Stanford student raises awareness for farm worker wages after getting $7 for picking 2 gallons of blueberries
"It's so easy to serve your fruit not knowing where those blueberries come from," she said. "There's a workforce with people with dreams and hope behind every food you eat."
PALO ALTO, Calif. (KGO) -- Incoming Stanford medical student, Gianna Nino, is raising awareness for farmworkers through her own experience picking in the fields in a tweet that has gone viral.
Gianna got her masters in epidemiology and before her fall semester started, wanted to apply for a summer job doing contact tracing.
Unsuccessful in the job hunt and also unable to secure a position working in retail, she followed in her family's footsteps and started picking blueberries at farms around the Bay Area.
In the tweet, Gianna wrote "I'm about to finish up my time in the fields, and wanted everyone to know that we (farmworkers) are paid $7 for two gallons of blueberries. How much do you pay for your blueberries?"
The tweet went viral with more than a quarter-million likes.
ABC7 News anchor Dion Lim asked Gianna what her goal was with the tweet.
She responded that it was for others to "become aware of the hands that feed you... humanizing the people behind that. It's so easy to serve your fruit not knowing where those blueberries come from. There's a workforce with people with dreams and hope behind every food you eat."
Gianna's sister graduated this past spring from Brown University, another of her brothers is an incoming junior at Bowdoin College and her youngest brother is an incoming freshman at the University of Washington.
