Brady-Bundchen and a lump of self-parody for your Xmas stocking

A gushing story on Tommy and Gisele's new $14 million Manhattan apartment co-exists on the same online page as;

Now, some of the most influential voices in the food movement - including Monterey resident Schlosser, best-selling author Michael Pollan and pioneering Berkeley chef Alice Waters - are chiming in.

They are connecting the dots between different camps in the food movement by saying it's impossible to care about eating sustainably produced food when food service workers are not making sustainable wages.

....Labor leaders hope that hearing prominent food luminaries speak out will prompt kohlrabi munchers to support Big Mac preparers. California - where the minimum wage is the highest in the country and, by law, egg-laying chickens must be given room to spread their wings - would seem to be a likely place to find food industry unity.

"If people care about where their food comes from, they will care about the people who are preparing it," said Pete Castelli, executive director of the Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which has been helping to organize fast-food workers in Northern California.

Meaning that those fast food workers are grist for the mill of middle class professionals who earn six-figure incomes talking to naive newspaper reporters who respond well to cliches;

... the wage disparity between the executive suite and the kitchen is opening many eyes. McDonald's CEO earns $9,200 an hour, while the company's average line employee makes $7.73 an hour....

How many dollars per hour is Brady paid to throw passes (even incomplete ones), or his wife to strut down a runway? The answer to those questions has about as much relevance to the wages of low-skill labor as the compensation of MBAs with years of executive experience. Not to mention that Tom and Gisele haven't fed any of the downtrodden as effectively as the CEOs;

"Cheap food is baked into our economy or society," Pollan said. "But we've done this by cutting corners, by exploiting workers and by exploiting the land."

...."We live in a fast-food culture, and it's teaching us about how to live our lives: the idea that everything should be fast, cheap and easy," Waters said. "They want to sell this, and they don't want us to ask anything about it - just buy it and become imprisoned in that paradigm."

For years, Waters said she has been "preaching that food is precious. I really treasure the people who grow it, who take care of the animals, that work the land. All of those people who take care of my nourishment are my allies, and I want to pay them the highest amount." 

Which would make it more expensive for other low skill workers to feed themselves, but who cares about them? Well...the McDonald's CEO, for one.