Tips for eating with a conscience with an eye toward improving the
health of the individual, the community and the world.
“We are as vulnerable as the eroding topsoil if we do not enrich ourselves with knowledge about our food system, and then share such knowledge with others.”
-Wes Jackson
Being thoughtful about how the food we eat is produced is in keeping with our Unitarian Universalist principles of justice, equity and compassion in human relations and respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
Many of the foods we take for granted are grown or harvested by underpaid or slave laborers, including children. This page provides resources for finding ethically produced products.
What is “Fair Trade”?
To receive the fair trade label, a product has to comply with standards all along the supply chain – including producers, traders and wholesalers. Small farmers are required to be organized in cooperatives or other groups that allow democratic participation. Plantations and factories can use the fair trade label if employers pay their workers decent wages, comply with health, safety and environmental standards, allow workers to join unions or other forms of associations, provide good housing if workers are not living at home, and do not use child labor or forced labor.
Companies must ensure that the additional revenue generated by receiving fair trade prices for the products is used for the benefit of the workers. To date, fair trade certification has been granted to coffee, tea, cocoa, rice, juices, sugar, spices, herbs, cotton, flowers, honey, wine, rum, bananas, mangoes, pineapple and a variety of other fresh and dried fruit.
Chocolate
The world’s largest supplier of cocoa beans is Ivory Coast – 43% of the world’s supply comes from this west African country. Hundred of thousands of children are bought or kidnapped to work as slaves on cocoa farms there. Buy your chocolate from companies who produce chocolate that has NOT been produced by slave labor, including:
Clif Bar, Equal Exchange, Green and Black’s, John & Kira’s, Newman’s Own Organics, The Endangered Species Chocolate and Theo Chocolate. Read more about this in an article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-robbins/is-there-child-slavery-in_b_737737.html .