Bon Appétit Management Company

On a visit to Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company, students learn all about this unique collaboration among Bon Appétit, a local coffee roaster, and a nonprofit driven by ethics and environmental stewardship.

For this year’s National Farmworker Awareness Week, Bon Appétit will be featuring a “Faces of Farmworkers” display in hundreds of cafés across the country and via social media, highlighting portraits and quotes gathered in the fields by Student Action with Farmworkers.

One of the most inspirational parts of our Pitzer Sustainable Food Forum was hearing the story behind Huerta del Valle, a nearby community garden whose grassroots efforts are helping transform a community.

As this year’s Farmworker Awareness Week approaches, hundreds of Bon Appétit cafés around the country are preparing to spread the word about how few pennies per pound farmworkers earn for commonly picked produce items, and 20 locations are hosting a screening of the documentary Food Chains.

A group of Wesleyan University students who’d immersed themselves in farm labor issues and food deserts visited Urban Oaks Organic Farm. Just 13 miles away from campus, they got to learn about these issues firsthand — and see where some of the fruits and vegetables they eat every day on campus are grown.

One wonders how we ever ended up where we are today. We never voted or ever had a conscious say on the transformation of agriculture from what it used to be to what it has become.

Every day, Americans take the abundance and low cost of our food supply for granted. Ironically, farmworkers — those whose lives are spent harvesting the fruits and vegetables we eat — can rarely afford to purchase them.

After growing up in Nebraska, the land of corn and cattle, I didn’t hear the term “sustainability” until I enrolled at Willamette University in Salem, OR, in 2006. And not until my sophomore year did I really connect the need for sustainability to the food system.

Proud as I am of Bon Appétit’s contribution to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ cause, I’ve long wanted to help in a more personal way. So when Cheryl Queen, vice president of communication and corporate affairs for Compass Group USA, said she was going to accompany them for two days of the two-week march, I immediately said, “I’ll go with you!” with great enthusiasm and not much thought.

The Bon Appétit Fellows are gearing up for the start of the school year and thanks to our partnership with the Food Recovery Network (FRN) we have some exciting new programs to look forward to.