Former Taco Bell customers pinching themselves
After three years of protests, begging and having their restaurants thrown off of college campuses, officials at YUM! Brands Inc. have decided that tomato pickers should make more money. The company announced it will pay the extra penny per pound for its tomatoes that members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), the collective that initiated the boycott, requested. The company also announced that it will only purchase tomatoes from growers who agree to pass the extra penny along to the workers in their fields. But wait, there’s more. YUM says it will also include more human rights requirements in its code of conduct for suppliers and join CIW in lobbying other restaurants, supermarkets and the Florida legislature for reforms. Yum! still maintains it doesn’t buy enough tomatoes to make Florida growers change their ways, but the assertion doesn’t seem to inspire the same outrage now that the company has agreed to at least give it a shot. As a result of the new agreement with YUM! Brands, CIW has announced that its supporters may now run to the border.
Smoke does get in your eyes
Apparently, the air in Lexington bars and restaurants, where patrons aren’t allowed to smoke, isn’t as polluted as the air in Louisville restaurants, where patrons smoke whenever they feel like it, according to a University of Kentucky study. Louisville bars and restaurants have air that’s a shocking 17 times more polluted than the air in Lexington establishments where air quality was tested. Researchers think it may have something to do with the fact that in Lexington, the use of some air-polluting substances — like the ones in cigarettes — inside bars and restaurants is against the law. In Louisville, the use of some air polluting substances — let’s stick with the ones found in cigarettes, just for argument’s sake — is not legal. There’s speculation that some who complained that UK wasn’t allocated enough funding for cancer research in the state budget proposals last week now suspect the school was allocated too much.
