“The food system is not broken; its working exactly as it’s designed,” Colorado State University alumna Teresa Mares said in a presentation April 9 in the Lory Student Center that focused on her new book, “Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food Chain.”
The book was released last September and is co-authored by Mares and Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, associate professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University. The two had the idea to write the book in late 2019 when they searched for a piece that aligned with their food and labor classes, but they couldn’t find one.
“As we were writing this book, we were really guided by that food systems approach and thinking about, who are those essential workers that are feeding us?” Mares said. “Nothing was doing that systematic systems thinking that we wanted to do.”
The authors’ main argument in the book is that the U.S. needs to improve the standards for those who work in all sectors of the food system in order to build a more just food chain.
“If we really want to think about sustainability in a much more comprehensive way, including social sustainability, we have to think about those labor dimensions,” Mares said.
Mares grew up in the City of Fort Collins and received her bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 2002 from CSU. Mares said during that time, her family owned a Baskin-Robbins, which was where she first learned what it meant to be a part of the food system.
“It’s actually really fun to be here for this purpose and talking about this book because my own relationship to food labor was really grounded and sort of formed in this space,” Mares said.
During the conversation, Mares mentioned her first book, “Life on the Other Border: Farmworkers and Food Justice in Vermont.” In it, she wrote about how farmers, especially immigrant farmers, navigate their basic needs.
Minkoff-Zern wrote her debut book, “The New American Farmer: Immigration, Race and the Struggle for Sustainability,” around the same time as Mares wrote hers. Minkoff-Zern’s book looks at the experiences of Latino/a immigrant farm workers who transition into farm owners.
The research interests of both authors bled into their co-written book, as every chapter tackles different worker struggles in the U.S. food system.
“All of these chapters are intersectional issues,” Mares said. “We can’t just think about citizenship. We can’t just think about race because of the ways intersectionality works.”
The pair said they made it a priority to not only dive into the challenges workers in the food system face, but they also felt it was important to end each chapter with how workers have demanded change from their circumstances.
“We made a deliberate effort in each of these chapters to, yes, lay out the problem, lay out the histories of how these problems have been produced,” Mares said. “But then, end each chapter with: ‘And here’s how we’ve seen organizing change,’ or at least attempt to change some of these realities.”
The power of worker-led campaigns was acknowledged as a central theme in the book. To provide an example during the presentation, Mares highlighted the recent JBS USA worker strike that brought the meat-packing company back to the negotiation table.
Another characteristic of the book’s chapters is that each is centered on political economy, a social science that looks at how politics and the economy affect each another.
“Each chapter tries to deal with a really thick political economic concept and then think about, what does that mean for the food system?” Mares said. “Whether it’s skilling, which is a process tied with assembly line, to things like social reproduction.”
Joshua Sbicca, an associate professor of sociology at CSU, helped host the presentation after he assigned Mares’ book to his Sociology of Food Systems graduate class.
“I decided to teach it because I think it’s really important for students to understand the labor part of the food system,” Sbicca said. “This is the most comprehensive food system-oriented book on labor I have ever come across.”
Brenden Mabus, a sociology graduate student, attended the book presentation after reading the entirety of the book in Sbicca’s class.
“What really stuck out was how you can’t have food justice or social justice without labor justice … in order to change the food system into one that is equitable for both the people who are providing the food as well as those who are eating it,” Mabus said.
Reach Katya Arzubi at science@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.