'Food Chains' Documentary Sheds Light on Farmworkers' Reality

Molly Hannon is a freelance journalist based in Virginia. She has written for Al Jazeera America, The New York Times, The Guardian, Modern Farmer, The Daily Beast, Paris Review Daily, among others. She holds an M.A. in arts and culture reporting from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. You can find more of her work here. A few years ago, Sanjay Rawal was driving past a farm in Immokalee, Florida and he saw a group of migrant farmworkers toiling away in the fields. Later that evening, he drove by the same field to find the same group still hard at work. Meanwhile, the farm managers were eating at a separate facility nearby. “The segregation of these two communities shocked me. Almost next door to one another were these two eating facilities–one for whites one for ‘coloreds’. The ‘coloreds’ in this case weren’t African Americans, but farmworkers. It could’ve been 1911, not 2011.” Rawal has been a strong supporter of the local food movement, but he realized he knew very little about food production. He became curious about, “who exactly was producing these organic tomatoes. What were their conditions like? What were they paid?” Now Rawal is releasing his third film, Food Chains, about just this topic. Produced by actors Eva Longoria and Forest Whitaker and directed by Rawal, Food Chains debuted at major film festivals this year, including the Berlinale Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival and opens for a limited theatrical run on Friday, November 21.