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• In recent years, more information has come to light about child slavery in the Ivory Coast, which fuels the enormous cocoa industry there. The U.S. State Department estimates that as many as 10,000 of the 100,000 child laborers in the country's cocoa industry are victims of human trafficking. The workers receive beatings and little pay in return for their difficult labor. Companies like Hershey's and Cadbury source cocoa from across the world and mix the various chocolates together for their products, so there's a high chance that anyone's Halloween candy was produced by this exploitative industry. Fair-trade companies like Equal Exchange and candy-swapping programs like Reverse Trick-or-Treating are trying to spread the word this Halloween about eating more sustainable chocolate treats.
• The Coalition of Immokalee Workers continued its months-long campaign to forge a fair-wages agreement with the Trader Joe's grocery chain last week. Over 400 advocates, tomato pickers, and religious leaders marched to the company's headquarters in Los Angeles expecting to deliver letters to upper management. Instead, they were not permitted inside the building, were dispersed by police, and were treated snidely by Trader Joe's staff. The CIW is asking many large retailers to pay one penny more per pound of tomatoes purchased from the largest tomato packers in Florida. This agreement would cost Trader Joe's about $30,000 per year, and would raise wages for tomato pickers from $50 to $80 per day.
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture is attempting to manage severe budget cuts by reducing the frequency and variety of annual agricultural reports. Reports for each crop and industry provide information on pricing, supply, and demand for the products. Farmers use these reports for guidance on when to sell their products and for how much. Eliminating 14 reports will save the agency about $10 million annually. The USDA based its cuts on the impact the reports had on industry, and the availability of relevant information from other sources.
• The New York Times examines a bill proposed by a Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) called the American Specialty Agriculture Act. The Act deals with the question of how to regulate and monitor immigrant labor in the agricultural industry. It allows growers to pay lower wages to workers, weakens the provision that growers must prove that they tried to hire American laborers before seeking immigrant labor, and shifts oversight from the Labor Department to the Department of Agriculture. The Act is a response to pushback from growers against the E-Verify system, a federal hiring database that flags illegal workers.
• According to a study out of the University of California at Davis, the most frequent consumers of fast food are those whose income level categorizes them as lower-middle class. Based on data from the 1990s, researchers found that middle-class consumers often have more disposable income but less time to prepare food, thus leading to more fast food trips. They speculate that the inability to use food stamps at restaurant locations prevents lower-class individuals from frequenting fast food chains. The study goes against some of the assumptions that implicate fast food as a primary cause of obesity among the poorest members of society.

About the Author: A student in Providence, Rhode Island, Leah Douglas loves learning about, talking about, reading about, and consuming food. Her work is also featured in Rhode Island Monthly Magazine.