| Sometimes, it breaks my heart to tell my boyfriend's seven-year-old the truth about the world. This was one of those times. A few weeks ago, I heard about the Coalition of Immokalee Workers' fair food coloring contest for kids. I immediately emailed it to our daughter's Girl Scout leader, asking if the entire troop wanted to enter the contest. She asked if I could lead it as an activity at tonight's meeting.
Sunday, I told my boyfriend's daughter that I was going to lead an activity at the meeting and I asked if she wanted to be the one to tell the story to the troop. She said yes, so we sat down together and I showed her pictures of the tomato pickers in Immokalee, FL and explained to her how bad their lives were. She turned white as a sheet. She's still at an age where scary stories keep her up at night. Her dad had to sleep with her the night I told her about the boy who cried wolf because she was so scared. So true stories like the human rights catastrophe of our food system REALLY make an effect.
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| We talked about how heavy a 32-lb bucket of tomatoes is (as heavy as her little sister) and how much you can buy for $.45 (the amount a farm worker gets for each 32-lb bucket of tomatoes. You could buy a gumball for $.45 and that's about it. If a farm worker wanted to buy a $25 T-shirt, they'd have to pick 50 buckets of tomatoes. And to make $50 in a day, they have to pick 4000 lbs of tomatoes! Plus, sometimes when their boss gets mad at the workers, he beats them. And some workers are even kept as slaves.
When we looked at the pictures, we saw the workers covered in pesticides. I explained that those are poisons put on the plants to kill bugs, but the workers are exposed to them too. And we talked about how the workers have to live sometimes 10 people in one room. They wake up at 4:30am and then work for 10-12 hours in a day. If they are lucky, that is. If they are unlucky, they don't get any work at all that day and they make no money.
After this, our little Girl Scout turned to me and said, "This is why we grow tomatoes in our garden!" Exactly!!!! She decided to draw a picture to show her Girl Scout troop, so she could explain it to them. She began drawing a big, green tomato and I realized that she probably had no idea why the tomatoes were green. So I explained. If they picked ripe, juicy, sweet tomatoes, they would go bad before they got to the store. Instead they pick them green and use gas to turn them red. Upon hearing this she said, "Now I know not to buy tomatoes in a store."
The lesson at the Girl Scout meeting was far less detailed and far more chaotic. It's impossible to hold the attention of 17 second graders for very long. But one thing's for sure: none of our girls will probably win the drawing contest.
I explained to the girls that kids have been some of the biggest heroes in the farm workers stories because it was college students whose boycotts of Taco Bells actually removed or blocked Taco Bells from operating on several college campuses. Now Taco Bell pays tomato pickers an extra penny per pound of tomatoes AND refuses to buy from anyone who mistreats the workers. So what we're doing now is trying to get more companies to pay an extra penny per pound.
The girls had a better idea. What if we pay them more than that? A penny per pound isn't a lot. "What about THREE pennies per pound?" somebody asked. "Well, that would be a good idea," I said. "But the workers are only asking for one penny. It would be a huge help to them." Somehow I couldn't convince the girls that one penny was enough and no more was needed. After all, a penny's not a lot. Surely the price of a pound of tomatoes should factor in the cost of giving the person who picked it a dignified lifestyle. A penny sounds good for marketing purposes. It's just so pathetic that a company won't spend a penny per pound that it is a powerful tool for building up public pressure. This campaign has succeeded in forcing many businesses to sign agreements to pay a penny per pound. But it's hard to explain marketing to a group of little girls who are thinking about human rights.
In the end, a lot of our troop's entries went in saying things like "Please pay the workers $100!" One person drew a picture of a boss telling the worker that he could go home. I don't think she realized that the workers WANT to work. They just want to be paid well. I think she figured that if the job was so miserable that people could be beaten or kept as slaves that the workers would all want to leave the job and go somewhere else. She probably also didn't realize that they don't have anywhere else to go. If they did, they wouldn't be picking tomatoes. Hopefully, at least one Girl Scout stuck to the penny per pound idea enough to produce a good contest entry. It'd be a real thrill if one of our girls won! |
