These first few weeks of the second Trump administration have been marked by an onslaught of executive orders targeting the federal workforce, global development assistance, queer and trans rights, scientific research and policies holding up and recognizing the contributions of diverse communities to American history and culture. Many of these have already been the subject of lawsuits and injunctions, though it’s not clear if the administration will back down or rush into a full-fledged constitutional crisis. It’s easy to feel spun by it all, and perhaps that is the larger point.
Folks who care about and support the food and farming sector, whether farmers, others who work in the industry, or advocates for social and environmental justice might be most outraged by the cancellation of legally binding funding for farming conservation programs, or the food that was destined to become international aid, but is currently rotting in warehouses because of cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
But we also need to focus our resistance on support for some Trump’s most consistent and troubling targets—the roughly 14 million undocumented workers on whose labor we all depend. There is a clear line from his initial declaration of candidacy in 2015, when he rode down an escalator to warn us that Mexican immigrants were rapists brining drugs and crime to the recent transfer of shackled undocumented individuals to the Guantanamo Bay Prison made infamous by the photographic evidence of tortured detainees during the war on terror.
Last week, undocumented students and their allies at my university, University of California Santa Cruz, staged a one-day walk-out demanding material support from the university, including access to on-campus housing, increased food resources and other basic needs, and equitable access to campus work opportunities. Among the calls for “education not deportation” and pledges of non-cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was a sign with two traced hands that read “Don’t bite the hands that feed you.” This could be taken as a metaphor for all of the various ways that we depend on undocumented workers, or it could be literal.
According to the Center for American Progress, just under 1.7 million of these workers are employed in the food sector—cultivating our produce, manufacturing our processed foods, slaughtering our meat and bussing our tables. After the inauguration, there were speculative reports that many of these workers would not show up out of fear of ICE raids and deportation, bringing the food industry to its knees. While these reports were exaggerated, they underscore the degree to which our food system, from farms to processing to grocery and restaurant work, depend on undocumented workers. Agriculture is particularly notorious for the egregiously cruel treatment of these workers, including low pay, lack of basic health protections, rampant sexual assault and, in at least one instance, literal imprisonment in a labor camp surrounded by barbed wire. The threat of deportation looms over worker efforts to organize, though the remarkable struggles of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers demonstrate enormous courage and skill amidst these horrors.
It should not take much to convince those of us who work to create more sustainable and just food systems that the humane treatment of food workers, including a pathway to citizenship, is an essential part of our struggle. But in the 20 years I’ve been studying and advocating for a racial justice perspective on food systems, workers’ rights have too-often been treated as tangential. Many of us come to the food movement out of health and environmental concerns. And, of course, those are important reasons to support the creation of local and organic food systems.
Increasingly, the food movement has also come to embrace and sometimes even center issues of racial justice. We have evolved from a movement that finds its power in individual consumption and voting with your fork to one that understands the link between food apartheid and diet-related health disparities. We’ve learned why Black farmers call the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) the “last plantation” and have advocated for increased support for Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Asian farmers. But even as food justice becomes a more prominent theme within food movement advocacy, support for workers remains at the margins. Perhaps this is because so much of the movement has focused on supporting farmers and helping to address their financial needs. Increasing labor costs and benefits are in tension with these needs, even among the most sustainable, ethical and diverse farm owners.
In their new book, Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food System, Laura-Anne Minkoff Zern and Teresa Mares explore working conditions in seven sectors of front-line food labor, ranging from production agriculture to waste removal. They describe massive exploitation, with women, BIPOC and undocumented workers facing the most violent conditions. But they also celebrate the victories and potential for cross-sector organizing—organizing that targets those firms that make the most money in the food system rather than only immediate employers. Most food activists know that the lion’s share of money spent on food goes not to the producer, but to the corporate-owned processors, grocery stores and restaurants. The efforts of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are illustrative here, in that they won concessions from those who sell the food as well as those who grow it. Minkoff-Zern and Mares put forward a vision of food labor organizing that could garner increased support from small and mid-sized sustainable farmers, and those who love them. By targeting the increasingly consolidated corporate actors that food activists have long opposed, they offer new opportunities for alliances. And indeed, this is an essential moment to resist consolidated corporate power as it flexes its growing political muscle.
What first drew me to food activism more than 20 years ago was how expansive its worldview was, how its vision of working with ecological wisdom could color so many aspects of our lives, from the ways we worked to the ways we gathered and built community. Today, the values of social and environmental justice that animate this vision are under attack from so many directions. As we stand up against cuts to food and agriculture businesses and research, it’s important that we also center the lives and livelihoods of workers who are essential to our sustenance, and remember not to bit the hands that feed us.
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Photo courtesy of Tim Mossholder, Unsplash
