Today signals the 5th week of my epic elimination diet. For the past 36 days I have avoided 19 different food items, including: citrus fruits, beans, vinegar, tofu, tomatoes, eggs and mushrooms. Suffice to say, this is not easy. In fact, I don’t wish this upon anyone. It’s one thing to be gluten-free 0r dairy-free or nut-free, let alone all three at once. But it’s a whole other beast to ignore a dozen or so common random food items. In both cases there are plenty of options; but in the latter lifestyle there is much more difficulty when interacting with the outside culinary world. If anything, the elimination diet makes you feel like a weirdo, alientaed from the “normal world.” A world I once proudly inhabited.
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Are my tomatoes picked by slaves?
The news report I discussed on Tuesday, “Indentured Servitude Persists on Florida Farms,” still haunts my mind and thoughts. In fact, every canned good I notice stacked high along the shelves at the grocery store, leave me fearful. The severity of the tomato pickers in the report was clearly extreme. But I cannot ignore the possibility that paid workers are still, often even, exploited. If I am skeptical of sweatshop laborers in China, why not support the exploited migrant worker who picked my tomato? (Right here in America no less.)
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Slave-trade Tomatoes, Fresh from Florida
Forget about fair-trade coffee. What about fair-trade tomatoes?
That’s right, you read that correctly. Instead of buying coffee from fair-trade farmers in countries most people cannot find on a map, let’s stop and serisouly consider an appalling reality in our own country, the U.S. of A.
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