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Teresa M. Mares and Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, "Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food Chain" (U California Press, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Laura Ann Minkoff Zern
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- [00:30]
Marshall Poe
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. 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, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:38]
Stephen Pimpare
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Stephen Pimpair, host of the Public Policy Channel, and we are joined today by Laura Ann Minkoff Zern and Teresa Mahrez. Forgive me. Who are the co authors of Willwork for Food labor across the Food Chain from the University of California Press. Laura and Teresa, welcome. Thank you for joining us today.
- [02:00]
Teresa Mares
Thank you so much for having us.
- [02:02]
Stephen Pimpare
So I wonder if we could begin by. Teresa, why don't you go first. Asking you to introduce yourselves, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do, and then what brought the two of you to this particular project.
- [02:13]
Laura Ann Minkoff Zern
Great.
- [02:13]
Teresa Mares
Yeah. So again, my name is Teresa Mares and I'm an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Vermont, also involved with our Food Systems graduate program here. And I've been doing work on issues connected to the food system and migration for about the past 20 years or so. And for the last five years, ish have been collaborating really closely with my co author, Laura Ann.
- [02:39]
Laura Ann Minkoff Zern
Hi, I'm Laura Ann Minkoff cern. I'm an associate professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University. I've been doing work with farmworkers for about 20 years across the United States from California to New York, and for the past five years been looking more broadly at labor across the food system while we've been working on this book together.
- [03:03]
Stephen Pimpare
So before we look at the ways in which you examine the labor that is occurring throughout the food system in various kinds of spaces, you undertake what you describe as a food systems approach. For folks who may not be familiar with that, I wonder if we could start by just having you talk a little bit about what that means and what the implications are for how we think about labor and food.
- [03:28]
Teresa Mares
Sure. So I think that the food system and its systems approach of looking at food is a way of understanding all of the connected processes and institutions and flows of food here at uvm. Most of our education around food takes a food systems approach. And so we look at anything here from seed breeding to the butterfat content and cow milk to the social and political and philosophical questions around food. And so I think what drew us to a food systems approach for this book is that we both had spent a number of years doing research with farmworkers, but realizing that there were so many connections between the laborers that we were getting to know really well and other parts of the food system and other workers in the food system. And I think at the same time, we were really inspired by some of the work of the Food Chain Workers alliance, which maybe Laura Ann can talk a little bit about more.
- [04:26]
Stephen Pimpare
Yeah, Lorianne, why don't we start there? Well, let's start by talking about farms and farm workers, and then we will move through the systems to talk about those other spaces.
- [04:35]
Laura Ann Minkoff Zern
Yeah. So like Teresa and I have both mentioned, we started our work, both doing field work with farmworkers, actually both of us looking at some level at farm worker food insecurity. And, you know, the huge irony that the majority of farm workers actually don't make enough money to pay them. You know, they're not paid enough money to feed themselves a healthy and sustained diet. So thinking about some of the structural and root causes of that type of hunger was, I think, an entry point for both of us. And also looking at the types of knowledge and skills that farmworkers are bringing to the field. And we've always had these overlaps and themes in our work. And also, I think around the same time, started teaching courses where we saw that students were interested. And we feel the important connections between people like farm workers in the field, which is usually the first sector people think about when you say food workers, but also service workers, people working in restaurants, everything from fast food to fine dining, you know, people working in food processing canneries to meat processing truckers that we don't always think about, and gig delivery workers. And what we started, both of us, in our teaching and in our own activism, we started to draw on the work of organizations like the Food Chain Workers alliance, which is an umbrella organ that brings together unions, worker centers, and other food advocate groups across the United States to kind of. They've been making this argument for a while before we were that food chain workers have a lot of power if they see themselves as part of the same struggle and dealing with the same constraints and conditions. So we were really using their resources and our teaching and found there wasn't a comprehensive, you know, both academic but more activist source making these links. And then when we started doing this work together, we also added in the workers that do work in the home, so reproductive labor, as well as workers at the end of the food system, at the waste end of the food system. So we added a few more kind of chapters or sectors in there.
- [06:46]
Stephen Pimpare
So you'll tell me if I'm grossly overgeneralizing, but it seems to be one of the threads that runs through food work across all of these spaces is vulnerability and precarity. So I wonder if, Theresa, we might stick with thinking about farm workers at the moment. We are recording this in October of 2025, so it feels to me incumbent upon us to at least talk a little bit about the role that immigrant labor plays in farms in the United States and the ways in which what are already, as Laura Ann suggested, not necessarily terrific jobs that are vulnerable and precarious are made even more vulnerable and precarious. And how we should be thinking about that.
- [07:33]
Teresa Mares
Yeah, that's such a good question and a big one. But I think that one of the things that we do throughout the book is look at the shared precarity and vulnerability that workers across the food system experience. And especially, I think what I found really enriching about writing this book is the amount of historical research that we did to show that the kind of vulnerability and precarity that workers experience now is not necessarily that exceptional, but it's a Continuation of centuries, really, of exploitation and vulnerability. I think that what we pay attention to in this book are the different political moments and the different kind of policy moments that have made certain workers more vulnerable, and that often is in the food system. But I do think that what we're seeing currently in 2025, with the kinds of actions and policies targeting immigrants, is disproportionately targeting food workers and is making them incredibly vulnerable and afraid and subject to detention. And so, you know, often as we've been talking about this book, I think both of us have been thinking about, like, if we had a postscript, if we had, you know, another maybe 50 pages to write about all of the current manifestations of vulnerability and precarity, we would have a lot to write about. But in so many ways, what we're seeing follows the blueprint, right, of exploitation that is centuries long.
- [09:06]
Stephen Pimpare
So, Lauren, when we bounce back to you and talk about. In some ways, if we think about sort of from the farm to how listeners get food into them, whether they're preparing it in the phone or going out to. In their home or going out to a restaurant, the next stage in that process we can think about is sort of processing. If you would maybe just tell us a little bit, what are the range of things that we are talking about, again, for people who don't necessarily think about where their food comes from and then talk about maybe some exemplary cases of what labor in those spaces looks like.
- [09:40]
Laura Ann Minkoff Zern
Yeah, thanks for that question. So when we talk about food processing, I think the most common thought of and, you know, example is meatpacking. The meatpacking sector, beef packing, which is commonly done in this country in the Midwest, kind of away from unions, away from the visibility of cities, which was a very conscious effort about 30, 40 years ago to move them kind of out of sight, out of mind, because it's some of the most gruesome and worst labor conditions, I would say, in any industry, not just in the food.
- [10:13]
Stephen Pimpare
Industry, incredibly dangerous work.
- [10:15]
Laura Ann Minkoff Zern
Like really high rates of both physical injury, mental health related to the nature of the job. And what we've seen, you know, also over the years is a move to a lot of repetitive. You know, it's an assembly line, right? It's a factory model for kind of the mass quantities of meat and particularly beef that, you know, we're consuming in the United States. So we see, you know, people doing the exact same actions day in and day out. So repetitive stress injury, so daily injury to kind of much more serious, like loss of limbs, along with, as Teresa was talking about just kind of structural vulnerability and lack of government oversight even before this moment, where we're going to see a lot less oversight than ever before. But this industry having a lot of kind of ins within the government, a lot of warning before you see any inspections in these types of very dangerous facilities. So that's, I think, the most kind of something that we're probably the most aware of as consumers is the gruesomeness of meatpacking. But there's a range in this. In this sector. Right. So you also have artisan bakeries. Right. And Brand Workers is an organization that works in New York City that works kind of at the intersection of immigration and, you know, artisan food processing. So small companies and small businesses that sometimes are assumed to have better practices but are, again, kind of under the radar because they have fewer employees and are not being checked out and have some of the, you know, similar types of really bad practices in terms of wage theft, you know, very long working hours, no voice for the workers in the workplace, a lot of undocumented workers who might be afraid to speak up, you know, and then you have things like food processing for things like cereals and granola bars and all the other snack foods that we eat. So it's. It's really a very wide range of types of, you know, labor environments. And some people may be aware that about a year ago, the New York Times did an expose of a lot of the really big food processing plants, finding that there was illegal child labor happening right across the United States. Unfortunately, immigrant children as young as 11 or 12 were working in a lot of the plants, making things like cereals and snack bars and chips. So, again, just really intersectional vulnerabilities in a lot of food processing. And I will say this was a chapter that Teresa was the primary writer on. So I don't know if I missed anything you wanted to add there.
- [12:58]
Teresa Mares
No, I think you covered it. We each took the lead on chapters, but we both have read each one of them about 100 times now, so we have pretty much the same.
- [13:07]
Stephen Pimpare
I would imagine. So, Teresa, let's turn our attention to warehouses and transportation. Is everything there terrific by contrast?
- [13:20]
Teresa Mares
No, it isn't. Yeah, I mean, I think what you see are one of the things that we try to do in this book is demystify some pretty thick political economic ideas. And, you know, part of that is in service of our students and trying to make sure that people have economic literacy and understand the ways that our economic system works. So in each of the chapters we highlight a different piece, right? A different. Whether it's precarity, whether it's fissuring, whether it's reproductive labor. And none of these sectors is great. But they're also not all uniformly bad. And I think what we do see in warehousing is just some really big changes over recent years and the move of moving stuff, moving stuff to people's homes. The fact that you can get groceries delivered and hellofresh delivered all of these box subscriptions is something very different about the way that we get food now. And those warehouses have to work incredibly fast, especially with some of the perishable foods that we can order through the Internet. So I think that none of these sectors is, again, uniformly bad or uniformly good. They're impacted by different dynamics of capitalism and different demographics of who's working there. And what we're trying really hard to do is point to how some of these. How some of these sectors have changed over time, and what are the consequences of those changes for people working there.
- [14:58]
Stephen Pimpare
I wonder if we can hang there for just a minute. And I know this is impossible to generalize because you're talking about so many different sectors and a long period of time, but if you were either of you to articulate, how do we understand why these changes have taken place? There are two or three things that you would point to that explain changes in working conditions.
- [15:25]
Laura Ann Minkoff Zern
Yeah, I mean, I think we've seen. Well, some things have changed and some things haven't. Right. So you go back and you talk about food work in the United States. You have to start with slavery and colonization. Right. And of course, we're not starting at, like, a good starting point. We're starting with highly racialized, highly dangerous, you know, highly exploitative conditions for food workers from the beginning of. Of the establishment of our country. That said, I think what's really changed is the high level of concentration of firms. So I'd say two things. Concentration of firms, which is really explicit in things like food retail. So grocery store concentration, which impacts both up and down the chain, their power over kind of producers and processors to create cheaper and cheaper products that are more and more uniform, and the same thing in the service sector. So the increasing of chain grocery stores and just the power of these really big firms. And we see it in food processing. It's across the food chain, but there's some parts of the food chain where it's really explicit. So the power of very few firms to kind of control the food chain and determine how much they're willing to pay for Certain products, what they need to look like, how quickly we need to get them. So that used to be much more disperse and much more democratic in a way, how the food system operated. So that concentration has happened really rapidly, I'd say more intensely since the 1970s in many of these sectors. Although, of course, we also have industrial agriculture that started way before that, but that's been aided by deregulation. So the system of kind of neoliberal deregulation. And again, we saw different, really explicit moments, both within regulation of safety trucking in the 1970s and 80s. Deregulation of how grocery stores were categorized, that was much more recent. So there's different moments of policy change. And I'm not a policy expert that can talk about the details of these policy, but it's a pattern where you see deregulation of industry, further concentration of firms, and then the end result for workers is more increasing vulnerability, as well as what labor scholars call the fissuring of the workforce, where workers are less likely to have any real connection to an employer, but more likely to be subcontracted, outsourced. A temporary workforce. Right. So a very much more vulnerable workforce from an economic standpoint. And then you have that intersecting with these historical vulnerabilities. So that was kind of a lot to throw at you, but there's a lot going on there.
- [18:11]
Stephen Pimpare
Yeah, there is a lot. So talked little bit about grocery stores. Teresa, why don't. If there's anything you want to add to the grocery store discussion, do that and then maybe let's turn our attention to what we can say about labor in restaurants, catering businesses, those kinds of instantiations.
- [18:31]
Teresa Mares
Yeah, I think this is something that I've been talking about with colleagues really recently. So it's on the top of my mind. But what was really interesting, and I think I remember getting a text message from Laura Ann on the day that she was digging into this. In this chapter is just how much dollar stores are transforming the retail landscape. And the fact that we have. I think the text message said, did you know that we have more dollar stores than all grocery stores combined? And that is really fundamentally reworking the food retail landscape and has really, I think both of us, having done work on food access and food security. Well, that there's. There are other kinds of questions that are connected to that kind of expansion that are about health and food access that are really wor. Worth examining as well. The restaurant chapter was. It was a lot of fun to write in some ways, but it was, you know, just thinking about how much our Again, speaking of how our habits have changed, how much our habits in the United States have changed about how we eat and where we eat and who cooks for us. And you know, we drew a lot on my colleague Amy Trubeck in that chapter who wrote this great book, Making Modern Meals, about the fact that we're not cooking less. Right. But different people are cooking for us in different spaces. So in that chapter, we talk both about restaurants and kind of the birth of the restaurant, the differences between tipped and untipped wages, but also get into more of the questions of institutional dining and school meals. And there's been some really excellent work done about school meals. So service work looks really different, but I think what it holds in common is a lot of sexual harassment, a lot of gendered violence, a lot of, you know, especially with working for tips, a lot of accommodating to customers demands because of a concern for one's own economic viability as, as a worker. And so that chapter takes us in a lot of different directions. It covers a lot. But I think again, what, but what I find really interesting is how much we've learned about how our purchasing and eating habits have changed and how that again, has been enabled by changes in labor and labor policies and practices.
- [21:02]
Stephen Pimpare
So let's move this even one step closer to food in the home. Laura Ann, and if you would, you made a reference to this earlier, talk a little bit about what, what mostly sociologists and anthropologists and theorists have been calling reproductive labor for quite some time, but the work that goes on in the home, literally to sustain the household and who is doing that work and what that looks like.
- [21:25]
Laura Ann Minkoff Zern
Sure. I'd say one of the ironies of the process of writing this book is Teresa and I started it during the pandemic about five years ago. We both had young kids at home, like literally at home. So, you know, it wasn't lost on us all the incredible amount of labor we were doing to feed our kids, keep our family fed while writing a book while no one was paying us to do any of that extra labor. Right. And, you know, despite the fact that we're both incredibly privileged to have, you know, active partners, we as the women in our relationships also found ourselves with the heavy burden of kind of the day to day, you know, no matter how much education and privilege you have, that research shows that we're still the ones doing the majority of that labor. Right. And of course, that labor is much heavier if, say, you're trying to manage multiple jobs, you don't have a partner, you don't have a vehicle for transportation. You don't have sustained childcare. And there's everything from feeding children to feeding elders. Right. So this work is happening largely by women that are unpaid, also sometimes, of course, paid labor as well. So domestic workers, like farm workers, are the only two, two working sectors that have been left out of the federal labor regulations created under the New Deal, the 1930s, which says a lot about how little we value the labor in the home, even when it is paid. So domestic work has always been treated differently. Right. And it's almost universal. So I think it provided a different challenge for how do we analyze this? How do we also look for some type of hope or organizing? Right. We didn't have the same data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on this, but we know that when you include labor in the home, that includes, you know, majority of people in the world have at some point fed someone else and it's not themselves. So there's a really different type of research in this chapter. You know, we looked at the wages for housework movement in the 1970s, looking at like, well, what would it be like if we tried to value domestic labor, Right. As an example of when people have started to think outside of the box around these things, I think we end with a kind of, you know, addressing, you know, within queer or non traditional household, what that looks like as also a place of hope for like, well, how, how can these household labor dynamics look different? Where do they already look different? You know, and again, just kind of speaking to Covid, there, I think was a lot of hope where that was becoming very visible, at least in kind of white collar professional workspaces. And then at the end, unfortunately, the research showed us that it actually didn't get any better.
- [24:13]
Teresa Mares
Right.
- [24:13]
Laura Ann Minkoff Zern
So there was a lot of this emotional roller coastering around food labor at that time, but especially for us personally.
- [24:22]
Stephen Pimpare
And even just sort of as a parenthetical, we can look at, you know, the, the Nordic countries that are traditionally understood to be more egalitarian along gender lines. And even in those places, you still find the majority of household labor is done by women. Even in places where literally equality along gender lines is understood to be a primary objective of the administration and the nation itself. So turning to the last substantive chapter of the book, the one that, as you point out, and that as a reader, I can say I point out, is a thing that we don't think a lot about is food waste, right? What happens after we've eaten the food and thrown scraps into to the recycling bin or the composting bin or to the trash. Teresa, you want to talk to us a little bit about the food waste piece?
- [25:18]
Teresa Mares
Sure, yeah, I can do so. Yeah. This chapter was probably in some ways the most creative chapter because we had to really dig for information on this because while there has been an increased attention to food waste, it's often been from more of an environmental concern and very understandably, concerns about the global and climate change consequences of wasting so much food. But looking at it from this labor dimension was something really new. And in drawing from, again, the Food Chain Workers alliance, that's an additional thing that our book tries to do, is to look at that sector of work. So it was a bunch different chapter to write than some of the other ones because the research looks really different, and the research doesn't focus on labor to the same degree that so many of the other sectors do. So one of the things that I think is really interesting about this chapter is the fact that it looks both at unpaid and paid labor at the same time. And so much of the food waste labor that happens in the United States is done, you know, through a more voluntary way, either taking food that is usable and feeding it to hungry people or, you know, the kinds of. The kinds of labor we even do in the home. Right. To deal with our own food waste is sometimes unpaid. But there's also a kind of a social movement dimension to this. And we look at groups like Food Not Bombs and sort of the freegan movement that is attempting to politicize food waste and really think about, you know, how can we use kind of actions like mutual aid to deal with food waste and to feed people who need it. But at the same time, you know, the histories of trash collection are figuring into this chapter, and that is literally a commingled kind of waste stream that sometimes food is involved and sometimes it isn't. But I think the fact that we look both at sort of the informal work and the unpaid work and the volunteer work and very formalized work in this chapter is really interesting, as well as the social value of this work.
- [27:34]
Laura Ann Minkoff Zern
Right.
- [27:34]
Teresa Mares
That there is something, you know, I just think about dirty jobs and how, you know, this is one of those dirty jobs that people often either don't want to do or don't want to identify with. But it's absolutely essential to our food system and to our broader, you know, our broader system of goods and good production.
- [27:54]
Stephen Pimpare
I mean, not to mention public health. Right. I mean, the reason that we have sanitation collection in the first place was disease prevention.
- [28:03]
Teresa Mares
Absolutely. And, you know, some of the social movements around the sanitation strike.
- [28:07]
Laura Ann Minkoff Zern
Right.
- [28:07]
Teresa Mares
That there's. There's been a really interesting history there.
- [28:10]
Stephen Pimpare
Yeah. So as we work our way toward concluding, why don't we turn back to you, Laura Anne, and then I'll go back to you, Teresa, for a final thought. You've made reference to a number of different organizations that are doing work in these spaces. I wonder if you would just tell us a little bit about where you look to. Where is the organizing that you look at that you think is either most effective or most promising in these spaces and in. In reducing some of this vulnerability and precarity among sort of the worst placed workers?
- [28:43]
Laura Ann Minkoff Zern
Yeah, thanks for asking. I think Food Chain Workers alliance is where I'd say, you know, number one, because they're an umbrella organization. So when you go to their website, you can see the 50 or so organizations that are coordinating with them, which I find like the place that I say, you know, follow them on social media, get on their listservs, and then you kind of can see the whole umbrella of food chain work workers, you know, within that. I think Teresa and I both are real advocates of the worker driven social responsibility model. We talk about that in the book. So that's the coalition of Immokalee Workers out of Florida and Migrant justice out of Vermont. And it's an approach that we see really hopeful through a hopeful lens. Because the coalition Immokalee Workers are. Is a farmer. Her organization in Florida. It's not a union, it's a worker group group. Because farmworkers are not universally, you know, protected to form a union in places like Florida. They've had to really think outside the box to do so. But they acknowledge through their work that farmers are not really the primary target because farmers are making so little on the dollar. Right. And this is again, the food chain analysis that we really believe in. Right. But the. The profits are really up the food chain at the processors and the retailers and the service in the grocery store places like McDonald's and Walmart that really make the vast majority of the profit. And so in there, you know, and I won't go too much into what it looks like, but they take an approach that really makes sure that. That putting the pressure on these big companies to get the money down the chain to the farm workers. And so I definitely recommend looking up the coalition of immokalee Workers Migrant Justice. Community to Community is another great farm worker organization out in Washington state that's really kind of persevered against all odds in a lot of realms, but I'll let Theresa add because I'm sure I'm missing a lot of great ones.
- [30:39]
Stephen Pimpare
Theresa what is she missing?
- [30:42]
Teresa Mares
I mean, I think you did a great job.
- [30:43]
Laura Ann Minkoff Zern
Lorraine.
- [30:43]
Teresa Mares
I think that, you know, we both, I think for our own motivation for this book, but also to not leave readers just really depressed at the end of reading it, is to pay attention to these really long standing social movements around food, from things like wages for housework, which was really interesting to learn about, to the really contemporary activities like the fight for 15 and even some of the WSR work. So I don't think we really miss anything, but I just want to emphasize that we really tried to highlight all of the ways that workers are not just passive recipients of exploitation, but they are very active agents in pushing for policies and pushing campaigns that will bring better and greater dignity to these jobs. So hopefully readers end on a positive note. The conclusion really tries to outline areas that we feel are really important to press on, and it was certainly important for our own motivation in writing it.
- [31:49]
Stephen Pimpare
You're listening to the Public Policy Channel of the New Books Network and we have been speaking with Laura Ann Minkoff Zern and Teresa Mares, who are the authors of Of Will Work for Food labor across the Food Chain from the University of California Press. Teresa Laura Ann, thank you very much for joining us today. Much appreciated.
- [32:07]
Laura Ann Minkoff Zern
Thank you.
- [32:08]
Teresa Mares
Thank you so much.