On a hot and sticky New York afternoon, an East Village parking space was home to a traveling museum–located inside a 20-foot truck. Even with fans running, it was uncomfortably hot in the truck yesterday, which only helped the exhibit to make its point. The truck is a model of the vehicle that was used to hold Florida tomato harvesters at night in a case of modern-day slavery. Photographs of wrists bruised by shackles are among the sparse display of hard-hitting images and text. The few artifacts include a bloody shirt retrieved from a worker who fled the fields after being violently beaten.

The successful prosecution of two brothers–labor contractors–who held workers in the truck nightly against their will is just one of five recent cases highlighted in the Florida Modern-Day Slavery Museum, a project developed by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) that is currently touring the Northeastern United States. Based in Florida’s rural tomato and citrus growing area with headquarters in the sleep town of Immokalee, the CIW and partners including Interfaith Action of Southwest Florida and Student Farmworker Alliance advocate for improvements in farmworker conditions, and developed the museum in a truck as a tool “to raise awareness and bring attention to the solution,” according to exhibit guide Brigitte Gynther of Immokalee’s Interfaith Action.

Through its Campaign for Fair Food, the CIW has gained recognition for its penny-per-pound campaigns to encourage major retailers, including Burger King and McDonald’s, to pay additional wages directly to piece-rate earning harvesters. The solution to modern-day slavery cases in farming, and to ending “the abuse and poverty in general” that allows such conditions, is to demand improved wages, and a zero-tolerance policy for forced labor through well-monitored codes of conduct, says Gynther. “Poverty and powerlessness are really at the roots of the slavery cases.” The instances of slavery highlighted at the museum were all perpetrated by labor contractors: debt bondage, violence toward workers, theft of legally obtained visas from migrant crew members, and the luring of prospective workers from homeless shelters. The common trope is one of worker intimidation. And as CIW tour guide Romeo Ramirez, a 29-year-old Guatemalan immigrant who has worked in farming all his life, explained, it is difficult to know when and where to seek assistance. He found his way to the CIW in 1998 after unexplained pay docks for his harvest work.

The treatment of farmworkers did not escape the Torah’s many dicta on agriculture, a series of laws and observations that are becoming an increasingly significant part of the intellectual discourse on sustainable, fair food. In a 2006 American Jewish World Service Torah commentary on a parshat that examines agricultural workers, Rabbi David Rosenn, the founder of AVODAH and the current COO of the New Israel Fund, looked at the significance of the Jubilee year, “one of the Torah’s most revolutionary ideas.” Every 50th year, debts are forgiven and land is redistributed to original owners, ensuring that even the unfortunate individuals whose unproductive farms forced them away from their own property into a migrant pattern of working on other farms–leaving them without reliable work, income, or property assets–would not permanently become a class in servitude.

Interfaith Action’s Gynther says that the problems agricultural workers face are about more than wages, immigration, or piece-rate pay mechanisms. It’s about “the real power in the agriculture industry,” and consolidation among major growers and retailers whose “demand for artificially cheap tomatoes” has a direct impact on labor costs. The power imbalance between the poorest migrant harvesters and the fast food executives is precisely the type of inequality that the Jubilee year is designed to correct. As Steven Stoll mused in Harper’s Magazine recently, the Jubilee year “constitutes nothing less than the first land-reform measure. The upshot was a legal mechanism for preventing class differences.”

One visitor to the Florida Modern-Day Slavery Museum, Orlanda Brugnola, an adjunct assistant professor of philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a Unitarian Universalist minister, was offering extra credit to students who took part in fair food efforts. She found the museum to be a provocative, though unsurprising, portrayal of greed and the corresponding systematic devaluation of labor. “If you look at the workplace and the world, whether farms or other businesses, workers are usually treated as objects of use. To me, that’s not an acceptable way of treating any human being.” Having just returned from protests in Arizona against the state’s new immigration law, Brugnola expounded to say that “the greatness of the nation can be judged by how it treats all the people within its borders.”

The museum’s mission is to serve as an educational tool and call to action for participation in its campaign to restructure the power imbalance–a campaign that seeks, in many ways, to function as the “modern-day equivalent of the Jubilee year: a way to prevent dispossession and destitution from becoming the inheritance of families and countries over generations,” as Rabbi Rosenn writes. For Ramirez, who was visiting New York for the third time, the museum was helping to make progress. Visitors, including two couples from South Florida, were positive and hopeful, he said. Modern-day slavery exists, but with a modern-day adaptation of the Jubilee year, perhaps the structural obstacles toward eliminating inequity can be eliminated.

On Monday, July 25th, Pursuers gathered at the Sixth Street Community Center in Manhattan for Chewing on Food Justice: Got Access, the second installment of the New York series on food justice. The space was a synagogue turned hip community center, a creaky, colorful old building whose walls were equally marked by old Hebrew and Aramaic letters and vibrant murals of figures like Emma Goldman and Zora Neale Hurston. It was a fitting context in which to wrestle with the intersection of Judaism and justice and to awaken our inner rabble-rousers.

The evening featured four change-makers doing wildly different work on food justice issues both locally and globally. Melissa Extein, the Associate Director of Grants at American Jewish World Service, began the night by getting us on our feet with an exercise on power. She symbolized power and stood in the middle of the room, challenging us to choose a spot that signified our relationships to her. The reflections that followed were insightful; we collectively explored our feelings about power, influence, and control. Does power mean dominance and coercion? Are we skeptical of power or drawn to it? How much power does each of us, with our unique positionalities, actually have?

Melissa brought an international lens to food justice, discussing the blunders of Food Aid, and how what looks like a basic charity program actually seriously undermines the livelihoods of local farmers in the Global South. Using Haiti as an example, she complicated the simple idea of dumping loads of free rice, and shared what Haitian farmers are saying about their inability to compete with free foreign produce. In exploring food sovereignty and discussing what gets in the way, we got inspired to advocate for concrete changes in the Food Aid program in the Farm Bill of 2012.

Up next was Mara Gittleman, the director of Farming Concrete, a research project that aims to measure how much food is grown in New York City’s community gardens. She certainly brought it close to home, taking us on a tour through New York City’s history with community-based agriculture, the mass abandonment that came with the fires of the 1970’s, and how finally, these no-man’s lands naturally morphed into a sort of “communal backyard,” areas for voter registration, community gatherings, and of course, gardening. Her presentation shed light on how data can be leveraged as an advocacy tool, and illuminated just how gigantic the yields of the humble raised beds scattered all around the city are all put together. She told us of Puerto Ricans in the Bronx growing sugar cane and Brooklyn gardens sprouting callaloo, fearless planters producing kiwi, gooseberries, and pigeon peas, and the hefty bounty that results from all this hard work (I’m still trying to get my head around the 29,628 lbs of tomatoes produced in 2010!).

Next, Steven Deheeger of the South Bronx CSA connected the dots between all of this community-based food production and issues of access. Calling 10 volunteers up to the front, he illustrated how, despite having some of the highest rates of diabetes, childhood obesity, and other serious health conditions related to malnutrition, the South Bronx continues to lack the healthy food options found in other parts of New York City, rendering it a “food desert.” There are 12 (low-quality) grocery stores in the South Bronx for 88,000 people, compared to 35 on the Upper West Side for just 60,000. So what would food sovereignty mean for the South Bronx, Steven asked? Not being forced to use assistance income on junk food at bodegas. Not needing to rely on private, for-profit supermarkets to fill the gap. More fundamentally, food sovereignty means that healthy food should be a right instead of a privilege for a few wealthy citizens of New York.

Reverend Robert Jackson, the director of Brooklyn Rescue Mission, stepped in to add a race and class analysis to the concept of food sovereignty, to combine what he called a “foodie movement” with the civil rights movement.  “The reality of poverty is not a theory; it’s not in a book. Food is access. You have to connect the dots between food, equality, and access,” he said. As a farmer, reverend, and community leader, he seeks to bring fresh food to low-income areas of Brooklyn, and supplies the food pantry program with produce straight from his Bed-Stuy farm. He spun the story of Joseph that we had looked at in our text study, advocating for all people to have the power to make decisions about their food, regardless of their income level. The late civil rights leader Bayard Rustin famously said, “We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.” Perhaps that was Reverend Jackson’s point when he urged Pursuers to wrestle with food justice, confront their privilege and choices, and gather up some chutzpah. “I want you guys to leave here bigger troublemakers than you came,” he said, smiling mischievously.  And judging from the spirit in the room, I think everyone did.