Fair Trade & Social Justice

There's a price war raging in the grocery aisle—but the people who actually grow and gather our food may be the battle's true losers. Meet the produce pickers of Texas's Rio Grande Valley, whose penny-per-bunch harvest helps stock your pantry for less. Our food is cheap—by some measures, cheaper than it’s ever been. But the inexpensive supermarket fare that consumers now expect doesn’t come without a hidden human cost.

Most of us wish we could eat with the confidence that everything on our plate has a story we can feel good about, a story about taking care of both people and the environment. In the food system (as elsewhere) these twin issues, justice and sustainability, have often been talked about as if they were unrelated, independent problems with separate solutions.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - February 7, 2019 - Food & Water Watch and Organic Consumers Association (OCA) have sued Pilgrim’s Pride Corp. for deceptive marketing and advertising of Pilgrim’s Pride chicken products. The suit was brought in D.C. Superior Court, under the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act.

Nonprofits Food & Water Watch and OCA, represented by Richman Law Group and Animal Equality, allege that Pilgrim’s falsely claims that the birds used in its products are fed “only natural ingredients,” “treated humanely” and produced in an environmentally

Highland Park, Mich., is a small, majority-black community with some of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the country. It’s suffered a series of indignities and setbacks over the years: a state emergency management takeover of the city and surrounding areas; a state takeover of the public water infrastructure; and a collapse of tax revenue fueled by white flight, fossil-fuel-driven suburban development, and the decline of the housing market and auto industries.