real Food Media

ROC United

RootDown LA

Roots of Change

Rural Coalition/Coalición Rural

Sacramento Food Policy Council

Slow Food California

Slow Food Chicago

Slow Food USA

Small Planet Institute

Soil Generation

South Agassiz Resource Council

Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Southern California

Springfield Food Policy Council

Student/Farmworker Alliance

Sustainable Agriculture of Louisville (SAL)

Toxic Taters

Treasure Valley Food Coalition

Union of Concerned Scientists

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

US Food Sovereignty Alliance

Warehouse Worker Resource Center

Warehouse Workers for Justice

WhyHunger

Workers’ Center of Central New York

Young Workers United

The post 100+ Food and Ag Groups Stand With Labor and Tell Senators to Vote No on Andy Puzder Nomination appeared first on Real Food Media.

When you look to the year ahead, what do you see? Ensia recently invited eight global thought leaders to share their thoughts. In this interview with Ensia contributor Lisa Palmer for Ensia’s 2017 print annual, Real Food Media founder Anna Lappé responds to three questions: What will be the biggest challenge to address or opportunity to grasp in your field in 2017? Why? And what should we be doing about it now?

The food system is one of the largest forces impacting our planet’s environment and people’s health. The choices about what crops are grown, where and how they are produced, who gets access to that food and who makes those decisions all have global consequences.

One of the challenges to achieving a more sustainable and fair food system is cor­porate consolidation in the food sector. Consider the latest proposed merger be­tween global giants Bayer and Monsanto pending antitrust approval. And remem­ber, DuPont-Dow, Syngenta–Chem China and Monsanto-Bayer (if the mergers go through) aren’t agriculture companies first — they’re chemical companies.

Particularly worrisome is that these multi­national corporations are focused on just a handful of commodity crops, while we know global food security comes from supporting biodiversity. We know that corporate control leads to political cap­ture as corporations use lobbying dollars and campaign contributions to shape public policy and regulation, with enor­mous implications for the environment and food safety. We also know that once four or fewer corporations control more than 40 percent of a market, true com­petitiveness is compromised: Consumers and farmers lack real choice and fair pric­es. Consolidation puts food workers and small-scale farmers at risk, and it increases vertical integration, further hurting farm­ers’ ability to compete.

To achieve greater food sovereignty, we need to embolden our regulators to take antitrust action against these mergers. We need to see these not as simply business deals for Wall Street analysts to angst over, but as deals that affect the very essence of our food system.

Originally published in Ensia

The post For Our Food System’s Sake, Say No to Corporate Consolidation appeared first on Real Food Media.

This accolade is well deserved, Food Chains is one of the most spectacular films to expose the realities of farm labor in America, the power behind the $4 trillion global supermarket industry, and the revolutionary work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

For more information on the film, and to learn how you can take action, click here.

The post Food Chains Wins #DocImpact Award appeared first on Real Food Media.

by Fiona Ruddy

On September 28, 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency announced new rules to protect farmworkers from on-the-job exposure to hazardous pesticides. These long overdue rules help protect the workers most at risk from these toxic chemicals in our fields. The new regulations, adding essential protections for farm workers, are a small win in the larger efforts to value and protect the 2 million Americans who grow the food we eat—the food that makes us thrive.

In Our Work Is Life, the Real Food Media Contest’s 2015 winner for best underreported issue, viewers meet some of these workers at the heart of our food system. As one worker says: “The work we’re doing is life—the life of the entire country.” The film tells the story of farm workers in the Northwest who pick berries that can be found throughout our food chain, from Häagen-Dazs ice cream to Driscoll’s distribution to big box grocery chains.

Coming together to voice their concerns for better working conditions, these farm workers created Familias Unidas Por La Justicia (Families United for Justice). To take action, Familias Unidas launched a boycott against Sakumas Brothers Berry, a company they charge is paying poverty wages and perpetuating substandard, openly hostile working conditions. The film is ultimately a rallying cry for all of us—whether we’re digging into a pint of delicious ice cream or devouring berries by the handful—to think about the workers who helped bring those berries to us and find out what we can do to speak up for their dignity.

For more information about the hands that feed us and ways to support farmworkers, please visit voicesofthefoodchain.com.

This piece is part of a series in partnership with Food & Wine Magazine.

Our Work Is Life | 2015 Real Food Media Contest Winner from Real Food Media on Vimeo. 

The post Food & Wine Blog: Meet the Workers Picking Your Berries appeared first on Real Food Media.

How often do you think about the actual hands that feed you, those belonging to the people who make your meals? If you were the typical American eater, even a few years ago the answer was probably not at all. But that is changing. There is a movement afoot to connect eaters with workers all along the food chain, from celebrity chefs to restaurant workers behind the kitchen door to farmers and farm workers in the field. The Department of Agriculture now even has a Know Your Farmer Know Your Food program.

In Hands in the Orchestra, Kevin Longa chronicles the multicultural kitchens of the San Francisco Bay Area. Longa connects us with the passionate immigrant chefs and food entrepreneurs who serve as community anchors. These are the hands that feed us. Unfortunately, these workers are often exploited and paid poverty wages.

Longa’s short film serves as a rhythmic call to celebrate and honor the food workers nourishing our communities, a call for us eaters to look behind the kitchen doors and get to know the people who make our food.

For more information about the hands that feed us and ways to celebrate these workers, please visit voicesofthefoodchain.com.

This piece is part of a series in partnership with Food & Wine Magazine.

Hands in the Orchestra | Real Food Media Contest Film Library from Real Food Media on Vimeo.

The post Food & Wine Blog: Appreciating the Hands That Feed Us appeared first on Real Food Media.

by Anna Lappé 

On a drizzly April day in Washington, D.C., 60 food workers and labor organizers from across the country gathered in an office building downtown. There was an African immigrant street vendor from New York City; a black apple picker from upstate New York; a white, 20-something former bartender from Cincinnati. There were Latino farmworkers from California’s Central Valley; Walmart workers from Oakland; a food-processing worker from Brooklyn. The diversity of the workers gathered for the fifth annual summit of the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) reflected the diversity of food workers nationwide.

The “food movement” is complex and often misunderstood. Read snarky Slate articles and you might be led to believe the movement is a white, elitist phenomenon whose poster child is a Lululemon-wearing, latte-sipping Whole Foods shopper and whose de facto guru is Michael Pollan. In other words: out of touch with working Americans.

But the people on the frontlines of the struggle to make healthy, sustainable, local food accessible to all Americans defy this stereotype. At its heart, the movement includes the workers who harvest the peppers, raise the chickens, process the pork, bus the dishes, take the orders, check out the groceries, truck the wares and more.

These food workers now have a unified voice through the growing FCWA. Started in 2009 by nine organizations to unite workers across the food sector, the FCWA has since expanded to 25 member groups, representing over 300,000 workers. “What is exciting is seeing all these groups come together to fight for a shared vision,” says Diana Robinson, the FCWA’s campaign and education coordinator.

The FCWA is based on the principle that a farmworker picking apples and a clerk stocking shelves at Walmart share many of the same struggles. The 20 million workers in the U.S. food sector are disproportionately poor. Food workers use food stamps at a rate more than 50 percent higher than the average American worker, according to FCWA research, and food workers suffer food insecurity at almost twice the national rate. Workers in this sector, encompassing production, processing, distribution, retail and food service, not only face low wages, but also hardships such as a lack of paid sick days. “In our national survey of food workers,” says FCWA Co-Director Joann Lo, “we found a full four out of five workers who harvest, process, distribute, sell or cook our food don’t have paid sick days or don’t know if they do, which most likely means they don’t.”

Building up the power of these workers is what inspired the founders of FCWA. The food industry has long understood the benefits of vertical integration — the wonky term for owning enterprises up and down the supply chain. In the chicken business, for example, vertical integration means control over not just the raising of chickens, but also the production of their feed and the processing needed to get them to market.

In 2008, food worker organizers started to have a conversation about what it would look like to have vertical integration in worker power: connections between the formerly disparate elements of worker organizing across the food chain. The FCWA was born a year later.

Since then, the group has contributed to big victories, including an increase in the minimum wage for tipped workers in New York State and paid sick days for workers in New York City. “One of our biggest victories,” Lo says, “is the leadership role we played in the development and adoption of the Good Food Purchasing Policy in Los Angeles and getting Mayor [Rahm] Emanuel to endorse the policy for Chicago.” The policy in L.A. is translating into over $130 million in annual municipal and school food purchases made with workers and sustainability in mind.

At the summit in Washington D.C., the FCWA was coming together to decide on joint campaigns and policy priorities for the coming year, and to join in solidarity rallies, such as a demonstration outside a Walmart store near Union Station.

I’d come with a recording team from StoryCorps to capture one-on-one worker conversations for Voices of the Food Chain, an initiative recently launched with the FCWA.

Most of these workers were only just meeting each other at the summit, but all of them would come out of the small recording room with big smiles. “I had no idea,” Ruth Faircloth said to me, wiping away her tears, “that our struggle was the same.” Faircloth, a former farmworker from upstate New York who works with the Rural and Migrant Ministry, draped her arm around Velia Perez, a former farmworker and current food processing worker, and said, “This is my sister.”

Again and again, I would hear these workers express a sense of connection and an understanding of their shared fate. In these conversations, it was also clear that the workers were coming together not only to secure better wages and conditions for themselves, but also to promote greater sustainability, animal welfare and resilience across the food system for all of us. These workers were as passionate about fighting for humane, local, sustainable food as anyone with a dog-eared copy of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” on their bookshelf.

As for the stereotypes of foodies? We hear they don’t care about workers like these; that they care more about the terroir of their turnips or the heritage of their turkey than the workers who harvest their vegetables or slaughter their livestock. But what I have seen on the frontlines of the food movement is a different story: The foodies I know care as deeply about protecting food workers as they do about the provenance of their vegetables or their meat. All across the country, I’ve been hearing a call for better wages and better food — from eaters and from workers. It’s getting harder and harder to write off foodies as uncaring fancy fennel lovers and food workers as only caring about their paycheck.

In this we’re-in-it-together spirit, there is real power. Uniting eaters with workers holds enormous potential to shift the food system toward what we all want to see: greater sustainability, animal welfare and better working conditions. Of course, it won’t happen overnight, but I’m thrilled to report the conversation has started.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

The post The Faces of the New Food Revolution appeared first on Real Food Media.

by Anna Lappé

Last month, Chicago hosted two seemingly unrelated meetings. At the National Restaurant Association’s annual trade show you could check out workshops such as “Pickle Your Fancy” and “You Bacon Me Crazy,” while mingling with some of the other 63,000 attendees. Though the annual trade show is the NRA’s most public moment, the group works year-round behind the scenes, influencing politicians and legislation to shape what we eat, how we eat it and how restaurant workers — including those employed by McDonald’s — are treated.

As trade show participants, including those from some of the biggest restaurant chains in the country, were closing up their display cases, McDonald’s annual shareholder meeting was just getting started. It would appear to be no coincidence that the trade association’s meeting was timed to coincide with the Golden Arches confab of shareholders — McDonald’s is one of the trade association’s generous corporate sponsors.

But in recent years, McDonald’s annual meeting has become a venue not just for corporate officials opining on official sales reports, but also for public-interest advocates taking the fast-food chain to task for contradictions between what the company says it values and what it does in practice.

McDonald’s NRA membership makes its recent professed concern for its workers ring hollow. The trade group has actively lobbied for years against improving conditions for restaurant workers, including better worker wages and benefits. As one of the NRA’s largest dues-paying members, McDonald’s supports such lobbying and benefits from its success.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the NRA lobbies on “virtually every issue affecting the restaurant industry.” In 2013 alone, the NRA, a tax-exempt, non-profit organization, spent a total of $71 million, including on lobbying and campaign contributions.

In 2014, it spent $3.9 million on contributions to candidates and lobbying 89 separate bills, according to its disclosures. Some of these efforts included longstanding lobbying against health care reform and increases in the minimum wage. The NRA specifically lobbied against policy proposals such as the “Forty Hours is Full-Time Act,” which would give those who work 30 hours a week the same benefits as those who work 40 — especially important today as business owners reduce hours per week to minimize their responsibilities for providing benefits such as health care. (Michele Simon documented more of these lobbying efforts in an Al Jazeera America column last year.)

A prominent member of the NRA, McDonald’s has been working with the trade group on many of these policy fights. Advocates at its meeting, including those from the Food Chain Workers Alliance and the Restaurants Opportunities Center, pointed out how the company is undermining worker welfare. The corporation’s “Standards of Business Conduct” report pledges to treat its employees with “fairness, respect and dignity”(PDF) and to “pay fair, competitive wages.” But as a member of the NRA, McDonald’s has helped to fund one of the biggest lobbying efforts to obstruct a national minimum wage increase in decades. Through the International Franchise Association, it’s also suing the city of Seattle for moving to increase the minimum wage to $15 there, claiming franchises, such as McDonald’s operations, are unfairly classified as “large” employers when they should be considered “small” businesses.

Advocates at the meeting pointed to this lobbying activity and to McDonald’s own shortfalls in improving worker wages and benefits. While the corporation was proud to announce a wage hike earlier this year for its workers, only a fraction actually received it: The hike covered just company-owned restaurants, where only about 10 percent of all U.S.-based employees work; the rest work for franchisees. (A projected 1,300 cooks and cashiers at McDonald’s and other major fast-food companies are convening this weekend in Detroit to strategize about such lackluster moves.)

Chicago Teachers Union vice president Jesse Sharkey also spoke of “the growing concerns from people across the globe regarding the devastating impact McDonald’s is having on workers, our food system and the health of our children.” And representatives from Corporate Accountability International, with whom I work, spoke out against the practices and lobbying efforts, especially with the NRA, that undermine the very values the corporation says it holds dear.

The Standards of Business Conduct report, subtitled “the Promise of the Golden Arches,” quotes McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc describing the company as “ethical, truthful and dependable” and committed to its “people.” But with its longstanding relationship with the NRA ensuring it has been a key force in limiting the compensation for low-wage workers — very much its people — it doesn’t appear that McDonald’s is going to make good on those promises any time soon.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Fibonacci Blue/Flickr

The post McDonald’s Two-Faced Talk appeared first on Real Food Media.

McDonald’s is having a bumpy year. It just installed a new CEO after a mere two-and-a-half-year stint by his predecessor. In January it announced its latest returns — and the news was bad. It included such shareholder downers as a “global comparable sales decrease of 1 percent, reflecting negative guest traffic in all major segments.” Last month the business press reported that the Gates Foundation divested $1 billion in stock from the company last quarter. While the stock divestment doesn’t affect McDonald’s bottom line, it does affect its reputation: McDonald’s is stumbling.

In the face of this string of bad news, McDonald’s appears to be having a brand identity crisis and pouring PR money on its problems instead of addressing head-on their causes: a growing disinclination, especially among millennials, to support a company renowned for its ill treatment of workers, predatory marketing to kids and questionable food sourcing.

Struggling for Relevance

Millennials — 20- and early-30-somethings — are turning their backs on the brand. From 2011 to the end of 2014, the percentage of 19-to-21-year-olds visiting McDonald’s fell nearly 13 percent. As an August 2014 Fortune headline put it, “McDonald’s struggling to stay relevant with millennials.”

They are flocking elsewhere for a number of reasons. They came of age in a time with a lot more fast-casual options than previous generations could have anticipated — options that are better tasting, higher quality and still affordable. (Chipotle, anyone?) They’re turning to other brands that reflect more of their concerns with the environment, workers’ wages and animal welfare. Instead of listening to these concerns, McDonald’s is turning to PR spin to solve its problems.

While a diverse bunch, many millennials are more engaged in environmental and social causes than young people have been for a long time. In one recent poll, two-thirds of millennials said they would vote for a candidate who supports cutting greenhouse gas emissions, compared with just half of Americans over 65. Millennials have been on the front lines of some of the biggest environmental fights of our time, from the Keystone XL pipeline battle to the 450,000-person People’s Climate March in New York City last year.

They are a leading force in the good food movement, with national networks such as Real Food Challenge, which was founded just a few years ago and now enlists tens of thousands of college students to push for better food on college campuses, and Food Corps, a national AmeriCorps training program that fosters youth school garden educators. Books such as Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” films like “Food Inc.” and advocacy groups such as Food & Water Watch are inspiring young people to ask questions about where their food comes from and raise hell about antibiotics and hormones in meat.

Millennials are passionate about workers’ rights and income inequality, evidenced by the dynamism of Occupy Wall Street and the fight for a fair wage that heated up around the country last year in actions such as the Fight for $15. From its poor pay to its wasteful packaging to its sourcing of climate-destructive industrial meat and dairy, McDonald’s doesn’t represent labor-friendly, sustainable or healthy practices.

So if not to McDonald’s, where are millennials headed? Those who have the disposable income to do so are pulling up a stool at Chipotle, diving into a burger at Shake Shack or grabbing a sandwich at Panera Bread. In short, many are spending their money at fast-casual establishments, which saw a 2.3 percent jump among 19-to-21-year-olds and a 5.3 percent increase among 22-to-37-year-olds from 2011 to the end of 2014. Fast-casual restaurants show continuing signs of strong growth. Since Chipotle went public in 2006, “its stock price has risen more than 1,500 percent,” James Surowiecki wrote last month in The New Yorker.

While Chipotle and Shake Shack shouldn’t be confused with health food joints — a steak burrito from Chipotle can load you with 1,290 calories, and a double ShackBurger have 770 calories and your daily recommended dose of sodium — these chains arguably produce better-tasting food and have made explicit commitments to sourcing better ingredients. Shake Shack owner Danny Meyer, for instance, has promised to use only meat raised without hormones and antibiotics. Many of these restaurants offer better benefits and pay than McDonald’s does. Take Shake Shack’s starting hourly wage of $10 in New York City; it’s still not going to get a family of four out of poverty, but it’s better than the minimum wage.

Flailing Tactics

McDonald’s is trying desperately to lure back millennials. In its one nod to the priorities of this generation, it released a request for proposal late last year for media companies to develop “a big idea” that “generates significant support for a charity” and “engages millennials to support this charity by speaking directly to their philanthropic priorities and leveraging their behaviors and habits,” according to information obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

But mostly the company has been launching a host of new PR campaigns leading to schizophrenic positioning and mixed results. In January, USA Today reported that McDonald’s opened a café in Australia with healthy offerings on the menu and nary a Golden Arch in site, about the same time that it launched a TV spot bragging about old-school Big Macs unchanged by foodie influences. (Kale, quinoa, and soy were all name-checked — and mocked.) Last year saw the rebranding flop of both its iconic Ronald McDonald mascot and the Happy Meal, which set off a social media firestorm as young people around the world mocked the new creepy, toothy look.

It’s trying hard to be hip too, setting up shop last year in San Francisco to incubate digital strategies. The new office, based in the hotbed of digital disruption, will help the company be “more plugged into the flow of ideas,” said the company’s Chief Digital Officer Atif Rafiq. But as one Forbes commentator quipped, “All the talk about digital tech isn’t disruptive, it’s predictably also-ran.”

Last year McDonald’s tried to make a splash with its new dynamic in-store kiosk that lets customers customize their burgers. After spending big on the launch, McDonald’s had to rebrand it from Build Your Own Burger to Create Your Taste because it added chicken to the menu. Oops. It also launched what it calls Experience the Future, “a comprehensive restaurant execution concept” that “capitalizes on investments in reimaging, service and technology enhancements to improve the look, feel and convenience of the McDonald’s experience in ways that are in-tune with today’s consumer needs.” Which sounds more like PR gobbledygook than a serious attempt to rethink the chain.

These missteps, just a few signs of the company’s flailing, are reflected in weak earnings reports and personnel trouble at the top, with significant turnover in key positions. Two McDonald’s USA presidents, President and CEO Jim Skinner, Chief Marketing Officer Neil Golden and Chief Operating Officer Tim Fenton were replaced in the past several years. The trend continues with the early retirement of CEO Don Thompson late last month.

Walmart’s recent announcement that it will increase the wages for its lowest-paid workers makes it ever clearer that McDonald’s is out of step with the rest of retail. It’s time for McDonald’s to give people a reason to love it — and not just throw money at advertisements that tell us we should.

Postscript: Sounds like the new CEO might have gotten the memo. In an announcement today, McDonald’s committed to only “sourcing chicken raised without antibiotics that are important to human medicine.” It’s a step the company took after seven months of dialogue and concerted pressure from civil society groups, including Friends of Earth. The environmental organization’s senior program manager, Kari Hamerschlag, said in a press release, “While McDonald’s focus on poultry is a positive step forward, we look forward to a dramatic reduction of antibiotic use across the board, by focusing on improvements in their pork and beef suppliers’ management practices.” McDonald’s announcement makes it the largest restaurant chain in the country to adopt such a policy.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Beth Wiki/Wikimedia

The post Millennials Aren’t Lovin’ McDonald’s appeared first on Real Food Media.