Looking for Work: Placing Labor in Food Studies

Abstract

Michael Pollan tells us to do a lot of things. He tells us to cook, to eat more plants, to embody our grandmothers in our food choices, to care about where our food comes from. Though lesser known than his witty axioms on what to eat, Pollan's more recent writings tell us that the price of our food is deeply problematic: that laborers in our food system are not paid a fair wage. As individual consumers, we cannot forage, shoot, or buy our way out of this problem, as much of what we consume is picked, packaged, and served by low-wage workers. Pollan's recent attention to labor follows the growth of food activism focused on improving the lives of a marginalized and largely immigrant workforce, particularly in the area of compensation. For example, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), an organization of tomato growers in southern Florida, has effectively worked to pressure large corporate buyers-from Walmart to Taco Bell-to pay a penny more for each pound of tomatoes they purchase. This has translated not only into reduced harassment and added work breaks but also into an appreciable increase in the per-week take-home pay of each farmworker. 1 During the late 2013 restaurant workers' strike, in a MoveOn.org petition that garnered millions of signatures, Pollan wrote: As a society, we've trapped ourselves in a kind of reverse Fordism. Instead of paying workers well enough so that they can afford good, honestly-priced products-as Henry Ford endeavored to do so that his workers might afford to buy his cars-we pay them so little that the only food they can afford is junk food destructive of their health and the environment's. If we are ever to right this wrong, to produce food sustainably and justly and sell it at an honest price, we will first have to pay people a 1. A "fair food" label will emboss these CIW-produced tomatoes, thus situating the CIW tomato campaign within larger programs for nonstate and neoliberal agricultural governance; see Sandy Brown and Christy Getz, "

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

“…Heeding the calls of recent food movement figures and researchers (Alkon, 2014;Besky & Brown, 2015;Bittman, 2014;Pollan, 2013) to attune more closely to issues of wage labor in the food system, this analysis has examined the communicative strategies used by restaurant workers to narrativize and frame their experience as food system workers living off tipped wages. In this way, #LivingOff-Tips stories intervene in conventional interpretive schema of tips and/or tipping (as a gratuity or a bonus, not a subsidized wage), the nature of dining establishments (as not pristine, but actual breeding grounds for disease), as well as of servers themselves (vulnerable employees, not sexual objects), all of which are connected to the subminimum wage regime.…”

“…Much of the critical public and academic scholarship on agrifood politics critiques primarily the modern corporatized food system (Besky & Brown, 2015;Fairbairn, 2012;Sbicca, 2015) in which, indeed, restaurant staff participate. Recent calls from prominent figures, including Allison Hope Alkon (2014), Mark Bittman (2014), and Michael Pollan (2013, to bring attention to and re-emphasize issues of wage labor in the agrifood movement agenda are promising.…”

Introduction toAccounting for Taste

“…Note 1. For a review of the role of labor scholarship within food studies see Besky and Brown (2015).…”

The question of ‘alternatives’ within food and drink markets and marketing: introduction to the special issue

“…conventional market; similarly, fair trade products are now widely available, questioning their alterity and ethical positioning (Besky & Brown, 2015;Goodman et al, 2010). Both fair trade and organic produce rely on a narrative of alternativeness, while their production is often underpinned by a more conventional structure.…”

“…Both fair trade and organic produce rely on a narrative of alternativeness, while their production is often underpinned by a more conventional structure. Despite the intention to redefine the terms of trade, the fair trade premium does not always reach the low-paid wage labourers engaged in producing it (Besky & Brown, 2015;Cramer, Johnston, Oya, & Sender, 2014); yet consumers can expect to see pictures of smiling producers adorning their packaging. The conventionalisation of alternative market offerings and the appropriation of their message in marketing material underline the demand for continued scholarly attention.…”