Most teens don't have the right to vote, but they've caught on to the power of the pocketbook [1]. Kids are choosing sweatshop free clothes and fair trade [1] chocolates as a way to advertise their activism. Evidently, it's become cool to care about the conditions facing farmers and factory workers.

"Paying farmers well is really important," eighth grader Emma Lewis told Christian Science Monitor reporter G. Jeffrey MacDonald, "because if we didn't have any unprocessed food, we'd all be living on Twinkies."

But Emma is as image-conscious as she is socially conscious. "If I were to come into school with a Coke, I wouldn't feel as cool as if I came in with a mango-tango smoothie. Looking healthy and being healthy makes you, like, feel good and feel like you look good."

Summer Rayne Oakes, a model and promoter of fair trade fashions who's fresh out of college herself, told MacDonald, "My generation has come to terms with the fact that we're all consumers, and we all buy something...what are the consequences? Who am I affecting on the planet?"

MacDonald reports that marketers are finding ways to tap into the desire many kids have to make a difference. Equal Exchange, an importer of fair trade coffee, launched a line of fair trade cocoa and chocolate bars to sell to the pre-caffeine teen set. Now teens are turning around and selling the chocolate bars themselves, at school fundraisers.

It's great that kids are thinking about the consequences of their choices as consumers, but fundraising with fair trade chocolate presents a bit of a conundrum. After all, I wrote a post back in February, Kids Say No to Candy Sales, in which I commended a group of fourth and fifth graders for refusing to finance a field trip by peddling candy.

So the question, now, is; is it OK for kids to fundraise with candy, as long as it's fair trade candy? And, does it have to be anti-oxidant rich dark chocolate, or is milk chocolate OK, too? How come we never see Seth and Summer grappling with this issue on The O.C.?