[hupso title=”Inspired by @FoodChainsFilm, DC middle schoolers sell lemonade for farmworker justice!” url=”https://ciw-online.org/blog/2015/05/mailbag-middle-school/”]

Inspired by “Food Chains,” DC middle schoolers sell lemonade for farmworker justice!

“Fair” is one of the first words we learn when we need to distinguish right from wrong in the world.  “That’s not fair!” is a universal childhood lament that echoes across playgrounds, streets, and backyards around the country and across generations.  Indeed, children come into this world with an innate sense of justice, an inner compass that reels when things are not right, or fair, around them.

We here in Immokalee were reminded of that precious quality of youth late last week, when we received a remarkable letter from two young ladies in the 8th grade class at the Sheridan School in Washington, DC.  The letter was so sweet that we couldn’t help but share it with you.  (As a matter of fact, we’ve received so many excellent letters of late from the Fair Food Nation that we’ve decided to launch a “Mailbag” series — so, if you have a letter to a supermarket or restaurant chain, or news of an action you’ve taken for Fair Food you’d like to share with us, send it along and it might just end up on the website one of these days!).  Here below is the letter, from Nina and Izzy, in its entirety:

These remarkable young people are the very heart of the Campaign for Fair Food.  They are leaders of a new generation, the first generation of the 21st century, a generation that cares as much about the quality of life of the people who produce the things they consume as they do about the quality of those things themselves.  

And it is due to the power and vision of this new generation that, ultimately, victory in the battle for Fair Food is inevitable.  Even before farmworkers in an isolated, dusty town in southwest Florida set out to build a national network of thousands of consumer allies, before thirteen major corporate buyers signed Fair Food Agreements, before Florida tomato growers entered into a new era of partnership with the CIW to implement the Fair Food Program… there was hope that justice would be done in Florida’s fields, and that hope was built on the idealism of our youngest allies.

Today, thanks to the consciousness and commitment of tens of thousands of farmworkers and their allies, that vision of an industry founded on the respect for workers’ basic human rights and a fair wage has become the everyday reality of tens of thousands of tomato pickers.  And those groundbreaking changes are swiftly expanding beyond Florida tomatoes, as evidenced by Compass Group USA’s recent commitment to expand the Fair Food Program within their supply chain by 2020.

And, so, this letter from Nina and Izzy is powerful testament to the pure and deep-seated instinct for fairness in all young people’s hearts.  But more than that, it is also a message to all those who continue to fight the historic changes taking place in Florida’s fields — a message to Publix, Wendy’s, Kroger and others, who still believe that the market will not take note of their refusal to support the presidential medal-winning Fair Food Program, the social responsibility program called the “best workplace monitoring program in the US” in the New York Times.  

To those companies, Nina and Izzy’s message is clear: Today’s young people demand a new food system for the 21st century, one rooted in a real, measurable commitment to human rights.  Anything short of that is simply unacceptable, and companies that don’t get that message will be left in the past.