Who Gets To Eat?

As recent food movements have focused on buying local or organic, a deeper and different conversation is happening among America’s food activists: one that demands not just better meals for everyone but a dismantling of the structures that have failed to nourish us all along.

- Ligaya Mishan

An altar is a sacred space, but you can make one anywhere, out of anything; out of what you’re given. On Dec. 5, a small group gathered in downtown Springdale, Ark., to line the cement steps of a public square with Our Lady of Guadalupe candles, chrysanthemums and white cards bearing the handwritten names of local poultry workers who had died of Covid-19. Under each name was the legend “¡Presente!” (“Here!”) at once invocation and exhortation, used in Latin America to proclaim the continuing presence of the dead among us, particularly victims of oppression. White helmets were set beside the cards, and blue vinyl aprons hung from the railings: part of the uniform the workers once wore as they stood shoulder to shoulder, breaking down up to 175 birds a minute even as the pandemic raged, in a city dominated by chicken and turkey plants and decreed by the state to be the Poultry Capital of the World.

For months, the worker-based organisation Venceremos (We Will Win), which arranged the vigil, had fought for protective equipment and staggered shifts at the plants to decrease the risk of exposure to the virus. (By the end of May alone, more than 16,000 poultry- and meat-processing workers across the country had been infected, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) “You were in the hurricane, just surviving,” says Magaly Licolli, 38, Venceremos’s Mexican-born executive director. “And suddenly you start counting the deaths.” The people whose names were inscribed on the cards had died because they were “essential workers,” as the government calls them now: essential, which implies value, but in this case there was neither esteem nor reward, only coercion.