If you’ve been wandering the aisles of your local grocery store with food justice and a proper confectionery Easter celebration in mind, I have a few ideas for you.

The first, and possibly the most fun and cost-effective : make your own.

Peanut butter, powdered sugar, and melted chocolate will yield delicious peanut butter cup eggs. (Consider the sources of your ingredients and order if necessary. I recommend Once Again Nut Butter, Woodstock peanut butter, Wholesome Sweeteners powdered sugar, and Equal Exchange chocolate

You can also make your own Peeps and Cadbury Eggs.

Not sure you want to make your own Easter candy?

My beloved Equal Exchange is sold out of Easter-style candy, but they do still have their regular line-up. All of it is delicious and beneficial to everyone involved in the production and consuming.

Check out this adorable Easter Egg Hunt Kit using Divine Chocolate (and surf the other gift options on the SERRV website while you’re at it!).

Sjaak’s is a new-to-me chocolate company committed to making quality organic products, and sustaining fair food practices, a healthy work environment, and socially responsible. Try Eli’s Earth Bars!

(Want more ideas? Check out Food Empowerment Project’s chocolate list.)

How about a non-food item? 

Buy a bunny and a Ugandan child will get one, too. The Sara Jane Project employs Ugandan women to make the bunnies AND donates money to families trying to adopt.

Have more ideas? Please share them here!

The March for Rights, Respect, and Fair Food is happening right now. Farm workers and allies are 80+ miles into a 200-mile march to call on Publix Super Markets to join The Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program.

The Fair Food Program started in 2000 as a join effort between farm workers and allies to secure basic rights, fair treatment, and living wages for tomato pickers in Florida. Up until then, tomato pickers were routinely some of the poorest workers in the United States (those who work for a non-Fair Food company may still be), not guaranteed any rights at all, and regarded as farm machinery.

As a result of the efforts of workers  and consumers united by The Coalition of Immokalee Workers farm workers and day laborers who work for participating companies now receive a Fair Food Premium, water, bathrooms, shade to rest in, on-site training regarding rights and a hotline they can call if those rights are violated (all things they did not receive prior to implementation of the Fair Food Program).

The efforts of the CIW have so far secured participation from Yum Brands, McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Whole Foods Market, Bon Appetit Management Company, Compass Group, Aramark, Sodexho, Trader Joe’s, and just last year, Chipotle.

So far, Publix Super Markets is refusing to sign the Fair Food Agreement, but the CIW is determined to make enough noise to change that.

The march ends on Sunday, March 17. To find out more and get involved, check out CIW’s Online and Social Media Hub.

http://sumofus.org/campaigns/chipotle/

Dear Reader,

Let’s shake things up around here. I think we’re in need of a breath of fresh air.

Larger corporations are using “fair trade” as a marketing tool, draining it of its meaning. It’s no longer enough to look for a symbol on a package. We need to do research. We need to expand what we mean by fair trade and get to the heart of our words and actions.

I recently attended The  Justice Conference (a HUGE breath of fresh air for me!) and came home with rich ideas to chew on like:

• justice efforts without relationships turn people into projects and essentially dehumanize them.
• justice is about doing AND listening.

I have said and I believe that our purchasing decisions are a chance to buy into a more beautiful story. I want to keep that.

But I have also written about “them” almost until I could write no more, turning lives into my projects, when what I really need to is to have more conversations, make fair and just decisions from a base of everyone deserves to be treated with dignity, respect, and thoughtfulness. Sometimes I see those things in myself, but I don’t see them enough. I certainly don’t see them enough in this blog. 

Before today, my posts were mostly written retroactively. I was trying to convey what had happened in my head and my heart and my kitchen before. I’ve been itching for more for a while now, so not everything will be new to both of us, but now most of it will. I want to  explore, discuss, learn, try, fail, and try again to cultivate hearts that truly believe and lead to behaviors that show we believe that all people should receive dignity, care, and respect. I want to do that together.

We’ll stick with our original theme of making eating choices that lead to fullness of life in both the producing and the consuming realms of food and explore themes like:

• What’s going on with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers?
• Justice minus relationships turns people into projects.
• Double Up Food Bucks Program
• Why are children going hungry in the United States?
• What happens when people gather around a table?

Why food?

We all need to eat several times throughout the day, making food one of the most consistent opportunities to make choices that support the kind of world we want to live in.

People whose work gets food from the fields into our homes and helps to sustain our lives are often given the least amount of respect.  This is backwards and needs to change.

Food is community glue. I’m convinced human beings were made for honest, generous, gracious community. Magic happens around when two or more are gathered around a table.

This is not an eating program. This is about the heart of the choices we make and the relationships we engage in through face-to-face interaction and consumption. It’s about everyone being treated as valuable because everyone is. It’s about getting educated about past and current events, stories of human lives, and cultures we don’t understand.

This is not about perfection. There’s a lot we have to learn. We might (and probably will) get frustrated, but most of us in The Social Eater community eat at least 3 times a day. That’s 3 times we get to try again to make choices that contribute to everyone’s quality of life.

This is an ongoing journey.

What do you say? Are you in?