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Human Rights from Field to Fork awareness resources

Developed in collaboration with the Food Chain Workers Aliance (FCWA), Human Rights from Field to Fork is an effort to raise awareness and to mobilize UUSC members and supporters in support of the rights of workers in the food sector. As part of UUSC's wider campaign to Choose Compassionate Consumption, we offer this collection of tools for learning about lives of food-chain workers and their struggle for justice.

Who's behind your food?

This Thanksgiving, as you reflect on your blessings, you can learn and educate others about the lives of workers in the food system. These activities and resources below provide some simple ways to understand and support them in their struggle for justice.

Put on a workshop

The workshop helps guide you through the learning process in a group setting, and it makes use of all the other items listed here. Those items, like the handout, postcard, and action sheet can also be used separately, outside of workshops, for independent learning or awareness raising.

Get your congregation involved

Bring the message of Human Rights from Field to Fork to your congregation during the Thanksgiving season with this bulletin/order of service insert. Use it to promote your workshop, or to allow your congregation members to explore the issue on their own.

  • Editable Word version [DOC]
    This sample bulletin insert is provided as a Word document so you can customize it for your needs. If you are holding a workshop on justice for food workers, type in the date, place, and time to announce the event.
  • PDF version [PDF]
    Print and cut these double-sided 5½" x 8½" bulletin inserts

UUSC has also created sample lesson plans for youth groups and religious-education classes that educators can use to engage people in understanding their connection to compassionate consumption through the Human Rights from Field to Fork project.

More about food-chain workers and the food industry

Food is interconnected with fundamental economic, political, social, and cultural aspects of our society. Food is woven into our communities through gatherings of family and friends and is central to our spiritual celebrations and rituals. The way we eat reflects personal habits and choices, as well as collective societal ones.

With each bite we consume, we are connected to people near and far on whom we depend daily to plant, harvest, process, pack, transport, prepare, serve, and sell our food. Yet five out of eight of the worst-paying jobs in the United States are in the food system, and food workers face some of the most difficult and dangerous working conditions.

UUSC's Economic Justice Program promotes the rights of food workers in a number of ways, including working to improve the conditions of poultry-processing workers, raise the wages of restaurant workers, strengthen a pecan-processing cooperative run by African-American women in Georgia, and engage UU congregations in fair trade.

If we explore in greater depth where our food comes from, we begin not only to uncover realities of the working conditions in which it is produced, but also to make connections to other issues such as food sovereignty, sustainable agriculture, climate change, and more. In 2008, delegates at the 2008 Unitarian Universalist General Assembly selected ethical eating as the 2008-2012 Congregational Study/Action Issue (CSAI) of the UUA.

In the United States alone, 20 million people work in the food system, which is built on the cheap or slave labor of mostly people of color and immigrants, who are among the lowest-income and most exploited workers. UUSC is collaborating with the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) to advance the rights of workers in the food system so they can work in dignity for a living wage and organize in defense of their labor rights. We hope you will join us by learning about this effort and taking action to make a difference for economic justice.

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