Stanford student raises awareness for farmworker 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."

Monday, August 3, 2020
Stanford student raises awareness for farm worker wages after getting $7 for picking 2 gallons of blueberries
EMBED <>More Videos

A Stanford student took a part-time, summer job on a blueberry farm, and is going viral after exposing how much the workers get paid.

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- 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.

RELATED: Podcast by Stanford seniors gives platform to stories of being Black, first generation college students

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.

Dion Lim, an anchor for ABC7 News in Northern California, 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, one of her brothers is an incoming junior at Bowdoin College and her youngest brother is an incoming freshman at the University of Washington.

RELATED: Relief fund set up for California farm workers amid COVID-19 pandemic