Civil Eats Wins a James Beard Award for Coverage of Farmworker Heat Protections

Our reporting on the Fair Food Program, which offers protections to Florida workers and immigrants while the state bans them, came in first in the Health and Wellness category.

Associate Editor Christina Cooke, former Staff Reporter Grey Moran, and Editorial Director Margo True pictured at the James Beard Foundation Media Awards.

On Saturday night, in Chicago, surrounded by peers in the food and journalism worlds, Civil Eats won a 2025 James Beard Foundation Media Award for excellence. Former Staff Reporter Grey Moran’s deeply reported story “Florida Banned Farmworker Heat Protections. A Groundbreaking Partnership Offers a Solution” came in first in the Health and Wellness category.

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The Beard awards are widely considered to be the Oscars of the food world. The awards were established more than 30 years ago to honor the country’s top restaurants, chefs, cookbook authors, broadcasters, and journalists, and grew so large that the Media Awards is now a separate event, recognizing cookbooks, television shows, podcasts, print and online media, and more.

Moran’s incisive piece about Florida’s ban of farmworker heat protection s explored the Fair Food Program (FFP), a successful grassroots effort to implement alternative protections for Florida farmworkers.

Former Staff Reporter Grey Moran accepts a James Beard Foundation Media Award on Saturday for their win in the Health and Wellness category.

We’ve long reported on the FFP, an initiative of the state’s legendary Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which helps build equity, respect, and transparency into the food supply chain. The farmworkers draft their own workplace safety rules, reflecting the hazards they face in the workplace, and they can report any violations to a third-party council that is available around the clock. Consumers who buy food with the FFP certification can rest assured that those farmworkers have a say in implementing and defending their own rights as the threat of extreme heat deepens.

As Florida’s ban on worker heat protections went into effect, our story helped build momentum for this groundbreaking solution—not just in Florida, but anywhere workers lack legal protections from extreme heat and other hazards.

Following publication of Moran’s piece, a wave of articles extolling the Fair Food Program began to appear, including in Modern Farmer, NPR, an NBC affiliate in Southwest Florida, USA Today, and the national Latino radio network Radio Bilingue. Moran also discussed the story on two radio programs: KALW Public Media and Food Sleuth Radio.

The Civil Eats team was also nominated in the Columns and Newsletters category for The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. We create and send one of these mini-magazines every six weeks or so, building each around a single theme, with deeply reported feature stories, follow-ups on previously reported stories, sneak peeks at what our editors and reporters are working on, and more.

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Since 2009, the Civil Eats editorial team has published award-winning and groundbreaking news and commentary about the American food system, and worked to make complicated, underreported stories—on climate change, the environment, social justice, animal welfare, policy, health, nutrition, and the farm bill—more accessible to a mainstream audience. Read more >