I grew up in a Christian tradition that regularly talked about extreme heat, but it was always about hell. You didn’t want to go to hell, because hell was hot.
Now, when I think about extreme heat, I think about the people whose bodies are already paying the price. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says extreme heat is the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States, contributing to more than 14,000 deaths since 1979. As temperatures rise, heat-related illnesses and deaths are increasing. The World Health Organization reports that between 2000 and 2019, 489,000 heat-related deaths occurred each year worldwide. Working in extreme heat is its own type of hell, one that can kill you.
On the Asian and African continents, home to some of the hottest places in the world, temperatures can make outdoor work unbearable. Here in the United States, we are still dodging the most severe impacts of extreme heat, but you don’t have to travel internationally to experience the effects of climate change. And the people who keep our food system running are often the same people we’ve decided we can look past.
According to a 2024 report from the Baker Institute, the agricultural system remains the labor sector with the highest proportion of undocumented workers, representing anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of the labor force. It translates into as many as 1.7 million people. Agricultural workers are also more than 35 times more likely to die from exposure to extreme heat than workers from all other sectors combined.
Without the people who are willing to work in the literal hell of extreme heat, for less than a living wage, no one eats.
“Give us this day our daily bread”
Every Sunday, as part of the liturgy during my faith community’s worship service, we say the Lord’s Prayer. It’s so familiar it can be recited without giving a second thought to what it truly means. But daily bread isn’t metaphorical to the people who harvest it. Daily bread is bodies in fields. Daily bread is heat. Daily bread is risk. Daily bread can mean both life and death.
Growing food is hard. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. If growing food were easy, we would have a food system that wasn’t built on the backs of enslaved people and immigrants, many of them undocumented. Bernardo R. Vargas’ essay “When Eating Fruits and Vegetables Hurts: Viewing Mexican, Latinx, and Indigenous Farm Labor as Racial Extractivism”—from Food Fight: How What We Eat is Weaponized (The Pilgrim Press), edited by Miguel De La Torre—details the failed immigration policies that have turned a blind eye to employers hiring undocumented workers, policies that have at times even encouraged it.
It’s racial narcissism to cry for the deportation of the same people who ensure you eat. It’s also a system that calls agricultural labor cheap. However, if we were to attach a living wage to agricultural work, the vast majority of the American population wouldn’t be able to afford to eat. This is the truth I have to keep from shouting when people talk about “cheap food” like it’s a blessing instead of a warning label.
Even with the best planning, plants and crop yields are negatively impacted by extreme heat, and crop workers are dying. With more than 50 percent of U.S. crops being harvested by hand, because for some varieties of produce, there is simply no other way, I’ve found myself wondering on more than one occasion: Did the person who harvested the produce I’m consuming get paid a living wage? Did someone have to die so that I could eat? Are the meats, seafoods, and produce acquired or harvested in a manner that is sustainable and that honors the life organisms lived on the Earth?
If there is no scarcity of land that could be used for food production in the United States, what are we doing? What am I doing to ensure that everybody eats?
Liberating labor
While growing food is hard, it is also liberative. I grow food. Kirk Franklin’s song “Strong God” has become part of my personal anthem. “We won’t sleep ’til everybody eats,” the song lyrics say. The song advocates for the least of these: the poor, the marginalized, the disenfranchised, the dispossessed.
A liberative theology of food means that we won’t sleep until everyone eats. It means we won’t stop working for the transformation the system needs. Everyone has the right to a living wage. No one toils in the heat without access to cooling and water. A liberative theology of food recognizes extreme heat as a crisis impacting all of us and names the divinity of those marginalized people living on the fringes of our society who are doing the work that enables all of us to live our healthiest lives—if we can afford to do so.
In the summer of 2010, I was a broke graduate student and working two jobs while in school. As I came up short in funds at the end of every month, I pedaled my bicycle to social services to save the gas in my car. I sat in the social services office until they called me and then waited while the social worker crunched the numbers. She told me that I made about 50 dollars too much money to qualify for any assistance.
I asked her if that meant I was supposed to work less. She said if I worked less, I would only qualify for about $20 a month in what used to be called food stamps. I felt a lump rise in my throat. Then she told me that I might qualify for more if I had a baby. In shock, I fought back tears while listening to all the things she said I would qualify for if I had a baby. She then suggested I have a baby. I continued blinking back tears as I rode my bike home. I called my parents. They provided me with a safety net that millions of Americans and people living around the world are lacking. I used some of the money they provided to buy seeds. It’s the summer my liberation started.
“Forgive us our trespasses”
Not everyone has access to the resources they need to buy seeds and start growing food, however. A liberative theology of food would address this. It would point to a society in which we all have equal access to healthy food, and equal opportunities to care for our bodies. It would also point to the truth that we depend on one another to survive. How can we thank God for the gift of food and think of it as a blessing while ignoring the hardships of those who labored to produce that food?
A liberative theology of food would also reorient us toward our dependency on the whole of creation. We need the Earth in order to survive. But the Earth doesn’t need us. In fact, the Earth would be better off without us. Our consumptive desires are doing harm to the very network on which we rely. Recognizing this should remind us to adopt a posture of humility, not triumphalism.
When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask God to forgive us our trespasses. How have we trespassed against those who produce for us our daily bread? And how have we trespassed against the Earth itself?
I consider God both creator and creation. And sometimes I wonder whether creation can and will forgive us for our trespasses against her.
This article also appears in the April 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 4, page 16-17). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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