German photographer Rebecca Rütten explores the topic of eating a healthy diet and class status in our modern American Fast Food culture with her series ‘Contemporary Pieces’, a series of five still lifes and five portraits. She states:

“During the conception of ‘Contemporary Pieces’, I became enamored with the eroticism, presentation and charisma of paintings from the Renaissance Period. In the Late Renaissance painters dealt with the middle and lower classes. In my opinion, Fast Food Culture represents these two social classes in the United States today. To eat healthy is expensive. However, one can buy large amounts of food at a fast food restaurant for a comparatively low price.”

Rebecca Rütten’s friends posed as her models, healthy food lovers who express a certain aristocratic disdain for the cheap, fat-ladened, mass-produced, genetically-modified foods they are holding. For the most part, Rebecca’s models don’t consider that what they are holding qualifies as food.

In America, Rütten’s friends would likely shop at Whole Foods. Today the upscale grocery brand launched a new rating system for its produce suppliers called Responsibly Grown.

Whole Foods will now rate its produce ‘good’, ‘better’ or ‘best’, based on pesticide and water use, treatment of farm workers, waste management including plastic waste and “whether they provide conservation areas to foster bees, butterflies and other pollinators,” writes the NYTimes.

“This is the latest example of our commitment to transparency and sustainable agriculture,” said Matt Rogers, who handles standards and sourcing at Whole Foods. British stores will not be involved in the launch of the Responsibbly Grown initiative, which will impact about half the produce sold in the 390 Whole Foods stores in America.

Whole Foods Responsibly Grown

In September 2014 Greg Asbed and Lucas Benitez, Co-founders, Coalition of Immokalee Workers were among the honorees at the Clinton Global Initiative. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is a worker-based human rights organization internationally recognized for its achievements in the fields of corporate social responsibility, community organizing, and sustainable food. The CIW is also a leader in the growing movement to end human trafficking due to its groundbreaking work to combat modern-day slavery and other labor abuses common in agriculture. The CIW works in three broad and overlapping spheres:

Read also: Restaurants Located In Poor Areas Tend To Offer Unhealthy Food Think Progress