« Got Shavuot? (Or, Blintzing the Receiver)
Ramps* and Circumstance »

Fair Language

by Anna Stevenson · May 17th, 2007
Fair Trade

I picked up a chocolate bar in the checkout line the other day. It had sleek packaging, and the offer of “dark chocolate with orange” was enticing. As was the Fair Trade symbol, which was prominently displayed on the front of the bar. Great, I thought, I’m sold.

Unwrapping the chocolate later (are you drooling yet? it was good, but I’m not going to elaborate on the taste, since I have a different bone to chew), I had the opportunity to peruse smiling faces of Latin American farmers, and read the careful literature on What Is Fair Trade and The Fair Trade Difference and Chocolate with a Smile, etc. etc. etc.

I give us as a society (and my local supermarket as a provider) points for valuing Fair Trade chocolate. But you know what would REALLY signify to me that we have ‘arrived’ in a new era of sustainable healthy global food supply?

If you didn’t need the description at all.

Think about it. You don’t see products with a hekhsher also sporting carefully worded literature on how this hekhschered product will enable you to keep a kosher home and raise a family of torah scholars!

We may still be far from all chocolate being Fair Trade, so for now the labels are useful (and the black and white balanced scales logo is hot, really). But I’d love to cut the bucolic sentimental earnest justification language. (And with it, I’d also like to cut green, “earthy” fonts that look sort of shredded, and pictures of children running through fields of wheat on cereal boxes — how many children do you know who run through fields of wheat?!) I firmly maintain that when you buy food you are buying more than just the product — you are buying the world in which that product was made — but I guess I just wish it didn’t have to be so cheesy. Sappy descriptions makes it easier to trivialise the whole thing.

And so if someone picks up a chocolate bar with that logo in the corner, and they don’t know what it means, let them turn to their neighbor in line, and ask them about it, and start a conversation, which they continue after they’ve both checked out and are walking out of the store, spoiling their appetite on good, Fair Trade, (insert no more adjectives here) chocolate.

Print this post

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Fair Language”

  1. Rabbi Avi Finegold Says:
    May 17th, 2007 at 7:46 am

    Though in all fairness most people don’t know what the kosher symbols are or even what kosher is. The OU or Whatever-K is yet another part of the dizzying amount of information thats on the label. The fair trade logo Is likely somewhat more informative since the person can at least read the words fair trade and look it up if it really intrigued them. I do wish for a world though where we can turn around and ask a person behind us in line about things like this.

  2. Ben Corey-Moran Says:
    May 17th, 2007 at 3:06 pm

    Right on Anna!

    As a long-time fair trade coffee buyer, farmer co-op advisor, and marketeer I’ve certainly struggled through the weaving of the perfect, appealing, truthful fair trade narrative. It’s not easy to transform the market from the inside out, you’ve got to do a lot of education, some preaching, and some say a good deal of guilt-tripping when necessary. Nine years after fair trade certification launched in the US, we’ve successfully developed a pretty neatly packaged little description of what we do, and why it matters. The fair trade market is growing. But at what cost?

    One, there’s the cost to the farmers, for whom this work is intended to benefit. Certification costs for fair trade (and organic) are significant, and while certification creates value (market access, higher prices) it reduces the return to farmers, and consequently the benefit of this alternative trading system. The question you ask is the one we should keep in mind as we watch this thing grow up: why does the good work bear the burden for labelling their goodness, while the exploitativde/unjust/ecologically damaging models get to rest in the luxury of being “status quo”? I say let’s work towards building a truly democratic global economy where the companies who oppress, pollute, and destroy bear the burden of explaining themselves to us.

    Second, and this is worries me more and more every day…what happens when this complicated, revolutionary, and imperfect model of trade successfully condenses intself into something with mass-market appeal? Like many of the alternatives which came before, what’s to stop the powers that are from co-opting the language, look, and feel, and turning something dynamic into something static, never mind the future we have yet to create with this model only in its infancy…Is our consumer culture really ready for revolution, or maybe just a little more of the same self gratification?

  3. Anna Stevenson Says:
    May 17th, 2007 at 7:37 pm

    Hear hear! Well put. Thanks so much for your comments. I first learned about Thanksgiving Coffee when I was doing a research project in college about coffee and eco-labels — you do good work - even if the territory is indeed complicated. Many thanks.

Leave a Reply

Peace Now

Join us for Hazon's Food Conference: Click here for more info

Advertise on The Jew & The Carrot