Around this time 54 years ago, broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow revealed the plight of U.S. farmworkers in his celebrated documentary Harvest of Shame.
And now, a new film titled Food Chains will do the same, premiering 8 p.m. Friday at Tampa's AMC Veterans 24. The showing is just one of more than 25 across the country.
The documentary — directed by Sanjay Rawal, and co-produced by actress Eva Longoria and journalist Eric Schlosser — revolves around the Fair Food Program, a successful human rights campaign founded by a group of Florida-based farmworkers known as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
In April, CIW member Lupe Gonzalo hosted a talk at downtown St. Pete's Florida Holocaust Museum, citing her experiences in the state's tomato fields before the Fair Food Program's inception.
Gonzalo's account included spending 10-hour workdays hunched over a bucket trying to meet unreasonable quotas, the constant threat of sexual assault and unfair wages that kept most workers in poverty.
Food Chains, shot primarily in the Interstate-4 corridor, depicts how members like Gonzalo helped develop the program, which establishes legally binding contracts with produce growers and buyers to improve working conditions and wages, and also requires that participating companies' practices are monitored.
Doing so ensures "their commitments translate into verifiable reforms," according to the program's website.
Though the campaign is changing the way American companies and consumers think about the agricultural industry, several heavyweights on the selling end of the market, including Publix, Kroger and Wendy's, haven't considered joining, or making steps toward reform.
The documentary, in turn, addresses these major players on an emotional and logical level through farmworkers' own words and scenes like a worker-staged six-day fast outside Publix's Lakeland headquarters.
People should be concerned about the quality of produce as much as the hands that pick it, Schlosser says in the film.
A discussion with CIW member Silvia Perez will follow Food Chains' debut to the region. At 5:30 p.m. Saturday, a demonstration will take place in front of the Twelve Oaks Plaza Publix at 7018 W. Waters Ave. in Tampa.
This article appears in Nov 20-26, 2014.