#LivingOffTips: Reframing Food System Labor Through Tipped Workers' Narratives of Subminimum Wage Exploitation

Abstract

Agrifood movement literature largely represents food system labor through images, descriptions, and depictions of farm workers and other agriculture-related labor, such as slaughtering and meatpacking.

Food justice: cultivating the field

“…Scholarship investigating inequalities in food access often notes that the barriers to healthy eating for low-income families (and for communities of color) have more to do with economic and structural factors rather than with knowledge about nutrition (Allen 2004, Kato and McKinney 2015, Krokowski 2016, Lambert-Pennington and Hicks 2016. Other articles document the ways that marginalized classes, such as prisoners and sub-minimum wage food workers, push back against oppressive systems through alternative practices (Sbicca 2016, Hunt 2015.…”

“…Policy (local, state, or national) was the primary topic of ten articles and books (5% of the sample) and was a key factor in a total of 70 (35% of the sample). Most articles examining policy assessed the work of food system planners or food policy councils (Eckert and Shetty 2011, Warshawsky 2010, Scherb et al 2016 or social movement campaigns for worker rights or anti-hunger policies (Brown and Getz 2008, Lo and Jacobson 2011, Hunt 2015, Myers and Sbicca 2015, Shannon 2016. Land use was the primary topic of five publications (2.5% of the sample) and was a key factor in 66 (33% of the sample).…”

Reform, Justice, and Sovereignty: A Food Systems Agenda for Environmental Communication

“…It is true that "every day we eat the world" (Opel et al, 2010, p. 251), yet the privilege and power imminent to our food systems engenders hunger and inequitable food access (Cherry-Chandler, 2009;Hunt, 2016). Global flows of comestible capital, (re)directed through neoliberal development policies modulate food security in ways that bolster and obscure relations of economy and ecology (Dutta, Hingson, Anaele, Sen, Soumitro, & Jones, 2016;Ivancic, 2017).…”

“…Reform can be organized at various scales, which necessarily requires navigating diverse interests while remaining open to the ways compromise is communicatively enacted. For example, these efforts can reveal constructions of space and place (Galt, Gray, & Hurley, 2014;Harris, 2010), and by investigating how nodes in the food chain are linked, this orientation can also problematize taken for granted economic categories such as labor (Hunt, 2016;Sbicca, 2015) and surplus food distribution (Poppendieck, 2008;Tarasuk & Eakin, 2005).…”

The labor between farm and table: Cultivating an urban political ecology of agrifood for the 21st century

“…However, a review of this scholarship reveals that the focus on labor in critical food studies is predominantly on agricultural work, with food systems labor often functioning as a synonym for farmwork or agricultural production. Privileging agricultural labor—both within alternative food movement discourse and the scholarship that critiques it—reinforces the “agrarian imaginary” and renders invisible the workers whom urban dwellers are most likely to come into contact with on a regular basis: the food retail and foodservice workers who stock, bag, prepare, and serve food (Hunt, ). A more holistic approach, with insight from UPE, would go far toward capturing this “missing middle” (Moragues‐Faus & Marsden, ) and interrogating the exploitative relations and contradictions that underlie the entire food system, from the farm all the way to table.…”