On May 2, 2020, all along Main Avenue in tiny Crete, Nebraska, workers from the nearby Smithfield Foods pork processing plant and their frightened children held up signs that read ESSENTIAL, NOT DISPOSABLE and MY PARENTS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN MEAT. At that moment, Covid-19 cases among meatpackers were surging nationwide—second only to hospital staff—and these workers and their families were calling on Smithfield to provide enough personal protective equipment (PPE), such as masks and face shields, to get safely through the long shifts. By then, we were already being told that the global pandemic would change everything. Restaurants had closed, supply chains collapsed, grocery stores declared shortages. Food prices were soaring, and the op-ed pages and airwaves were filling with pundits stating what seemed obvious: we couldn’t continue on as before. Even Smithfield had seemed to acknowledge this, announcing a temporary closure of their plant in Crete amid an April outbreak, only to reverse course when President Donald Trump issued an executive order instructing meatpackers to keep their facilities open.
In response, workers had organized demonstrations across the country—but at this particular protest, something unexpected happened. At the end of the morning, after a few hours of waving at passing cars and talking to news crews through surgical masks or handmade face-wraps, the protesters got into their own vehicles and formed a parade. They moved south in an unbroken line toward the Smithfield plant. The plan was a drive-by rally. But then, somewhere near the front of the line, a car turned into the company parking lot. The next car followed and the next, until they had filled employee parking. People honked their horns and shouted out the windows. They climbed into the beds of their trucks or stood up through the sunroofs of their cars, waving American flags and holding up their phones to document their fervor and their numbers. They felt too numerous to ignore. And the government had declared their work essential; how could you treat essential workers as if they didn’t matter?
I was there on that day. For more than a decade, I had been covering the meatpacking industry and the systematic mistreatment of workers, many of them undocumented immigrants and refugees from war-torn countries, and I had never seen anything like this. There hadn’t been a show of meatpacker defiance so public since the Hormel strike in the 1980s. At long last, it appeared that we could no longer pretend that our national food supply wasn’t reliant on the exploitation of the most vulnerable among us—the stoop laborers of the Salinas Valley in California; the migrant pickers coming north from the Rio Grande; the drovers in the feedlots of Cactus, Texas; the employees in the confined animal feeding operations in the Raccoon River Watershed of Iowa; the workers on the packinghouse floors in small, forgotten towns from Colorado to North Carolina; the kitchen crews in restaurants, checkers and stockers in grocery stores, and delivery drivers all across the country. We would be forced to have an overdue national conversation about the true value of good food—and the cost of cheap substitutes.
But it didn’t take long for the corporate food industry to rise in its own defense. The meatpacking giants successfully fought off Congressional investigations into their liability for Covid deaths. They pressed the US Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service to lift strictures on line speeds while keeping prices high, allowing the largest companies to rake in record profits. At the same time, they settled investigations conducted by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for amounts that roughly equaled $100 for every worker sickened by Covid-19 and $500 for every death. Some expressed shock and outrage—but before long, we came to accept the new normal and moved on to other concerns.
This issue is offered as a partial corrective. With the help of the Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN), an independent, nonprofit news organization based in New York City that has been a huge supporter of my work over the years, I set out in recent months to gather a diverse group of writers—chefs, journalists, thinkers, poets—who could collectively look back at the effects of recent years but also look forward, imagining how we might rethink our relationship to food, the environment, to our collective health, and to the future of our warming planet.
Journalist Lygia Navarro writes with devastating clarity about her personal struggles with long Covid, which has left her unable to travel the world as she once did; she describes the difficulty of navigating her new life and reminds us that for many the pandemic will never be over. Carl Phillips writes about his decision, in the early days of lockdown, to cook more and share his kitchen process on Instagram—widening the circle of cooking friends during that era of isolation but also underscoring the loneliness of preparing meals without others to bring around the table to share and enjoy together. Chef Tom Colicchio writes movingly about his love of food and his thrilling rise through the burgeoning restaurant scene of 1980s New York City, but he also describes the intractability of Congress in the days when he was seeking Covid relief dollars to save the industry. “I couldn’t decide whether or not I wanted to continue working in restaurants,” he writes of the darkest days of the pandemic.
In the end, Colicchio discovered a renewed sense of purpose by choosing a different place for himself than he had occupied before the pandemic. “I decided that maybe there could be a new role for me as a supporter,” he writes. He specifically mentions working to provide a platform for fellow chef Sean Sherman. Sherman, who is Lakota and has given himself the cheeky moniker “The Sioux Chef,” speaks in this issue with Theodore Ross, editor-in-chief at FERN, about his efforts to decolonize the diets of Native communities and reconnect them with their heritage. He rejects settler foods, even frybread. “It comes from military forces, after Indigenous peoples are being rounded up and force-marched into areas and given subsidies and given commodities, like bags of flour, bags of salt, bags of sugar, vats of lard,” he says. “A lot of families are proud of frybread in their family history, very proud about their grandmother’s frybread recipe, but we chose not to go with it. One piece of food shouldn’t identify every Indigenous community across North America, because it doesn’t have much to do with us as Indigenous people. It’s a product of colonialism.”
In similar ways, Siddhartha Deb writes about his decision to reject the no-beef diet of the Hindu majority in India, as an act of defiance and solidarity with the repressed Muslim minority. The enforcement of anti-beef policies has grown so fervent and fascistic under prime minister Narendra Modi that “beef lynchings” are being carried out by so-called cow protection groups in states ruled by the Hindu right. Jori Lewis writes about her complicated feelings toward the watermelon—a staple of survival in West Africa, where she lives much of the time, but also a symbol of racial denigration in the United States, where she grew up, “transforming it,” she writes, “into something almost unpalatable for many Black people.” In other words, food has always been a source of nourishment and community-building, but it has also been a tool for oppression, discrimination, and colonization.
This issue, and this partnership with FERN, are meant to provide a space where food can be celebrated and shared, while also supporting the idea of reconnecting and rebuilding communities through food culture. The true value of good food lies in its power to feed our souls, even as it fortifies our bodies. It brings us together, to share and be in each other’s company, laughing and telling stories, building trust by continuing to have important and sometimes difficult conversations, each of us with an equal place at the table.—Ted Genoways
