Posted on 10/01/2015 4:42:53 PM PDT by BBell
Whole Foods will stop selling products made using a prison labor program after a protest at one of its stores in Texas.
The company said the products should be out of its stores by April 2016, if not sooner. Whole Foods said it has sold tilapia, trout and goat cheese produced through a Colorado inmate program at some stores since at least 2011.
Michael Silverman, a Whole Foods spokesman, said the company had sourced the products because the program was a way to "help people get back on their feet and eventually become contributing members of society."
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
They had a huge farm down there in the Gould and Wrightsville area.
Is that anywhere near Paragould? My dad was born in Paragould, named after J. W. Paramore and Jay Gould.
Shout it out.
Something more constructive would be to make them go through garbage and separate the recyclables from the non.
LOL I go to walmart to avoid unpleasant cutomers
Might be harder to control contraband that way
I hear you. :)
The best bet, and really good PR for Whole Foods, would be to set up a prison *training* program. Then, while the prisoners are learning, get a subcontractor to set up a production facility that will supply Whole Foods, hiring the prisoners right out of prison.
The icing on the cake would be if they set up group halfway house residences for them. So, minimum rent; set up direct deposit bank accounts, so they can accumulate some wealth; inexpensive prepared meals three times a day, etc.
Make it a good enough deal so that when their probation is done, they want to stay there for a while longer until they are in a good situation before migrating to different jobs and other situations in an orderly manner with much less stress.
I recall a label once touting it’s product was ‘Made in the Americas.’
I’m glad to see prisoners working but I wish they would grow something tastier than tilapia.
In modern aquaculture, wild-type Nile tilapia are not too often seen, as the dark color of their flesh is not much desired by many customers, and because it has a bit of a reputation of being a trash fish associated with poverty.On the other hand, they are fast-growing and give good fillets; leucistic ("Red") breeds which have lighter meat have been developed and these are very popular.
Hybrid stock is also used in aquaculture; Nile × blue tilapia hybrids are usually rather dark, but a light-colored hybrid breed known as "Rocky Mountain White" tilapia is often grown due to its very light flesh and tolerance of low temperatures.
Commercially grown tilapia are almost exclusively male. Cultivators use hormones, such as testosterone, to reverse the sex of newly spawned females. Because tilapia are prolific breeders, the presence of female tilapia results in rapidly increasing populations of small fish, rather than a stable population of harvest-size animals.
Source: Wikipedia
So perhaps the solution is pay prison workers the prevailing wage scale, and then deduct costs of housing, food, restitution, and bank the rest for them when they have paid their debt to society. Sometimes the cruelty of so-called conservatives astounds me.
Farm raised and processed by inmates. What could go wrong.
Farm raised and processed by inmates. What could go wrong.
That’s the point. If what you say was done, the cost advantage of using prison labor would be lost, so there would be no reason to use it. The union argument is, if you’re going to pay full wages, use law abiding employees. There is nothing wrong in training convicts skills, but making employees of them is taking jobs from those who obey the laws.
No those towns are in southeast Arkansas. Paragould is northeast Arkansas, north of Jonesboro.
I’ll take my chances with the prison labor.”
There is a prison about 15 miles from us which has a huge garden which is tended by the inmates and they also raise goats and chickens. They always have great produce for sale at a reasonable price and their goat cheese is better than anything you can buy in the store. Good use of their time and provides them with an opportunity to learn something useful.
I would recommend to everyone Prison Blues, which are the jeans made in the Oregon state prison at Pendleton. Prisoners need to work.
The quality of the meat produced there is so high that the meat is sold on the open market and cheaper meat is feed to the prisoners.
So they just sit around milkin’ the trout.
That just sounds dirty.
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