This fraught, historic moment reminds us the past is prologue, and gives us the opportunity to not only recognize the fissures, but better understand the exploitation woven into this system intended to nourish and sustain. cc: CivilEats
“Unions are very concerned, with very valid reason, that these facilities are exposing workers to a risk of getting sick,” he says. And the unions are concerned for the sustainability of the system as a whole: “If you don’t have workers, you don’t have food.” Businesses, he explains, must take a different approach and “sacrifice a bit of economic efficiency” in order to protect workers. They need “to treat workers in the food system with the same care as healthcare workers.
On a societal level, Gómez says, we must reconsider the value of food and the labor behind it. “We should be willing to pay a little bit more for food in order to sacrifice some economic efficiency.” And, he says, consumers should also see the challenges borne out of the pandemic as a chance to change consumption. “In the U.S., we are spoiled. We find all products, all year round, in a huge assortment.
, “but increasingly we realize how dependent we are on the worlds of work from which we're kept apart.” Drawing on years of activism in South Africa, he echoes Mittal’s suggestion to go beyond empathy for the people who feed us to build solidarity. When fighting, he says, those practices started with education—"reading, listening, and learning” about the conditions under which Black communities had persevered.
That historic struggle for justice offers important lessons for today. The only way our food system, or our world, will get better, he says, is “if we fight—and win.” And that choice—that opportunity—belongs to all of us. “A year from now,” Jayaraman says, “it could be a totally new world, or we could be in a much worse place. Those are the two options. It's really about how hard are we willing to fight collectively to put a stake in the ground right now to say—not just as workers but as employers and consumers—“we stand together for a totally new vision of what this industry and what our economy and what our country looks like.
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