Sustainable food must be produced in a way that takes not only the environment and consumers into account, but also the people who grow, harvest and process it. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how an economic system dependent on low-wage labor creates as many issues as it purports to solve. When profit determines every outcome of social and economic life, working people lose. This reality is on full display in our food system. The novel coronavirus and our food economy are bound together in every regard. As a result, the social and economic aftermath of the virus will have grave implications for our food system—particularly for the workers who keep it in operation. However, as made increasingly evident by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is labor that keeps our food system going. CEOs may keep their salaries and self-isolate in their homes, but it is workers from grocery stores to farm fields who have been revealed to be truly essential. By leveraging their power in a time where the entire country is looking to them for survival, food workers can build the movements that will improve their working conditions well into the future. These changes are not only necessary; they benefit us all.
Current methods of production of crops, like corn and soybeans, rely heavily on machinery. Thousands of acres can be planted, sprayed and harvested by just a few people operating large equipment like tractors and combines; the latest versions of which have built-in GPS and computers to analyze the field.
But for raising and processing fruits, vegetables, meat and poultry, the agriculture industry still relies primarily on human labor. Farm and food workers are mainly an immigrant workforce, many of whom are undocumented. They are often poorly paid and work in harsh or dangerous conditions. This is just the latest chapter in a long history: the US was built on exploitative agricultural labor that dates back to slavery. Today, however, some of the most successful worker-organizing strategies are emerging from the fields, as farm and food workers fight for their rights and dignity.
The works in this section highlight the intersection between gender and labor in the food system. Women are discussed in food and labor literature and historically in terms of their role as mothers, in nurturing and feeding, and their role in the context of domestic work which can be evidenced notably in mid 20th Century advertising and cookbooks aimed at women.
However, it is important to note that women also play a large role in public food labor -- planting crops, processing agricultural products, driving food delivery trucks, working as cashiers and waitresses - and more. In addition to this paid labor, women are also expected to work the domestica unpaid labor. Women working within the food chain have been historically marginalized, though they make up an increasingly significant portion of this workforce. Such artwork challenging perspectives important to changing the conversation and recognizing the work of women, who make up 43% of agricultural labor worldwide.
Over the past five years, the Food Justice Lab at West Virginia University hosted a series of food access planning workshops across the state of West Virginia. With over 250 participants, the Nourishing Networks workshop training program was designed to build grassroots capacity for food system change. Eighty-percent of workshop participants were women and dialogues recorded at these events revealed how women are disproportionately impacted by food insecurity and disproportionately labor to repair a broken food system. Women in West Virginia are not only growing food, feeding their families, selling it at the grocery stores, serving it in restaurants and schools, and distributing it in food pantries, they are organizing for policy change in their own communities and working to combat systemic problems at the root of hunger and malnutrition. Absent from existing scholarship is an interrogation of the connection between community food work and the care work that goes into these labors of what Heidi Gum calls food caregiver women. There is more work to be done exploring the perspectives of these women through intersections of gender and race in the West Virginia context.
Text courtesy Foodprint.org -received permission.
Sources:
“Women: The Key to Food Security,”
“Technological Food and Women’s Labor,”
“Gum, Heidi Lynn, "Resilience in the Mountains: Exploring the Labor and Motives of Food-Caregiver Women Repairing Broken Food Systems in West Virginia Communities" (2020).