It’s been awhile since I’ve done this, but today is all about the links. All justice related, so enjoy!
- Jennifer Gainer Wildeboer has embarked on an ethical eating project and is blogging her way through it. She writes –
I’m developing a blog (and eventually a book, if the door opens) over the next calendar year. I am calling it Whole Food/Soul Food: A Year of Eating Ethically. I am changing my family’s eating habits to remove all foods that I can’t pronounce as well as trying to eat fresh, local food and not eating factory farmed meat or dairy. The goal of the project is to get healthier, eat more ethically, make my actions match up the ethics of my faith, and to prove that it can all be done without being rich. I am planning on blogging and writing about the experience as well as interviewing local farmers and the like.
Fantastic endeavor. I wish her luck and I am eager to read what she discovers about food, her faith, and herself along the way.
- Also my friend Shelton Green in currently in India forging relationships with fair trade factories for his newly launched fair trade clothing company Good & Fair. He is awesome, the company is awesome, and I love that he just went to India to really get to know the people he will be working with. He has been blogging through his travels there, reporting on what he is experiencing and the people he is meeting – I highly recommend checking it out. This recent entry is a great perspective on the impact of fair trade –
I have spent the last two days at the factory of a fairtrade clothing producer here in Kolkata, India. I have conducted a few interviews and begun to take pictures. I have spoken with people at all levels of the company. Honestly, I am struggling a bit to understand how people live in such abject poverty. Culture shock set in right away when I arrived and I am now beginning to tread my way thru it as I attempt to understand the cultural context in which I find myself.
I think I expected “fairtrade” clothing production to look very different than what I found. Without thinking thru my expectations, I now see that I wanted it to be “western” and easy to identify. Fairtrade simply looks different “in the flesh.” It is very relative. The wages are enough to lift people out of poverty, allowing them to a place to live and the basics of life for the wage earner and his or her family. The company I am looking at and will likely partner with, does more than pay a living wage (which, as you would expect, is more than minimum wage). They pay for the children of employees to go to school, they pay part of the employees premium in order them and their family (including parents) to access the government health care program, and several other things that are benefits on top of wages. This company is the only company in India that is fairtrade certified by one of the U.S. based fairtrade organizations.
Even after all of that I am struggling to understand that what I am seeing is what fairtrade looks like in the real world. Fairtrade gives the poor a life, it doesn’t give them the life that I have and luxuries I enjoy. I want them to want the things that I want, to look like me and to act like me, then they will no longer be “the poor.” That’s what the unreformed, unacknowledged, old school “missionary” in me wants to do. And that is the worst thing I could hope for them. They deserve the life they want, and not one that conforms to my ideas of prosperity.
The work of Good & Fair is to tell the story of these workers who are treated and paid fairly, and who are safe and free at work; and to support them by utilizing ethical supply chains. Their is more to fairtrade, but I am learning those things are at the heart of it.
And finally, in a completely self-serving bit of self-promotion – as I mentioned on Facebook, I submitted an entry into the Anthony Bourdain Medium Raw essay contest. The topic was, “Why Cook Well?” and I wrote from the perspective that cooking well helps us get over ourselves by pushing us to care for the people we are cooking for as well as the people who grow our food and the earth it grows in. I just wanted the larger voice of justice to be represented among the essays. So if you want to support me and those ideas, I invite you to go read and vote for my piece. You can vote once a day, so if you really love me… 
Okay, end of Julie commercial.
Enjoy the links!