Food Chains Film Screening (Latin American Sustainable Agriculture Initiative)

Join the Latin American Sustainable Agriculture Initiative for a screening of Food Chains. This exposé documents the human cost of food by focusing on the lives of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a group of Florida farmworkers, that battle the $4 trillion global supermarket industry through their Fair Food program.

After the screening, a panel of discussants will talk about their research and lives as it relates to this important film. Discussants include:

Beto Mendoza is a community organizer; co-founder of Dignidad Inmigrante en Athens (DIA), Athens Immigrants Rights Coalition (ARIC) and the Athens Latino Festival. For the Economic Justice Coalition (EJC), he was the Latino coordinator for a living wage. Beto is a musician and composer of undocorridos, a musical genre that tells the stories of undocumented immigrants in the USA.

Shane Hamilton is associate professor of history at the University of Georgia, where he teaches courses in U.S. social and political history, history of capitalism, history of technology, food history, and digital spatial history. His first book, Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (Princeton, 2008) won the 2009 Theodore Saloutos Award for Best Book in Agricultural History. With Sarah Phillips, he is the co-author of The Kitchen Debate and Cold War Consumer Politics: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford, 2014). His current research explores the role of supermarkets in the Cold War “Farms Race.”

Andrea Malloy is the General Manager of Daily Groceries Co-op.  Cooperatively run grocery stores currently thrive as a viable alternative to the big chains in most parts of our country, but have yet to take hold in the South outside of North Carolina.  At Daily Groceries, we believe that jobs in our food industry can be both ethical and viable when economic control of the distribution point rests with the communities where they operate.  Athen’s only co-op is very small, but has grown by 60% within just the last 3 years and has plans to grow much more.  Prior to Daily Groceries, Andrea worked with Coastal Conservation League in South Carolina, which included work with small sustainable farms in the southern coastal plain area of South Carolina and Georgia.

Funding for this event is provided by the Title VI Department of Education’s National Resource Center grant and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute at the University of Georgia. The Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute presents this film series as a partner of National Farmworker Awareness Week.