Eating organic, avoiding food additives, championing family farms, supporting animal rights—none of these worthy practices will make the American food system healthy. As the authors of this book make clear, our food system has been built on and continues to profit from the exploitation of poor immigrant workers. Food warehouses, slaughterhouses, grocery stores, and fast food restaurants depend on a transient, low-paid, low-skilled, and powerless workforce. Fresh fruits and vegetables—the foundation of a good diet—are still harvested largely by hand, under working conditions so terrible they evoke the harsh fictions of John Steinbeck and Émile Zola. Will Work for Food follows this trail of injustice from farm to plate. Without providing fair wages, a safe workplace, and a sense of dignity to the people who work hard to feed us, our food system will never be ethical or sustainable.
-Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
So many of our intersecting contemporary crises—from climate disasters to public health emergencies to punitive immigration policies—underscore our dependence on and exploitation of front-line food workers. This insightful and clearly written book offers a prescient analysis of the production of worker precarity across the food system while attending to complex intersections with race, gender and citizenship. Most importantly, amidst these dire circumstances, Will Work for Food highlights the potential for systems-level, cross-sector organizing and coalition building that can broaden the political imaginaries of food and labor movements.
-Alison Hope Alkon, author of Nurturing Food Justice
This book is a remarkable synthesis of historical and current data, interwoven with brilliant and empathetic analysis of labor across the food chain. Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern and Teresa Mares ground the book in the firsthand experiences of people harvesting vegetables, slaughtering animals, cooking meals, “rescuing” wasted food, and everything in between. They encourage readers to widen their perspective of who “counts” as a food worker by using a food systems lens that encompasses both paid food work outside of the home and unpaid food work inside the home. The result is an invaluable and highly teachable resource, deeply engaging for students, scholars, consumers, workers, and activists eager to understand the conditions and organizing strategies of frontline food system workers.
-Jennifer Gaddis, author of The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools
