Lori A. Flores, "Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19" (UNC Press, 2025)

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We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that to love the forum and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome back to New Books in Food. I'm your host, Kelly Spivey. Now I would imagine that most of us struggle to figure out what's for dinner, much less how it got to our plate. And I would also venture to guess that we want to cook and eat food that is familiar to us, comforting to us, especially at the end of a long work day. And for those of us who are far from home, we especially want our food. Today's guest addresses many of these concerns from the perspective of Latinx workers, many of whom produce most of what we eat. And when I say most, I mean everything from fruits and vegetables to milk and seafood. Laurie Flores is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University. Her research and teaching interests include Modern American and U.S. Latinx history, labor, immigration, borderlands, oral history and food history. She is the Director of Stony Brook's Latinx American and Caribbean Studies Center and Program, and the Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Laurie, I'd like to welcome you today to talk about your recently published book awaiting their feast, Latinx food workers and activism from World War II to COVID-19. Yeah, I just, I kind of just want to dive right in. Let's do it. Okay. So, the first thing I'd like to ask is, what is your connection to the subject, you know, that made you want to write a book about Latinx workers? My connection to this topic and this book and why I felt so strongly about it was my first book grounds for dreaming was about California and specifically the farm worker movement pre-Cesar Chavez. So pre the Civil Rights period where more of the United States started paying attention to issues of labor and hunger and malnutrition, ironic malnutrition in the very population that was helping to get us our food. And in writing that book, I definitely was able to tell the story of a place I lived at the time. I was in California for graduate school and the Salinas Valley was a place that I got to know really well. But in the interim, between the first and the second book, I had moved to the Northeast. I had taught in both Maine and New York by that point and I was meeting very different types of students, very different types of Latino communities in this new region that I was living in. And so I knew that for what would become this book, I wanted to still play on my strong suits of labor history and I still had things to say about farm worker history. I find it endlessly rich and fascinating. But I knew that I needed something to carry me through the next few years because writing and researching a book takes so long. And so I knew I wanted to make it a little bit more capacious. I knew I wanted to make it something that could teach me more about the new place that I was living. And I thought to myself, well, if I looked at the larger food chain, if I looked at labor in many different stages of food production and not just harvesting and cultivation, then I could learn more myself as somebody who should challenge herself constantly to keep learning and to keep growing in terms of what I can teach and offer my students in what I know. And then I would also become more exposed to the Latinx Northeast in a way that I think if I didn't focus on it in this book, I still would have a lot of gaps in my knowledge of how food works here. And just how much Latino, Latinx people have really not just contributed their labor because I didn't want to make them seem just like workers in this book, in awaiting their feast, but as fuller people in that. So they've not only changed the labor systems when it comes to our food chain, but they've really brought a sense of vitality, entrepreneurship, creativity in the culinary world, but also other worlds. And they've truly shaped the Northeast in ways that I don't think a lot of people realize. So that's how I got invested in the topic is by trying to challenge myself to think bigger and to write bigger and to learn more. And so it also forced me to start reading in food studies too, which is a fascinating field in multidisciplinary and oftentimes historians don't dialogue with other disciplines. And food studies taught me a lot about how to approach this work. Can you say a little more about that? What do you feel like you took from food studies that helped you tell this story in a different way? Well, food studies and the scholars who have been in that field have taught me a lot about how to be more mindful of the terms I'm using. So I think when it comes to the language of history, we might use certain words like authenticity or take for granted that somebody, when they say something's authentic, we just repeat those words or quote them and then move on. And I think early on when I had food studies scholars reading drafts of this work, they really wanted me to explain and to problematize what that word meant and what it has historically meant and what it continues to mean to people. And so I think the pushes that food studies readers have given me as I've worked on this book have been really helpful because it's been able to get me to actually explain what I mean, treat it as a problematic term at times, treat it as sort of an impossible concept at times that authenticity itself is not something that's stayed stable throughout the course of history and over the course of people's movements and interactions with each other. So that was an early example of what food studies taught me. And then of course the commodity approach of a lot of food studies work definitely informed the way that the chapters of the book play out because oftentimes the case studies in the chapters are centered around a thing or an ingredient that goes into a lot of dishes that we use, whether it's a type of seafood or dairy or something else, you know, vegetables as in chapter one. And so while I don't take the same type of approach of following a commodity from beginning to end, I think what food studies really inspired me to do is to be more lyrical with the ways in which I was talking about both the labor and the thing itself that the labor is helping to create and distribute. So those are a couple of things I can think of the top of my head, but I think now I am so much more aware and appreciative of what the field can teach historians. I always knew vaguely that it could. And then in writing this book, I definitely know that I can bring this and should bring this more into my writing and my teaching and my classrooms. I got the sense reading the book as you say you sort of organize around certain commodities like milk, wine, grapes, frankly, everything because there is nothing untouched by Latinx workers. And I think for me, the thing by doing that, it is inescapable. It becomes very, very clear that this is a fact of everything that we eat, everything that we drink. Everything we are taking in is provided to us by people that are marginalized and hidden. For the most part, it seems. And undergoing very direct and violent xenophobia, not just now, but in previous periods. It's often and everywhere. It hasn't left, like you said, any region of the United States untouched. This is a population of people that, like any other population, is very diverse, heterogeneous, made up of multiple nationalities, multiracial profiles, multilingual profiles of people. And I think with the Northeast, what also made me want to write about this region is that the Northeast is often mythologized as this white place and that it still has this whiteness to the labor that goes behind a lot of its products, especially when we think of artisanal cultures in Vermont or New Hampshire or Maine, lobster, maple syrup, apple cider, you know, upstate New York, Hudson Valley, you know, those images of those places and pastoral Vermont with artisanal cheese and dairy products too. I think there is still this mythology of the native born, multigenerational, white American family who's still behind a lot of these commodities. And yes, you will still find that local population threaded in there. But for the most part, a lot of what is brought to us, that gives us that sense of bucolic escape, especially during the fall in the winter, is powered by U.S. Latino or Latin American or Caribbean labor. And when I realized the scale at which that was happening, it was very eye-opening for me, again, something I vaguely knew, you know, but now I know I had to prove it. And through the different chapters in the book, I hope that I show it consistently enough that people like you say to themselves, "Wow, it really is part and parcel of American food." I was in a job interview many years ago and someone asked me, "Could you teach American history but just without the Latinos?" As if they were some sort of like elective group that could be left out of the story. And back then, I was so uncomfortable with this question and so horrified by it. And I still think in many ways, in our current world, people are still asking for that. They're still asking for it to be optional, for it to be elective, for it to be pushed to the side, for it to be ignored. And I hope what the book does is take one of the most basic needs that we all have to eat and to have food in our possession and help people realize just how essential Latinx communities have been to that very reality. I'm just horrified that somebody asked you like, "I kind of can't get over that." But. Well, the fact that it's still in memory means I, you know, it powered a lot of what I do, like why I do what I do because it's like this is not an elective. This is not elective to take. It's choosing your own reality, I guess, is where we're at. So I want to talk about with marginalized hidden populations, especially with the immigration situation, which is extremely complicated. How do you go about doing research for something like this? Because I can imagine that there's not much in the archives from first-person narratives or first-person documents. How did you put all this together? It's really hard, like you said, very, very complicated. And this is another reality of our food system is that it draws upon people of so many different citizenship and migration statuses that it makes it an arduous task to try to not only enumerate people as being there, you know, in the system, but it also makes it really hard to try to parse them out as communities on their own who deserve the respect and the time and the space and the study, because not everybody has the same amount of visibility as you said in the archive. So often what I would find in the early stages of my research when I was in the archives was people are often only recognized as people when something happens to them at work. So an injury, an accident, a death, a labor strike, maybe. But in most cases, it's often when something horrible has happened to them or something debilitating. And then that's when they appear in the historical record. So I had to reckon with the fact that that was how I was getting a lot of my information. And so I had to supplement it with interviewing people in the now, right now, and asking them either about their own histories as workers in the food system or asking them about their parents if they were descendants and their parents were no longer with us. And so when I was doing this research and the interviewing, it was during the first year of the pandemic, I couldn't go up to research sites and talk with people. I didn't feel comfortable for my own health and then of course for theirs too. So we were often doing this on Zoom or on phone calls. And what I love about oral history work is that in-person energy and relationship that you can create with people. So unfortunately we lost out on that chemistry of the whole experience. But that's what made it all the more generous and I appreciated it all the more because in such a hard time, I still had people who were willing to talk with me. Many people I understood did not want to and could not just because they were afraid of their own precarious status. And so they didn't want to be identified or simply they didn't have the time because they had to work and try to piece together a living. And so the people who I talked to the most, I would say, are people who perhaps used to be in a precarious immigration position or status and who had now achieved a place, a secure enough place to be an advocate for those laboring populations. So oftentimes I got interviews with people who were running or helping to run organizations that provided health services or food security services or labor activism strategies to workers. It was often sort of that middle tier of people who I was able to access the most during my research time, but I hope what I was able to do in the book is communicate the situations of a lot of different people through a lot of different sources. It's like a mosaic that you have to put together of a lot of different broken little shattered pieces of information. So I hope that comes across that I tried to put together as many corroborating sources as possible. I think it does. And I, there's something just sad to me about a person's only existence in an archive being based on something terrible that happened to them. And that's, you know, I come from an oral history background and that's one of the things that I feel like is so important to talk to these people that don't get a voice. Or when they do get a voice, it's like it's sad and it's a victim and it's this, that and the other when as you write in this book, which we can actually go ahead and get into, they're very active and they're very present in their lives. Yes. Very present and with an incredible sense of agency. Yes. And with the intention to nourish themselves and each other. Yes. Yes. So, let's jump into the first part that really does talk about nourishment. I, I talked to Alicia Kennedy and she was saying in her definition of food justice, that includes culturally appropriate meals, which doesn't sound like that big a deal until you can't have that. I mean, as, as just the way that I related to that is being overseas on July 4th and having someone try to make me ox tail. And I was just like, I don't, like this is your interpretation of, of our, of what I would be used to. And it's, it's, doesn't make me feel at home. It just makes me feel sadder on this. So, I just, I want to underscore the importance of, of culturally appropriate meals. Can we talk a little bit about, let's, let's kind of set the stage for, for where we're at with, with the Bracero program and the FPP, I want to talk about those a little bit. So we can establish, you know, how, yeah, thank you, who were, um, yeah, the actors who appear in the beginning of the book, because this book starts in the World War II period. That's really when I think this trend of the United States, devaluing both Latino food and Latino labor starts happening at the same time. And I think a huge part of that are the two programs you just mentioned. The Bracero program that we negotiated with Mexico, which lasted from 1942 to '64. And then the Farm Placement Program with Puerto Rico, which lasted for more decades than that, up until the '90s, it started fizzling out, but smaller number, um, and not in all regions. The Bracero program, Mexican workers, Mexican men were sent to all regions of the United States, whereas the Farm Placement Program mostly concentrated on the East Coast and the Midwest. But both focused on agriculture, both focused on importing these guest workers, Puerto Ricans were in this weird sort of citizen, guest worker hybrid position, which emboldened them to make more claims for food justice and nourishment. But in both cases, the workers were promised, um, forms of sustenance that they just didn't get. So, um, the Bracero program was bigger form, you know, more than four million contracts over the course of almost a quarter of a century, making it one of the biggest, guess worker programs in the history of the world. Um, and what I found in my research is what they had in common with Puerto Rican guest workers in the '40s and in the '50s, um, because the first chapter of the book concentrates on those two decades is that there is, there was a lack of gastro diplomacy, if you will, in the way that the United States was thinking about feeding these workers while they were doing food work in, in the nation. So you would think, especially if you label something as a guest worker program, you treat your guests the best way you can. And one of the ways in which these workers really agitated for good treatment in the work place was not just wages, it was not just housing, it was not just proper sanitation, but it was their meals. And the more that I researched, just how activist these workers became around the type of meals that they wanted, the more fascinated I became. So they wrote letters to their consulates, they wrote, um, or they filed complaints against their employers, they wrote to other government officials back in Puerto Rico in Mexico about how lacking they found US food in their labor camps. So it was either disputes with the portion size, like caloricly it wasn't enough to sustain them for 12, 14 hours out working in the fields. Or it wasn't, like you said, culturally satisfying. So they were these poor attempts at gesturing towards a Latin American ingredient or a Latin American dish, but still made with subpar, sort of mismatched substitutes of a kind. So offering a lot of awful instead of other more substantial, you know, portions of protein, white carbs instead or white bread instead of tortillas, you know, still serving things like spice beans, but not having the right type of rice, you know, like that type of mismatched sort of plate. God workers very upset because they thought, well, if we are literally breaking our backs for you, there is more of an effort that you can make here to learn more about what we might like to eat, what we're telling you we like to eat. And the ingredients that we realize, you know, cannot be really from Mexico or really from Puerto Rico, but you can approximate them. And you can hire cooks of Latinx background to cook for us. So these demands might seem trivial in the larger landscape of labor rights violations that these guest workers are also talking back about. But in reality, when it comes down to someone's daily experience and daily routine, their meals are actually quite important. And it feeds this nostalgia that they had for home, being away for so many months. So what I found really fascinating and what I thought was a twist that I could put on this story because many people have written about the Brasero program. Many people have produced great studies about the Puerto Rican guest worker program. And what I felt I could contribute that was new to the conversation is talking about how important food and food activism was on the part of the workers during this time. Well, it united them, even when, you know, even when they're unaware that both are doing it at the same time. It's happening. Yeah, because it's a basic human want and need. And everybody feels homesick. Everybody misses, you know, when they're away for three to nine months, it's like you want something, you know, anything that reminds you of home, especially because these guest workers had to pay for it. They had to pay a daily fee. These meals weren't free. So they found themselves paying the equivalent of 13 to $27 today back then for their three meals, which were poultry and blend in their opinion and just not, not comforting to them in a very uncomfortable environment. So for all of that, I think any of us could relate. Any of us would want the same thing. Yeah. You actually publish a menu in here, which, you know, for lunch, stewed beef, kidneys, Mexican style, whatever that means, string beans with tomatoes and onions, boiled potato, which is like at every single meal they have every single meal was the carb that they had. Yes, salsa salad, again, not a clue with that reference to the idea, bread and, and Olio, which is margarine, so it, and it's essentially the same meal every day. Yes, it's really repetitive. And can you imagine anybody would go wild over a repetitive menu like that? Yeah. I want to, you know, another reason to get the book, but I really want to underscore like, I just imagine yourself eating that every day for lunch and working. Doing work that it totally exhausts you, that all you have time for at the end of the day is to shower, sleep and do it again. I mean, this is, it's repetitive work. And so if it's repetitive food, it's just too much. It's just overwhelmingly lonely. Yes. Yes. And so we kind of shift over from the activism happening around the food that is served to, I think probably what most people are familiar with, which is the United Farmworkers boycott, which, you know, I grew up in the 80s and, you know, when you're a kid, you don't really register things on certain levels, but I have, I know those images. Like I understand, like I know there's something, you know, like that seeped into my subconscious, which is a very big deal for it to have done. So can there's a lot I want to talk about here, but let's, let's start a little bit with the United Farmworkers and what their goals were and, and why the Northeast was so important. Yeah. The United Farmworkers probably are the best known back then and still today Farmworkers Union in the United States. The Coalition of Immaculate Workers has been really impressive. There are a modern example of a counterpart to the UFW, but back in the 60s and 70s and 80s, which chapter two of the book covers, those three decades, the UFW co-led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and Larry Idlion, Filipino labor activist, really made an impact on the national consciousness because of their brilliant strategic moves when it came to a national consumer boycott, first of grapes and then of lettuce. But like you said, the visual was very important and it kind of got seared in people's minds, the posters, the buttons, you know, the, the fashion of the UFW with the red flag with the black eagle, you know, that kind of imagery and the symbolism and the ways that they really capitalized on catching people's attention and eyes, allowed them to make an impact on what they could control about what people put in their mouths and what they asked them not to. And the UFW saw the Northeast as important, basically because the Northeast held some of the biggest hubs in the nation when it came to food and vegetable markets and moving distributing product throughout the nation. So we had New York of course, Boston, Philadelphia, these are places that the UFW knew they needed to reach consumers there in order to have an economic impact on how these markets were functioning and how much money growers were making or not making if consumers decided not to buy certain products, certain non-union products because what the UFW was trying to, you know, squeeze out of growers was the chance to get them to the negotiating table if they were losing too much profit on grapes and lettuce that they were refusing to have under a union label. So the Northeast was important for those markets and also important because that's where you found an educated liberal wealthy donor class and that was the reality that donations really powered much of the UFW's activity across the country and also internationally they were organizing in Montreal, in Canada, Chavez and his brother at different times went over to Europe to try to gain support internationally to keep dock workers from unloading surplus product over in Europe. And so the Northeast was vital if the union wanted to keep a national message circulating and they wanted money, the lack thereof, going to growers and then donations going into the union's pockets, that's what made the region so important. So again, that was the twist that I could put on a often told story. Again, we have so many great scholars who have written on the UFW and I integrate them of course and cite their work and acknowledge it. But again, the spin I wanted to put on it is what was happening in the Northeast and not just in the big cities but in the smaller towns where people were organizing boycott committees that we might not have known about. And can you talk a little bit about the people involved in these boycotts because in the book you make a specific point of talking about women and families, families would move across the country to support these boycotts. And you know, one, the one that just popped into my head, Hope Lopez, who had five kids, five children. So just talk about that aspect of the boycott, just the women and families that supported it. Yeah, incredibly brave people, such impressive women, to be found in this story. Chavez often, and Wethat too, they get the credit as the lead organizers. But none of that success would have been possible without the people working so hard in the lower tiers at the local level. So Hope Lopez, Margaret Rose is a scholar who wrote on Hope Lopez before and so I read all her pieces on Lopez and then tried to find some other stuff myself. She was one example of a woman who agreed to volunteer for the UFW and to bring her family with her. So by that time, Hope was widowed, but she had children who she needed to care for. And so she was one of many women in California who were involved in the UFW who took the risk and were brave enough and were strong enough to convince their families to do this with them and to move and to try to make a difference in the Northeast. And so Hope had two other Mexican-American female assistants go with her and try to energize Philadelphia and to try to get housewives and mothers and women in general more involved in boycotting and picketing outside of grocery stores to get other ordinary people to realize what the union was fighting for. And Lopez definitely was a strategic thinker and she used her position as a mother to articulate how farm worker families out in the fields, children were working out there like child labor unfortunately still today is a feature of the agricultural landscape, children working out there not being able to get an education, being pulled out of the rhythms that other children had the privilege to have. And whole families were suffering from malnutrition, food insecurity, literal hunger in ways that people only thought existed in the third world at the time. And so Lopez and other women as mothers and as people who could speak with domestic authority or authority in the domestic sphere were saying if you took this one action, this one little change that you could make in your daily routine just don't buy grapes when you go to the grocery store, don't buy lettuce, stop eating salads or eat a salad, a non lettuce salad. These little actions could have the ripple effect of making a bigger statement. So I think Lopez was also strategic in using techniques that Cesar Chavez was using such as fasting in public and she did it very publicly as a mother, as a woman. And when people see a woman and a mother fasting outside of a grocery store, they feel a lot more disturbed and they feel a lot more motivation to tell the grocery store owner maybe you should change your policy because this woman needs to get back to her kids. And so I think that hope knew that that message would be sent to people who watched her star for several days outside of a store. She was doing it willingly, she knew what she was doing. She brought up that she was a mother, she made it very clear that she had children. And so she definitely wanted to disrupt people's ideas and people's notions of what was going on. So I take her as an example and so many women in the Northeast in UFW history are examples of that type of bravery and that type of guts to move clear across the country and work for very little salary, you know, $5 a week for the union to carry this message. And as you point out at the same time, this is when Mexican food is becoming very popular or I guess I can put that in quotes because, you know, Taco Bell is in the 60s, right? Taco Bell comes around and and you mentioned in the in the introduction, which carries through the entire book that what we're looking at is a devaluation, not just of Latinx food labor, but of Latinx food as well. Yes, yeah, the nation starts equating authentic with cheap and equating Mexican food with fast food in a way, especially because these big chains like Taco Bell and El Dorito and other, you know, innovations of the 60s, Mexican TV dinners of the 50s, like very ironically, at the same moment that Mexican origin food workers are asking for better and for more food. Mainstream America is getting to enjoy Mexican food in all sorts of ways and play with it in a lot of different ways. So whether that was like a taco kit that you could buy at the grocery store or whether it was a fast food meal or a meal out at a Cantino or a Tex-Mex style place or whether, you know, as we get into the 80s, the more fancies sit down, hoat Mexican cuisine experience in a place like Chicago or New York. People are able to access Mexican food in a way that the workers themselves of this origin are not able to acquire, whether it's because of low wages or because they asked for it and they weren't given it, as in the case of the guest workers of the World War II period. And so I just find it deeply ironic and it's, it feeds into this tandem devaluation that I'm arguing because we are in a nation that fetishizes Mexican food, but we definitely do not embrace Mexican and other Latin American origin labor because if they're continually framed as an immigration-related threat, people are always going to see them, whether they are citizen or not as foreign presence. And so the way that many people can hold this very cognitive, cognitively dissonant thing in their heads that I love the food, I don't love the people, like that is contradiction that's woven throughout all the decades talked about in this talk. Yeah, or just imagining that these like, these ingredients are somehow less expensive than every other ingredient in every other cuisine. And I have to imagine that the workers were aware that this was happening, or where were they aware on any level that the food that they wanted so much for themselves was being commodified and and prepared for people that don't eat that kind of food. Yeah, I think workers were very aware of their place in the chain. That once it left their hands, it became something desired, commodified, able to be acquired by others and not by themselves. And so I think that the statements that the UFW, but also their predecessors in these earlier guest workers, they were making the statement that we are the ones who are actually responsible for the beans that are showing up in your grocery stores, for the salsa, that's in the can, that you buy at the grocery stores for the, for all the processed food that we find in the ethnic foods aisle, like people are very aware, but also, and it wasn't just Mexican products, it was like jolly green giant or bird's eye or, you know, anything you find in the frozen vegetable section, that was all done by Puerto Rican guest workers in New Jersey, for those companies, for instance, mushrooms in Pennsylvania, you know, where do you think they come from? So it's, I think workers are quite aware, the ways that they've articulated that awareness have been different. But there's definitely that invisibility at the beginning of the food chain, that then the food itself when it's prepared, especially in the world of restaurants, we lose all of that, out of sight, out of mind, the labor kind of fades away. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about restaurants. You talk about New York City in the 80s and the 90s, and you highlight an interesting figure, I think, Zarella Martinez, yeah, I just want to talk about her for a little bit, and her, her life as a chef in New York. Yes, many, many people have been interested in and questioned Zarella Martinez' place in this book, and she's very interesting because she doesn't, she's an unlike a lot of other people featured in the book, in that she was economically privileged in relation to many of these other workers. She was a Mexican immigrant, but came from a wealthier family in Mexico, got very, very lucky in terms of mentorship and networking and connections that allowed her to become a successful caterer and then a chef in New York City. In the 80s, which was a decade in Manhattan where Tex Mex was giving way to a higher cost regional Mexican cuisine, and she was a pioneer of that movement, along with Josefina Howard, who owns Rosa Mexicano, that chain of Mexican restaurants in New York that got very popular in the 80s as well. So Martinez is an example of an entrepreneur, of a businesswoman, of somebody who definitely was privileged in a lot of ways, so from the beginning of drafting this book until the final stages, people were still asking me like, why this choice, why throw in this person that looks very different and her career skyrockets in ways that many others featured here in this book, they remain in a certain kind of confined space, as not rising to that level of being able to be their own boss. And the answer that I give, and what I truly believe is that if we want to talk about how Latino communities have impacted the world of food, have changed food scapes, have had an impact on food in the United States, that's not a class-specific thing. And we can often get sort of trapped in the mentality that when we think about Latino food workers, we're thinking of working class. And when we think of workers, we can also think of people who are sort of mid-level, we can think of people who are food workers who then became and got the ability to be more creatives and entrepreneurs rather than just workers. And so it's a cross-class story, I think. And Martinez, by making regional Mexican food, so intriguing in Manhattan, it actually allowed more consumers to be open to food trucks from Puebla or from Oaxaca, because now people knew something about regional diversity in Mexican cuisine. So in a weird way, Martinez's higher-end Mexican restaurant in Manhattan made people aware that Mexican food wasn't just from a haleeskin style, or it wasn't just like one style of food. So it made people more open to thinking like, oh yeah, that a cruise seafood is as much a part of the Mexican repertoire as the street talk of from the Oaxaca style food truck. So I think that the work she did, even though it was from this more privileged place, was actually part and parcel of how Manhattan became this place of what I call and what others have called many Mexico's. Like people became aware that Mexican food was so much more than one particular style, one particular kind of combo platter, that it was actually a lot more diverse than that. So she's an interesting figure in the book, she's kind of an outlier in many ways, but I think what I hope I've done is make the case that we should be thinking about cross-class impact and to put those histories on the same plate, so to speak. Well, it's actually an excellent example to me of your argument of Mexican food being devalued, because even though she's making, she's, you know, a chef in a restaurant, she's got a very popular restaurant, she cooked for Ronald Reagan. You know, like this is not, she's like the real, the real deal, you know what I mean? But even then, she's getting reviews saying, well, the food is too expensive. You should include rice and beans as part of a combination platter. Like, you know, they're saying that 425 for a side of rice is too much. And so for me, I appreciate it, it doesn't matter your social class. You're still battling, yeah, these notions of Mexican food as being cheap, right? Not immune. And I think it was disillusioning for her to realize that. I think because she had her own restaurant, she thought she would be protected from some of the floating notions out there about, well, I'm not paying that much for Mexican food, whereas I would pay that much for a French meal, right? I think, you know, she said something like, I use the same exact duck procured by the chefs at Le Cirque. And I'm using it too, and you know, she was making duck mola or something like that, right? But was so shocked that people would literally write into her and be like, you should change your prices, you should add this to this. So I think she thought that devaluation was happening to street food outside of her, the walls of her restaurant. But soon learned that as more of that rhetoric came to circulate in the public, that she would be impacted too. What other businesses, even if they portrayed themselves as a higher end experience, would be affected as well? I feel like the whole, pretty much from chapter four on was all new information to me. So I hope it's new information to other people as well. But I want to talk about food workers in Maine. I know that we already know we're in the Northeast, we're already thinking about that. Eggs, blueberries, apples, broccoli, seafood, all of those things powered by food workers. Yep, all over the world. What made you want to look at Maine specifically? Well, I taught for one year at Bowdoin College, and that was my first job out of grad school. I never ever thought I would live in Maine. It just wasn't on my radar, but that was the opportunity I was given, and I'm so glad in retrospect that I got to live in Maine. First of all, it's a gorgeous landscape. And what I found myself doing was that while I was teaching, I would, of course, be paying attention to the newspaper in case there was anything I needed to know before I walked in the classroom, and oftentimes what I found were a lot of articles about the blueberry industry, about different, you know, lobster, about different industries in Maine. And they would mention that there were some Latin American, or Caribbean workers, Haitian workers, as well as Mexican, Central American, and US citizen workers who migrated there seasonally. And so I would literally either clip these newspaper articles if I was reading them physically or clip them digitally and put them in a digital folder, and I filed them away in my mind as like, this is super interesting. This is almost exactly the same sort of phenomena I was observing in California when I was living there previously, and it's happening over here too. So I was mentally sort of creating a file cabinet to come back to it later, and I knew one day I would try to find an opportunity to write about Maine because as I was saying before, I think it's a prime example of how people mythologize spaces of whiteness in the United States and Maine is definitely one of them. In demographic reality, yes, it's one of the whitest states in the nation. But I think if people really knew how multicultural Maine was in terms of its labor force, their minds would be blown. Like, if you look at the statistics, it's really, really fascinating how many languages are now required to be offered and taught in Maine schools. Because of everyone from Somalian refugees to Central American students, to students who are speaking Haitian Creole, right? So it's a lot of different nationalities represented in who is behind a lot of these commodities that we think of as Maine. And so Maine's nickname is Vacation Land, and I always found that so fascinating. The way that Maine creates stories about itself and perpetuate stories about itself that don't include the other types of people who never get a vacation because they're too busy creating the image of Maine that those of us who might be tourists up there enjoy, whether it's summertime blueberry pie and lobster rolls or wintertime holiday wreaths and, you know, sort of like the cozy culture of the Northeast. And so that's what made me want to write about Maine is my year living there. And also how similar I found it to be to other regions of the United States. I think that thing that struck me the most, you know, you're, you talk about sort of the trajectory of how the labor works like going up the coast. So by season, you're just, you're literally constantly moving along with the crop. Yeah. Well, yeah, people play the whole calendar year, you know, moving. Yeah, and it is very cyclical. Yeah. Okay, here it is. Like usually starting in Florida and the late winter. So they're starting in Florida. They're moving up to Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, ending in the Northeast. And then I'm assuming just repeating that cycle, mm-hmm coming back down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then some, some did stay, some do stay Vermont is also an interesting example. I think at both places from what I read, it seemed, you know, I think the word uses carceral countryside. Yeah. That's a term by a geographer named Susanna McKendless. She characterized Vermont that way because it can, I mean, on the surface, it appears to be a very pastoral, bucolic lifestyle, green pastures, red barns, white snow. That carceral for the people who are working in the dairy barns, often they are undocumented or of precarious immigration status where they would not want to be detected, apprehended and deported. And so it can feel carceral, it can feel confining, it can feel like imprisonment when a worker doesn't even feel comfortable stepping outside their dairy barn or their employer provided housing across from the dairy barn to walk five minutes or ten minutes to a gas station or a corner store or a grocery store. The sense of confinement, people feel when you do the research and when workers in the dairy industry have been interviewed, some people have gone years without setting foot outside of their workplace. Five years, one person even ten years just went outside basically to go to the ER. This is a geographical shrinking of people's mental maps, but also their physical mobility. If they feel they can't even interact in the communities that they're working in. So yeah, when I was doing this research, geographers definitely have done great work already on labor and commodities, so I benefited a lot from geographers expertise here. And sociologists and even health practitioners who were serving these workers to kind of learn the health outcomes because depression, anxiety, all of these different things develop out of a sense of isolation. So people's mental health as well as physical health is being affected by the very structures in which dairy work takes place. If people have no separation between work and home, if people do not feel comfortable walking steps outside of their workplace because they're afraid they'll be apprehended on the road, it's a very small place to live your life. And so I think, especially when it comes to undocumented migrant dairy workers, routines, they often feel hemmed in and they all used the same word in their interviews and said although they feel trapped, like an animal, like a cow. They likened themselves almost all the time to the cows that they were working with. And many of them don't necessarily want to be hidden. I want to point that out to like many of them are seeking out other opportunities within the same farm even, just like being outside and doing work instead of being inside all day. Yes, in the milking barns, yeah, they want to be, you know, driving the tractor. They want to be, you know, taking care of the feed outside. They want fresh air at the most basic level. And they want the ability to be visible and to be seen in the freedom to do that. And oftentimes it's the employers who are just as scared of immigration authorities and tell them, no, no, your job is just in the barn. So yes, at the same time that we have people afraid of being seen, we have people who so desperately want to feel like they have the same freedom as other workers. Yeah, and I mean, just to be clear, when we talk about employee housing, it's not what most of us would feel comfortable living in, I think. Yeah, a definite lack of privacy. People are literally taking shifts on the beds like you don't even have a bed to yourself. You share it with somebody who takes the next 12 hour shift after you, you know, it's very crowded dwellings, often dilapidated houses, some are some are multi room and they have lawn in unit laundry and multiple kitchens and some employers do create this housing to try to be as comfortable as possible for, you know, 10 people all living in one space. But other examples that I saw because I drove around and looked at different types of dairy employer housing, some of these places are in really, really bad shape, decrepit, falling apart, no privacy, when it comes to sleeping space or grooming space or, you know, spaces of hygiene like the bathroom. So it's a wide range of employer provided housing and like you said, often the case that most of us would not feel very comfortable on a daily basis, especially when it's such a demanding job physically. Yeah, so this is where we're at. I just want to underscore that when we get to COVID-19 that we're already at the bottom of, I don't even want to use the word acceptable because it's, it's just not acceptable. And then we get to COVID-19 and now there are essential workers, right? Tell me a little bit about researching that. Yeah, COVID research was hard because it was happening in real time. So this final chapter of the book about COVID and the food labor chain was informed a lot by journalism because it just, that was, that was where the statistics were coming. Of course, I would hyperlink to the original reports and take a look at the numbers there and, and try to reconstruct an image of not just the Northeast, but then the country. Like the COVID chapters, it zooms out to the nation once more because COVID affected food workers in exactly the same ways everywhere. I don't think anyone felt protected at that time in California, wildfires plus COVID was creating a respiratory nightmare for workers out there. And in the meat and poultry processing plants of the mid-Atlantic, workers are feeling incredibly vulnerable there because they're working shoulder to shoulder and the most gesture of safety that, that employers could muster sometimes as a plastic sheet between workers on an assembly line, but they're still there breathing the same error, you know? And in the Northeast, people being bust and then put in these dorms to continue working in the vegetable and mushroom fields and, and fruit orchards and not feeling the, any sense of security whatsoever. When they ask for mask, when they ask for hand sanitizer, they get laughed at. I mean, this is really degrading treatment, very insensitive at the very least and fatal at the most treatment and, you know, sort of ignorance when it comes to just how risky it was to be and still is to be a food worker in many ways. The fact that bakery workers in San Francisco were most at risk for dying from COVID should tell us something. Like when we think of bakery work, we think of it as sort of cozy and safe and protected and no, this was not happening. So if different sectors of the food industry people are dying at rapid rates and yet still they're being called essential and treated as very, very disposable, there's not this bottomless reservoir of human capacity and human labor, but our government sure acts like there is because it's gotten so used to being able to import food labor at a moment's notice. And so at the same time that a presidential administration was, you know, closing borders, it was importing food workers to keep our meat industry going at the exact same time. So again, that contradictory thinking and contradictory action is taking place. And meanwhile, people are dying and people are not even going to get treated by doctors and hospitals because again, if they're of a precarious immigration status, they don't they can't. They don't feel like they'll actually be taking care of. So so many different elements of COVID produced what was already an insecure position as a food worker and made it completely unsafe and fatal in many cases. And what I'm so glad that you brought up that I've recently become a little bit obsessed with is food delivery. So door dash, grub hub, all of these companies that use food delivery, I have seen essentially the workforce shift into that, not the entire workforce, but it's become I'm trying to think of a good metaphor, it's become the new field is how it feels. Like this is the workforce that is doing these jobs. And I know like, you know, this is still very recent and research you did in real time. But did you see any like shifts there with with that during the pandemic, you know, like the labor force kind of shifting? For sure, I mean, I'm kind of, I have a New York sort of bias on this and I'd be very curious to hear what other people observe in their own communities because a New York delivery culture was already sort of baked into the way that people got their food. But the way that it has exploded and amplified in New York just shows me that it must be an exponentially bigger phenomenon, even in parts of the United States where delivery culture wasn't present before COVID, not really, right? Maybe the occasional pizza hut delivery, but not to the extent that people are on demand getting whatever food they want now. It definitely in New York has become so taken for granted that the COVID delivery culture should remain in place and get even bigger and more convenient and cheaper and now tips are optional. And now delivery companies are adding service fees to cover the minimum wage that's now been instituted by New York City. But all of that cost is going to the consumer. And I think that's what people need to know is like the reason why your service fees on seamless or grub hub or whatever you're using. The reason they're getting higher and higher is because more people are bringing to attention that delivery workers deserve a minimum wage too, but the companies are not taking on that cost themselves. They're passing it to you. And so that's why your fees look the way that they do and that's why it says tips optional now because companies many times are so resentful of the base wage that they need to pay, that they're offloading the cost and making tips optional and actually making you treat then the worker as somebody who doesn't deserve a tip because that minimum wage should be enough. When really that minimum wage should have been in place all along for the kind of high pressure work they're expected to do. And the penalties on apps when workers don't want to travel an insane amount of time to deliver a $10 cupcake order and receive no tip, you know, it's taking away delivery workers choices and agency to pick their own gigs. So this is no longer gig work, it's not this kind of optional thing like workers actually get penalized and the algorithm punishes them when they try to make certain choices about what they're willing and not willing to do for their own day and for their own comfort. So I think delivery culture has become this very insidious thing where people think, well, I only care about the convenience at my end of the equation, I'm not aware of how much strategic thinking needs to go into how the worker plans their day. And now I don't think many people are aware but the migrants who are being processed in Northeastern cities and waiting for their work permits or at least who were waiting for these work permits in the Biden presidency were taking on delivery work. So oftentimes your food delivery was being handed to you by somebody who's been waiting desperately for a really long time to be processed in a legal process, by the way, with the silent work permits. And that's the person who handed your food to you. So it's all part of this system of a multitude of people who are feeling very vulnerable and being pressured to deliver your food to you as quickly as possible. And in dangerous traffic, by the way, like we can get into a whole other conversation about that. But yeah, the geography of delivery work is now part of a dangerous food industry. I mean, I've noticed personally, I'm in Colorado, on all the apps, there's translation. There's language translation. They're very aware of who their workers are, what they're doing, you know, the thing that they put on there is not very useful, but it just is very clear to me that they know what it is, is starting to have, or are they've intentionally done this? There's like, there's a part of the book. I just want to quote, I think it's in the Vermont chapter where you talk about this being a particularly late 20th and early 21st century phenomenon of accelerating ethnic succession to undercut wages for citizen workers. And as you said, a lot of these people are waiting. They're just in limbo to become citizens, but this is, this is what's offered to them. And this is continually happening. That's why I say like with DoorDash and things like that, you know, you see it when it first starts out as like a way to make extra money if you're in college or if you're like a stay at home mom. And now it's a very different animal. Yeah. And that is predicated by food workers, by farm labor, we've already seen this happen. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. This is the new wave in which companies, corporations are taking advantage of people's vulnerability. These are people who are in limbo desperate to make some sort of living because they've been put in a nontenable situation here in the United States. They've been bust to cities that they didn't expect to be bust to in some cases, especially in the Northeast, New York, Martha's Vineyard, Washington DC. These are some of the most expensive places to live. And if you're waiting for a work permit and you're able to get some delivery work, you're going to try your best, right. You have to do it under very vulnerable conditions and the structural lack of transparency that a lot of companies have with these workers. Yes, they'll offer, like you said, the language translation, but they don't offer complete transparency. When are your tips going to be given to you? What kind of wage are you going to be making? How far are you going to need to go on that e-bike or your regular bike or your car that you borrow or whatever? So it leaves a lot up to the worker to figure out their own ability to play the game. And gaming, in this sense of the word, is not an attractive prospect. It's actually quite, I think, I think it's a dangerous one. I think it's a dehumanizing one. We're already headed towards a culture in which dehumanization is something that we are just normalizing. And if we do it in our food industry as well as consumers, I think we really have to resist the impulse to play into that, to sort of see, to not see the person who's handing you the food, to not see the labor that's happening there. I don't think many of us are doing it intentionally, but I think the food system is designed in ways to keep things out of our view. So as consumers, I do think we need to be a bit more intentional about the ways that we notice our system's working. I have a lot of hope that we can. I just think it needs to be brought to people's attention, like factor that in to the way that you think about your food. You might think about your diet, you might think about your nutrition, you might buy organic, you might go to your farmer's market, you might make all these little decisions, intentional decisions about your food choices, and add to that a mindset that takes into account labor and looking for it, and paying attention to it and asking questions about it. I think the last thing that I want to talk about is just writing this book in general. This is such a dystopian time that we are in right now, and how do you feel, I mean, what is writing about this due for you, what do you feel like it does for the people that you're writing about? I just want to kind of talk a little bit about the process of writing as a powerful act. Yes, I love talking about that, and I love ending on that note, because I think those of us who are readers and writers, we might feel at times like we are doing very little. I think we're actually doing a lot. The more that people stay interested in those two practices, being critical readers, being critical writers, being thinkers, talking, and that's what makes me happy in talking with you today, that you cared enough about this topic and this book to have a conversation. I think there is power in, although academia is slow, being an academic who can write from a certain kind of training, from a certain kind of vantage point, and to be able to reach a certain kind of audience, it's the students I teach, but also other people students, I hope, and the general reader who is interested in food and how it gets to us and the people behind it. I think the craft of writing for me, it's honestly what keeps me going in very, very hard times, it's the way I can feel creative, it's the way I can feel productive, and although the entire book was a slow process, I think the ways in which I've dialogue with people in spurts along the way has helped make an impact on the way that people think and how they might feel inspired to take an everyday action. A lot of little actions can add up to a lot, a lot of books can add up to a lot, a lot of readers out there can add up to a lot if we remain dedicated to fighting together, to be able to push back against a culture that is devaluing the intellectual, and the intellectual doesn't mean Ivy Tower, the intellectual means that you are critically thinking about patterns and things you are noticing in your daily life and your world, and connecting them to historical echoes, reverberations, and connecting that to, okay, what are we going to do about this in the future, what actions can we take together. So that's how I feel I can make a difference in both a creative sense and intellectual sense. And so I really hope if you are intrigued in listening to this podcast and talking about these topics that you will check out this book and other episodes of this podcast. It's really, really important to keep these conversations going. They are not useless, they are not little, they are a big deal right now. And I really thank you Kelly for giving me your time and this space to talk about it. It's made my morning so much better after a night of worrying about the state of the world. Thank you so much for coming and talking to me about this, I truly could, I highly recommend everyone to read this book. I know that a lot of times academic books sound very, or quote unquote, academic books sound very intimidating, this is not that, it's, I don't want to say it's an easy read, it's definitely a lot of hard things, but things that we really, really, really need to be paying attention to.