We’ve all heard of “From Farm to Table,” a philosophy of locally producing goods and delivering them to local consumers. Now we have “From Prison to Table.” Yes. Prison. Incarceration. Farm prison to your table.

Do you ever shop at Whole Foods? Have you perused their seafood? Ever bought the tilapia? Turns out the tilapia are "farm raised" by inmates incarcerated in a Colorado prison facility.

The Cañon City prison complex has numerous industries on its sprawling grounds, which are so large that from most vantage points you can’t see the prison fences. It has the country’s largest water-buffalo dairy. If you have eaten buffalo mozzarella in this country, there is a very good chance you have eaten the product of inmate labor. Supermarket chains sell tilapia raised in enormous vats on the prison’s grounds. Inmates stitch sweatbands, craft zebra-wood fishing rods, and collect honey for sale. Because the prison wants to keep its industries small and its captive labor market unnoticed—especially by private competitors and by the consumers who buy, eat, wear, or cuddle their products—their goods aren’t marked as the product of indentured labor. If you have profited from the work of a person in chains, you almost certainly don’t know about it. And by keeping the products unlabeled and unnoticed, prison labor systems all over the country have skirted uproar over whether prison labor is fair and just.

Colorado prisons produce 1.2 million pounds of tilapia a year, which Smith says is far less than their potential. But while CCI stays off the radar, that doesn’t necessarily mean its clients are so obscure: One of the prison tilapia operation’s primary customers is Whole Foods.

Prison laborers take home roughly $125 per month at the top of the pay scale, or about a buck-fifty per hour.

The Thirteenth Amendment specifically permits involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime” so prisons can pay their inmates nothing at all—and in fact that is the going rate for inmates working in prisons in Texas and Georgia. But that’s not the big story here.

The story is Whole Foods advertising “Our Higher Purpose Statement” and then seeing how they do business:

With great courage, integrity and love – we embrace our responsibility to co-create a world where each of us, our communities and our planet can flourish. All the while, celebrating the sheer love and joy of food.

So much for the Whole Foods slogan “Hold your groceries to a higher standard.” John Mackey and his corporation flourishes while the people who produce the food they sell get paid $1.50 an hour - when they’re at the high end of their pay scale.

Three cheers for capitalism. Or not.