Today is the last day of our justice team fair trade food challenge. Unfortunately, I have utterly failed. So we were supposed to start this thing last Monday (the 12th). I was all excited for this because I felt really motivated to participate in something like this after reading Seven by Jen Hatmaker. Yet on Wednesday night as I’m eating my $7 chick-fil-a meal, I finally realize that I am not participating at all simply because I didn’t make it a priority.
Needless to say, I went out Thursday to the Friendly City Co-Op to buy fair trade foods. Holy cow is that stuff expensive. I knew that it would be pricier but I knew I needed to step up my game to get this show on the road. So $50 later, I have enough food to last me a while but unfortunately no variety.
The biggest thing for me was that I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing. I was going through my daily routine not realizing that the chicken strips I was eating was from a company like Tyson who is notorious for mistreating chickens and underpaying farmers. But it was convenient for me at the time and boy did it taste good.
While I was walking to the bus eating my chicken strips, I decided to do a little research. What I found the most was that in bigger businesses (like Target), the only fair trade items are coffee and tea. Now I don’t know about you but I can’t live off of coffee for a week. Using the GoodGuide app, I could see a rating as to “how fair trade” an item was. Most of them were in the 7/10 range but that still didn’t seem good to me. I kind of wrote it off like “this isn’t fair trade enough so I can’t buy these things”. That basically just led me to continue eating my chicken strips and leftovers that most definitely weren’t fair trade.
So obviously up until Thursday, I was not doing a good job. After I went shopping I stuck to my foods. The same organic milk and cereal for breakfast, an organic ham and cheese sandwhich for lunch, and chicken and potatoes for dinner. How boring. It was all going well and good, until I went out of town to visit my sister. Now, a little background. My sister is the most experimental person I know when it comes to food and she always ends up dragging me into it which is how I ended up eating weird (yet tasty) lamb from an unknown local Greek restaurant.
Friday went well. I brought with me my breakfast and lunch fair trade foods and even went back to the co-op to buy the ingredients to make my sister’s favorite stuffed green peppers (also not cheap…). But that was only Friday.
Saturday we decided to just do leftovers but here’s my downfall: FREE COLDSTONE ICE CREAM. My sister’s roommate is a manager at the local cold stone and told us that she would get us free ice cream if we swung by when she was working. What a sweet hookup. Like that ice cream was bomb. But probably the farthest thing from fair trade that I had gotten so far. And if that didn’t make it worse enough, we went to the local Mexican restaraunt (which was poppin because of parents weekend). Needless to say, I did not hold back or ask where the ingredients came from. I was content eating my slave super burrito with chips and queso.
But that there is the problem. We allow the mistreatment of animals and the exploitation of children workers because we are content with what we have in our perfect white middle class lives. And me just following along isn’t going to help end these inhumane practices.
So after this week, I realized how important buying locally and fair trade items are to replenishing God’s kingdom. And although I did terribly, I also tried to make a change in my habits. And I won’t just stop going to the co-op now that this week is over. Mainly because the cheese from there is delicious and they have amazing pumpkin tortilla chips but also because I had a great conversation with the cashier and I could read the package and see that these apples came from a farm just 20 minutes away from here.
It also makes me want to live more sustainably and in a way that glorifies this Earth that God has given us.
If you don’t know what fair trade is, that’s okay. I was unaware until I came to JMU and there was more of a push to fighting injustice and eating locally than my suburbian town in Northern VA.
About a year ago, I was given a sheet with the basic fair trade principles on it from a local store here in Harrisonburg. This is the website where you can read them yourself. https://www.fairtradefederation.org/fair-trade-federation-principles/
This is a super helpful site that you should check out! Also find out if your city hosts a farmer’s market on the weekends. Since it’s getting colder, those types of things will be coming to a close but getting informed is the first step to change!
As hard as this challenge was, it was also rewarding to feel like I have done something to help our local businesses. I encourage you all to do the same because it’s a great feeling.
Sincerely
Erin
decisivelyerin 