 Hello everyone. Welcome. Good afternoon. Theresa Mears is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at UVM and the Director for the Graduate Program in Food Systems. She received her MA and PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Washington and completed a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies. Her research focuses on the labor in the food system, food security and food sovereignty and migration from Latin America. Her first book is Life on the Other Border, Farm Workers and Food Justice in Vermont, which was written in 2019. She's now working on her second book titled, Will Work for Food, Labor Across the Food System. Theresa finds that consumers are increasingly concerned with what goes into their food and demand a healthier and more ecologically sustainable food system. However, labor is rarely part of a sustainable food discussion. Dr. Mears shares her ongoing research on food and farm workers, focusing both on local labor concerns in the dairy industry and national conversations about essential work. Please give a warm welcome to Dr. Mears. Make sure this is all working. Sound good? Okay. All right. Thanks so much for having me on a Friday afternoon. Such a nice turnout and I'm always really excited to share the kind of work that I'm doing on campus and off-campus spaces and so I'm really excited to talk a little bit about work that I've been doing over the past few years. I saw the lineup for this semester this fall and you've got a couple more of my colleagues coming in, Louise, and they'll be great. I'll share that they will have really interesting things to talk about. Thanks so much for that introduction. That's who I am. Those are the things that I focus on. I've been at UVM since 2011 and I'm an anthropologist who studies living people. So I study people who are still alive and a lot of my colleagues, the archeologists are studying more material culture, the remains of people who are once alive, but I am very interested in the people who are still alive and the ways that we think about culture, think about food, think about migration. Those are some of the big areas that I focus on. So what I'm going to be sharing today is a little bit different than I often do when I do talks. For the past four years or so, I've been doing a lot of book talks on my first book that came out in 2019, and that has been a lot of fun. That research was looking at the experiences of dairy workers here in the state, most of whom were from Mexico, and their experiences getting food, accessing food, organizing for better working and living conditions, and really thinking about border dynamics here in the state of Vermont and how that impacts immigrant workers. That was a really interesting project. As an ethnographer, someone who does research that is inherently talking to people, the pandemic has presented an interesting obstacle to that. You can do Zoom interviews, you can do Zoom research, but it's not really the kind of research that I really love, but I wanted to stay productive. Prior to the pandemic, I was talking with a close colleague and friend of mine, Laura Ann Minkoff-Sern, who is a geographer and she's at Syracuse University. We were at a conference and we were talking about a class that both of us taught. Mine is called Food and Labor, and hers is called Will Work for Food. What we are sharing with each other is that as we teach this class, which draws a lot of students, and a lot of students are very interested in this class because they are food workers, right? They're the ones who are working at Skinny Pancake. They're the ones who are working at City Market. What we realized in those conversations is that there's certain areas of food work that are really left out in the scholarship and the research on food labor. And so we thought, and this is again, prior, this is in 2019, that well, maybe we should write this book. Maybe we should just do it together. We had both finished our first books as solo projects, and we're like, this might be more fun actually talking to someone as we go through this process. So we thought about it, and then 2020 came and we realized that this was really the perfect opportunity to do so, that we didn't necessarily need to do more fieldwork, that there's been so much written about labor and food systems. What we saw is our project really to pull it together. So the book that I'm gonna share a little bit about today is forthcoming. We're still working on it, and all of the questions and comments that you have are gonna be giving me really good ideas for finishing up that book. And hopefully if all goes well, it'll be out about this time next year if we meet our deadline, which it's looking good so far. So one of the big questions that I've been thinking through, and this was prompted by a conversation that I had with my colleague Amy Trueback several years ago, is have we ever had a fair food system? Have we ever had a system that doesn't mistreat workers, that ensures that everybody has enough food, that is ecologically environmentally sustainable? Have we ever had that kind of a system? And as anthropologists who are really interested in both kind of the current realities as well as historical realities, that's kind of an open-ended question, right? And even if we look to sort of the romantic past, right? The romantic past full of family farms and full of more localized food systems, right? Often those were dependent upon unpaid family labor. If we look at current conditions of industrial agricultural production, of factories, right? Of large-scale production, clearly there's not great things happening in that system either. So what we're trying to do in this project is really to think about is a fair food system possible? Are we, do we have the capacity, do we have the knowledge, do we have the skills to build a food system that doesn't allow people to suffer? And what would it take us to get there? Laura Ann presented this book at a group of food philosophers last week and they got very heady about that very quick. They're like, wow, what does justice mean? What does goodness mean? What does fairness mean? And those comments are gonna be really fun for us to consider. But one of the things that we're trying to do through this book is to look at the experiences of workers and how their identities, their racial, class, gender, ability-related identities, often are the things that people are exploited because of and also what draws them into this kind of work. So I'm gonna give some facts and figures, talk a little bit about some of the chapters and also really make it clear that a systems approach to understanding food is for me kind of the best way because unless we understand the food system and it's entirely, in its entirety, right? Eating fairly or eating more locally might not really address the whole picture. So food systems at UVM is a really hot topic right now. My class is fellow the first day. We have an undergraduate minor and undergraduate major a master's in a PhD program in food systems. And we were the first university in the country to build that. And so I think that's no accident that the state of Vermont and being a lay and grant university has provided this really fertile ground for thinking about food systems in this academic way. But I think we're all really, we know what a food system is, right? And I would venture a guess that if we look at all of our collective histories, probably 80 to 90% of us have worked with food in some way, right? Whether it was in a restaurant, whether you were cooking your children a meal, whether you had an agricultural background, whether you've driven a truck, right? All of these things really allow us to think about our own place within a food system. So for me, I grew up in the back of an ice cream store. My parents owned a Baskin Robbins for most of my childhood. And you would think, oh, that would be so fun, an ice cream store that's like every kid's dream. And there was truth to that. It was a lot of fun in a lot of ways. But I also saw the toll that that took on my mom, who was trying to manage an ice cream store in the middle of a Colorado winter when no one wants ice cream, right? Or what happens when your high school employees leave the walk-in open and all of that ice cream melts in the middle of a Colorado summer, right? I then went on. I had a lot of different paths through the food system. I worked in catering. I was a barista in Seattle, which was very high pressure. People expect a lot of their coffee in Seattle. I've worked in fast food. I've worked in a lot of different sectors of the food system. And now I teach about it, which is really exciting. So when we think about the system of food, right, these are all of those interconnections, those relationships between what we often call farm to fork, right, or farm to tape. And it's all of those sort of social, cultural, political conditions that shape how we eat, who we eat with, where our food is coming from, where our food is going when it's wasted. And it's incredibly complex, right? So I think it's no accident that we have to have entire degree programs designed to really pick apart and understand its complexity. So this idea of food systems has been a really important one for Laura Ann and I to think about labor and to think about where does work fit into this, right? Where does human labor sort of enter into this picture? Where is labor duplicated? Where is labor outsourced? Where is labor exploited? And it's been a really exciting and daunting process, honestly, to think through some of these dynamics. So one of the things that started this project is our own appreciation for some of the work we're organizing that's happening within the area of food and food systems. So the Food Chain Workers Alliance is a national organization and they are a huge umbrella of lots of different organizations that are working to improve living and working conditions for food workers. It involves organizations like Rock United, Restaurant Opportunity Centers United. It involves groups like Migrant Justice and the Coalition of Immokally Workers. It involves and sort of gives form to the Fight for 15, which is really an organizing place for fast food workers. And in our own teaching, we've been really interested in how the Food Chain Workers Alliance identifies where food is being worked on and how people are engaging with food. What's really interesting though is if you look across the organizing around food work and if you look at the scholarship on food work, there's two main areas that don't really pop up. And these are areas that are absolutely essential to that food system functioning. So the first is home-based labor. And the ways that we think about labor in labor scholarship, labor studies and even labor organizing is very bifurcated. You have work that happens outside of the home and you have the work that happens inside the home. And of course, as any of us who have children know and who have seen those children grow up, mine is five still, so he's on that road, right? A lot of what we're doing in the home around food work is creating more workers to work outside the home. And at the same time, we don't pay attention to those interconnections and we often, because it's unpaid work, typically in the United States, we don't necessarily think about in a lot of detail how to make it better or more just. And those are some interesting dynamics. The other thing that is really missing is what happens to food when we're no longer using it, right? Food waste. And in the state of Vermont with our now our universal recycling and composting law, this has actually gotten a bit more attention than it has in the past. That oftentimes, you know, you hear that saying like there is no way when you throw it away, there is no way. And when we look at food, that's really true, right? Someone has to compost it. Someone has to put it on a trash truck. Someone has to think about the packaging of that food and whether it's recyclable or not. But yet we don't understand that as part of the labor system of food. And so in the book that we're writing, what we're trying to do is break down this really immense and complex food system sector by sector and think about who is doing the work within that area. So one of the things that happened and one of the things that we've been really kind of thinking through as we've been writing this is the impact of COVID. And I think if we all think back to early 2020 when we were faced with concerns about empty store shelves, right? The farmers who were all of a sudden selling CSA shares out the window, right? Because people were wanting to buy more locally. When we were thinking about how we had executive orders from then President Trump to keep the factories open, right? Because they were essential workers. So what's happened is the pandemic has given us a kind of a new viewpoint on the work that it takes to feed ourselves and the work that it takes to feed the nation. And as children were no longer able to go to school and all of those household dynamics really had to shift, we also have a new attention to the pressures that happen in the home to keep that family going. I was lucky enough to mostly move online. I don't love online teaching, but I could do it. I kept getting paid. I kept my paycheck coming from UVM. And at the same time, at that point, I had a two-year-old who could not go to daycare. And balancing online teaching with keeping a very fussy two-year-old fed with my husband who was also trying to stay employed, these added different pressures. And at the same time, it's given us a new viewpoint to understand maybe some possibilities around change. So I think when we're looking at sustainable food or good food or fair food, this is a conversation in Vermont that is wonderfully productive. And I think looking at this past summer with the flooding and the impacts on our farmers, in this state, we care a lot about our food system. We care a lot about the condition of the lake. We care a lot about supporting our local economies. We care a lot about, collectively, what's going into our own bodies. But labor often slips out, right? Thinking about whose hands we're picking that tomato, whose hands we're milking that cow, are often not part of that sustainability conversation. And what we propose in this book is that if we are really going to build a sustainable food system, a sustainable food movement, we have to center work in that question. Because without those workers, we don't have a food system. So part of our job in this book has been to look at a lot of data. And this is, we can't talk to people or we weren't able to talk to people as we were pulling this together. And actually, this gave me a whole new insight into national questions. So I've done a number of years of ethnographic fieldwork here in Vermont, working with dairy workers, understanding their concerns and the conditions of their work. But I really had not had the opportunity to step back and think about what does this look like at a national scale? And if we look at the numbers of people who are working in our food system, it is immense. And this does not include unpaid work in the home. So we have about 22 million people in the country working in the food system. And when we look at where they sort of reside, almost half of those people are working in food service in restaurants, in cafeterias, in catering, in prisons, all of those sort of direct provisioning of meals. And if we look at the hourly wage of that, it's about $13 an hour for food service below the livable wage in Burlington certain. If we look at production, production, meaning agricultural production, we see one of the lowest annual wages, even though farming and farm work is central to all of those other steps, right? If we look at food processing, making tortillas in a factory, making the Oreos, cutting up the chicken in large-scale meatpacking facilities, right? We also see relatively low hourly wages, and we also see a lot of exploitation. Waste management is an interesting thing. So waste management is a really complicated field. And as we realize, this was actually the hardest chapter for us to write because of the fact that we don't often see it as food work. It's actually one of the better paid places in the food system. It's more likely to be earning more or less a livable wage, but the conditions of that work, as we might imagine, are not necessarily something we all would want to do. So overall, this is how we're organizing this book. We have an introduction, and then we go sector by sector through the food system. We look at food and farming and how plantation agriculture and industrial agriculture have really built a system that tends to be extremely hard on workers. We look at processing, and this was one of my favorite chapters to write, where we looked at how Henry Ford and Henry Ford's invention, well, he kind of invented and he kind of did. The assembly line then went on to shape how we make food. We look at distribution and trucking and logistics and warehouses and all of those kind of unseen parts of the food system. Moving to retail, thinking about grocery work and corner stores and 7-Elevens and dollar generals and all the places where we get something to eat. We look at service, focusing mostly on restaurants and school labor, and work within the home and then food waste. So this is kind of taking us beyond the farm to table, but kind of the farm to the table to the compost bed is what we're thinking about and still centering that question of the home. So what I wanna do for the rest of the time is to focus in on three of these areas because this talk is not gonna be five hours long, it's gonna be 45 minutes long. And I wanna kind of paint a picture of what we know about work in this particular sector and where there's some really interesting possibilities of making change because what I've realized in teaching food-related classes for now nearly 20 years is that when you study food, there's a lot to be upset about, there's a lot to be depressed about. My students are often like what do we do to make it better? Like tell us how to make it better. And that desire I think is very valid. So what I also wanna point to are some really interesting places where people are trying to make this work better and how we might as consumers or as people who are concerned maybe might lend our support to that. So I'm gonna start out with agricultural labor and for Laura Ann and I, this is the area that we knew the best. I had worked with farm workers in the state of Vermont. She has worked with farm workers in a lot of places including New York and California. And when we sat down to write this chapter, we're like, oh boy, how are we gonna narrow this down? This is so much to think about. And so what we really tried to think about is how plantation agriculture, really extractive violent forms of agriculture that were developed to enable and to profit from slavery then became a blueprint for industrial agriculture as we know it today. So one of the things that we know again is that this work tends to be not paid that well. And in kinds of fieldwork and the type of farm work for people are paid piece by piece, what we call a piece rate. Bucket of apples, bucket of tomatoes, bucket of whatever, those wages can be really unpredictable and seasonable. And that's one of the major causes of why, for example, farm workers are more likely to be hungry than the general population. It's because often they don't work in the winter unless they're in Vermont and they work on dairy. We know that this industry has very low levels of unionization, very, very low levels. And at the same time, there's really important historical movements that are trying to organize farm workers, from Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers to more recent forms of organizing of farm workers. And so what we try to understand in this is how agriculture in the United States has faced a lot of pressure to get bigger, get bigger, get out, right? What is it? Field post to field post, right? So that's a sort of idea of the need to monocrop, the need to grow large swaths of the same thing. And all of that has had, in many ways, a devastating impact, not only on the small family farm, but also on those workers who come into those large-scale farms to work. And so what we know is that from the transition from enslavement to sharecropping, right? That violence persisted. And from that movement of sharecropping to becoming, for example, migrant workers in the Northeast, that violence persisted. And as we've seen shifts where now we have so many workers from outside the country creating food for us, that violence has persisted. So right now, there's a figure that's something like 80% of the food that we eat goes through an undocumented farm worker system. And that's a lot of the food that we eat, right? And at the same time, right, that's absolutely essential work. It's work that has to happen. One of the things that we trace and that we're very interested in is how the treatment of workers, especially in agriculture, has been built into law. And if we look historically at the New Deal, which brought about really important changes in the United States, new protections, new safety nets, the two groups of workers that were left out of all of the labor protections in that were agricultural workers and domestic workers, right? At the time that the New Deal was written, most of those workers were African-American, right? It was a systematic way of keeping that work not just, right, and not fairly compensated. So the patterns that we see in our agricultural system, right, have long histories. And it seems like there's probably a lot of history buffs in this group. So I think it's really important that we kind of come to terms with that. So amidst that, we're at the same time, and maybe because of those conditions, we're seeing incredibly important strategies of organizing workers and bringing better conditions to the field. And so worker-driven social responsibility is a model that has had great success in bringing better working conditions, better pay, time off, having evidence of a pay stub to thousands of workers in the country. And this model is probably best connected to the coalition of Immokalee workers in Florida, Immokalee being a place that has always been a really central place for industrial agriculture, first with former sharecroppers and now increasingly with workers from Latin America. And what this model does is it has really successfully located the place in the food system that has the power, and it's not the farmer. Farmers often, even the best intentions, even the most sincere desire to create good working conditions, are really difficult when you're not making enough yourself. So what this model has done is it has looked to those really large-scale companies that have plenty of money. Wendy's, actually, no, not Wendy's, Wendy's has not signed on. Walmart, McDonald's, Burger King, Subway, Sodexo, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Pizza Hut. And what they have done is they require or they have mobilized for those companies to pay one more penny per pound of the tomatoes that they purchase. That one penny has then been responsible for immensely improved working conditions, right? And Sodexo, they can afford it, okay? Ben and Jerry's, as we'll talk about with milk, they can afford it. So what else is really important about this is that the Worker Social Responsibility Program has been responsible for both highlighting and eradicating slavery in tomato fields in Florida. So one of the main motivations for this organizing is that there was still cases of enslaved people working in the United States picking tomatoes. And through this organizing, one of the things that's happened is an eradication, not probably a total eradication, but an erasure of that issue. It also has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment. So farmers who are getting the money from those higher-up companies to create better working conditions for their employees, right, they're able to do that because it's not coming off of their own back, right? It's coming from these large companies. So this has had a really tremendously huge impact in agriculture in the United States and in other places. And this Fair Food Program, which is the Coalition of Immaculate Worker Program, has spread as far away to South Africa, to Chile, to Mexico, to California. And in my mind, this is one of the most exciting things that we're seeing in the food system happening. In Vermont, this has been something that I've been tremendously excited about in our own backyard. So Migrant Justice and Organization here in Vermont, an organization that I've been really fortunate to work closely with, was a part of their board for a number of years, probably will go back at some point when I have a less demanding child. I don't know when that's gonna be. But what happened is that Migrant Justice started learning from Coalition of Immaculate Workers about how they were doing this program. And through a ton of organizing work, years of organizing work, what they've identified is that in Vermont's dairy industry and also in New York's, there's a lot of possibility for engaging in this approach in our own backyard. So 2017, it's been almost exactly six years ago, Ben and Jerry signed on to this agreement. And what that means is that on all dairy farms in Vermont that are selling milk to Ben and Jerry's, they get a price premium for their milk that allows them the money they need to provide better working conditions. And that's really cool. Right now, the new campaign is with Hannaford. Grocery stores, so that all of the store brand milk would also come from farms with these same conditions. And one of the really interesting things about this is that what a good job looks like in these programs is designed by the farm workers themselves. It's not designed by corporate CEOs who may have never picked a tomato in their life. It's designed by the workers themselves. And I think that that's really a different approach than one that we need more of. So I'm gonna move sectors into something that we probably know quite a bit more about because we interact with it all the time. Going to restaurants, at some point having our children eat school meals. This sector is a really fascinating one because of how recent it really is. And the restaurant industry and the intensification of food service is really kind of a recent phenomenon. And it's tied in some ways to the establishment of the inn for weary travelers and restaurants in and of themselves as places are really about 130 years old. Not that old when we look at human history. So again, when we look at service that's where we see the largest chunk of food workers. And this is the place where most of my students have spent some time. They have been servers, they have been cooks, they have been bussers, they have been dishwashers. And it's this system, this part of the system that we all know really well. So in this chapter, one of the things that we pay attention to is the difference between working for tips and not working for tips. And how working for tips entails a whole different kind of engagement with the broader community. Part of that results in really high rates of sexual harassment. So there are more sexual harassment complaints filed within food service than in any other industry. Part of that is because if you are working for tips and a large percentage of your pay is dependent upon that, oftentimes there's toleration, right? Even if not appreciating that kind of behavior. There's also back of the house, front of the house kind of conditions where oftentimes upper management are relatively well off, they're often men and servers are often young women. And right now there's a very interesting case kind of brewing around a local company where there's questions of how those dynamics have played out. But if we look at fast food, right? Fast food is one of those areas where no matter how friendly you are, no matter how you engage with client health, you're usually not making tips. And that's where we've seen a lot of energy for raising the overall wage to $15 an hour. So here we also see really low rates of unionization. It's really, really hard to organize restaurant workers. One of the hardest industries to organize. But at the same time, just in the past couple of years we have seen workers organizing in ways that we have not seen for about 60 years. Part of this is through the fight for 15. So the fight for 15 is a national movement that is trying to, I can raise the wage, so hard to say that, to $15 an hour. Currently that's at 7.25, right? And there has been no national level change, but many states, including California, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut and Florida and several cities, Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, obviously very expensive cities to live in, have agreed and have committed in policy to gradually increasing wages to $15 an hour. The reality of that is that those changes have increased the wages of 26 million workers to the tune of $150 billion. So all of the purchasing power there, all of the economic sort of vitality that might be tied to that is making a number of policy makers maybe think differently about this, right? Bernie's been behind this for a long time, right? This is one of the things he's often campaigned around. But the ways that this kind of change would impact workers of color and women is really, really important because when you look at the roughly 22 million workers that are in the food system, about 12 million are workers of color. So if we're looking at addressing historical poverty at historical gaps in wealth, these changes have actual real possibilities to change some of those conditions. The other thing that's happening is to do away with the sub-minimum wage. And so federally, we have something called the tipped wage, $2.13 an hour that has been on the books for 30 years. And although there are very different realities in how that works out, in some states it's expected the management will raise that up the federal minimum wage if it's not earned. In some states, they've actually chosen to have a higher tipped wage and tips are on top of that. In general, the tipped wage fills not so great realities for restaurant workers unless you're working at hand of the work. Where you're likely to be working with very deep-pocketed customers. Great list. So one of the things that the One Fair Wage campaign is trying to do is to do away with that federal minimum wage because if you are working in an IHOP at three in the morning in the middle of Illinois, chances are you're not making enough tips to get by. So doing away with that tipped wage would have really tremendous impacts. So that's an area that again, when we look at some of the realities here, this is one of those things that I think has real problems. Policy level changes that would have really far reaching impacts. What's interesting though is that there's some critique of this from restaurant workers themselves. So restaurant workers who really are doing really, really well with tips are sometimes questioning what would happen to their tips if these base wages were changed. And I think that's a very valid point. So the third sector that I'm gonna talk about is the sector that we all probably know quite a bit about, right? We all at some point have lived with a family. We all have had someone feeding us. We all have probably fed others at some point in our life. But at the same time, this, these practices as labor are not often considered food labor, even though it's working with food. And so this idea of social reproduction, which is a theoretical term to really understand how in the household we actually are making more workers is a really important place that we pay attention to in this book. It's no small accident that both Laura Ann and I have two small children. Well, I have one, she has two. We have three together. And a lot of our writing sessions, we've been Zoom writing for now two and a half, three years. A lot of our sessions have started out like, oh God, if I get asked for one more snack today, I'm going to lose it. Or, hold on, I've got to stop writing. I need to go throw this in the up. So there's no small accident that this chapter was one that got us fired up, right? We are both working mothers. We both have young children. We both have amazingly supportive partners. But we also recognize how a lot of this work across history has been gendered. So when I was approaching this chapter, I was like, what am I going to say? Like, it's not just a complaint, but what am I going to say about this chapter? And how am I going to think about, you know, these questions as questions of work? So one of the things that we've decided to do in this chapter is to focus on these three historical moments where major political shifts or social shifts have had really transformative impacts for who is doing the cooking, who is doing the cleaning, who is taking care of the children. We start out with emancipation. And when we moved from having enslaved domestic workers in the United States to then having legally binding, but not legally enforced requirements to pay people, this had huge impacts on who was doing this work. And what we saw is that for formerly enslaved African-American women, domestic work was often the next step, right? Working for white families was often that next step, even if it was for pay. We also look at kind of 60s, 70s era feminism and how increasing calls for women to have work outside the home and to be fairly compensated for that work were both really transformative changes, but also didn't recognize that many women of color have been working outside the home for decades. And so we try to think about sort of where was sort of mainstream 60s and 70s feminism successful in bringing about gender equality and where was it kind of had a little bit of a blinder off? It was really fun to talk to my mom about this. My mom's 82, she was firmly within this generation and just thinking about her and seeing all of these changes over her lifetime were really fun for us to consider. Then we end with COVID because when we look at the impacts of COVID, what we know in just the first three months of the pandemic, 250,000 more women left their jobs than them, right? Almost a quarter million in three months. And oftentimes we're taking the lion's share of the work in the home, right? And if we're thinking about women of color who are overrepresented in fast food work, meat packing, chicken processing, grocery, retail, fast food work, all of those pressures to be essential workers outside the home were deepened by having to also take care of children in new ways when schools were closed. So this chapter was a really interesting one to write. It was a really interesting one to think about. And it's one that I think probably stands to make maybe the most pointed argument about where we need some change. And I will also say that it's also a place where we've seen really important shifts happening, even across my lifetime. In those conversations with my mom, she was like, your dad never changed the diaper. He didn't change one diaper for four children. My husband's chain has changed way more diapers than I have, right? That's progress, maybe it's old. But how we organize women or anyone who's a caretaker in the home is really challenging. It's really diffuse, right? It's not a factory full of people. It is thousands of homes filled with workers. And so one of the things that we've been really thinking about is how there's really exciting and interesting research about how same sex couples actually manage household labor. And in a lot of ways, those are actually much more fair. So thinking about where our dynamic and diverse iterations of family may be examples that we wanna look to. We also think about the impacts of feminism, the impacts of new forms of feminism, but this chapter kind of leaves this open ended question of like, how do you bring change to women or men that are doing caretaking? And an answer that some people have proposed is wages for housework, right? Getting paid to do that work. That would be a very size lecture. So I'm gonna wrap up with just a few concluding thoughts. So again, one of the questions that we've asked in here is how this food systems framework, how thinking about the complexity of the food system tied together might allow us to think of a better future for food workers. And what would that mean for conversations of sustainability? We've also thought, and Laura Ann and I are very much excited about calls to eat local and calls to sort of support our local food systems. But how can we bring in labor or what's often called social sustainability into those questions, right? How do we sustain the social world in the same way we wanna try to sustain the natural world? And at the same time, how do we draw upon some really interesting models? Things like worker-driven social responsibility, things like the Farm Bell, things like the Good Food Jobs campaign that might be creating some of these new realities. And what's really interesting is as we were writing this, we've been in this kind of time of organizing that is at the rate that we haven't seen for something like six decades. Starbucks workers, Chipotle workers, the scoop shop down on Church Street are now all organized. And that's a very different thing to think about than even 10 years ago when we saw unionization really dipping. So I'm gonna wrap up just with some slides and thanks. We are really excited to get this thing out in the world. We're also a lot of work ahead of us. And so I'd love to hear questions, comments, thoughts on things that you think we should consider. And we've had some really good support for this, both from our own institutions, UVM and Syracuse, but also by an army of amazing research assistants who have been digging into the Bureau of Labor Statistics for us and finding cool pictures. And then what's also really exciting and I wanna make sure I acknowledge this is the University of California Press who I've published my first book with. They have a special program to support first-generation authors. And I'm the first generation in my family to go to college, certainly the first person in my family to write a book. And this press is actually paying a lot of attention to how do we amplify voices that have historically not been included in publishing. And I think that's really, really cool. So I'm gonna stop there. We have about 15 minutes for questions, comments. I only talked about three of the eight chapters. And so there's a lot of other things that are happening, but I'm happy to answer any questions and hear any ideas and suggestions to all my questions. Now, now, I just keep pushing buttons. That was great. Me too. You know, let's see if we have anything on Zoom. Yes, we do. Why is it more difficult for farmers to get temporary workers from Latin America documented or not? What is the process for this at this time? Oh, that's such a good question. And that's a place where the pandemic and the closing down of borders has had some really interesting kind of ripple effects that actually when we close down the borders because of COVID, seasonal agricultural work still continue to some degree. But the process to obtain a permit to hire H2A workers, which H2A visas are the workers that bring, like Jamaican workers into the state of Vermont to pick apples, workers into lots of the country on a seasonal basis. What you have to do is you have to go through a very lengthy process to demonstrate that there is no local labor supply before you're able to, as a farmer, go into that program. You also fold a lot of responsibilities to ensure that those workers return home, that they have adequate housing, that they have adequate pay. It's a really lengthy process for farmers to get into. And when we look at different kinds of agriculture, it's also important to realize that dairy is not seasonal. So when we think about our own economy here in Vermont, 70% of our agricultural revenues in the state come from dairy, large-scale dairy mostly. And there is no way to get a worker's visa to come into dairy because it's year-round. It's not seasonal. And so one of the things that Leahy did while he was still in office was try to expand the H2A, he was trying to make the case for expanding the H2A program to include dairy work. I'm a little hesitant about that, quite honestly, because the H2A program has been well-documented to be a program where a lot of worker abuse continues. And so using that as a model, I'm a little a lot unsure of. But it's really interesting because the number of H2A visas is very limited in comparison to the demand for it, to the demand for those workers, and just the logistics of trying to get into that program often deter a number of farmers from doing so, and then we'll hire workers off the books. Yeah, that's a really important question. That's true. Got a couple? Okay. I heard you say, I love food earlier before the talk. Well, can you hear me, everyone? Yeah. I worked in the bookkeeping part of the food industry, in a restaurant group. Yep. I had a secret job that no one was to know that I did. What was it? It was to take and figure out the cost of all the meals that we served in a year. And this information, so you didn't include taxes, it was just the food part. Yep. So there was a lot of just collating math. Yep. And it was by meal. And those numbers went to the Internal Revenue Service. And they judged the amount of dollar value of meals that were served against the reported tips of the servers. Yep. And I went in when nobody else was working. Yep. And I was never to tell anyone that I did that because there were other people in the office who would have shared that with the servers and nobody wanted anybody to know that that, does that still happen? So I'm, it's really funny you bring that up because I'm married to an accountant for a restaurant group. That's in stock. I don't know that it happens. I'm not really sure if that sort of seems like kind of undercover work happens. I'm not positive about that. Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if that happens. I also think that this is where more formality, right? Either through guaranteeing higher wages on an hourly basis or reconfiguring tips in a way that might be for formal might, I mean, there's various impacts, right? Workers are gonna hate it, right? Servers who are trying to often do anything they can to make a dollar in a really hard industry might really dislike having to be formalized in ways that they currently can kind of slip through right now. But at the same time, it's kind of one of those things that sort of built into the system, right? The informality of tips, the need to self-report tips. That's kind of one of those things it's kind of greasing the wheels of the restaurant in the strain a lot of ways. But I should look into that. I should ask off the record if that's one of the jobs that my partner has to do. I haven't heard that it is, but I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah. Is the organic movement on the rise in Vermont? Oh yeah, absolutely. Can it be profitable for both farmers and workers? Yeah. So what's interesting about organic is that organic has nothing to do with labor standards. Organic has everything to do with inputs and how fields and plants are maintained, grown, sprayed, those kinds of things. There are no labor conditions within organic. That said, there's this really, really well-known food systems thinker, Julie Guthman. And she wrote this book called, Agrarian Dreams. And it's all about organic standards, what organic standards have done to agriculture. And I think it's towards the end of the book, she said, while organic might not actually have anything technical to say about labor, when I buy organic strawberries, I at least can hope that those farm workers were not poisoned by chemical, right? So organic is definitely on the rise. Organic milk is an interesting, like very volatile kind of industry in the state. And organic practices often do have some spillage to questions of social sustainability. Farmers who want to go organic often do have concerns about labor. But when we look at the actual certification, there's nothing about labor within that. Things like fair trade have a bit more specificity about fair wages or fair incomes, often for workers in other countries. But organic itself has nothing to say about labor. As a follow up, did the flooding impact much of it? Oh gosh, the flooding has impacted so much. And there's actually, if anyone's interested, there's gonna be a really good series of talks at UVM about the flooding and about the flooding's impact on agriculture. And the last panel is gonna be a panel of farmers who talk about this condition. Yeah, I mean, and it's really uneven across the state, but the flooding and just heavy rainfall has had a really dramatic impact, whether it's about how fields being completely flooded and then not harvestable to hay, not being hayed at the right and kind of predictable times, that yeah, the flooding has had a really, really terrible impact on agriculture in the state. How that's translated to labor, I don't know as much about, something I'm really curious about. But yeah, the floods were really, really hard for our local system. Very interesting presentation, Teresa. Thanks for it. After I retired, one of the things that we've done is to volunteer for meals on wheels. And I have kind of mixed thoughts about that. I think it's great that individuals who need a nutritious meal are being provided that. I have a real concern about the way in which it's done, which is done in a really factory-like, assembly-like process, but I think everything kind of made in Rutland and then driven to hubs and then people pick it up and then distribute it. So there's a lot of disposable, I would think, waste in the packaging. There's a lot of gasoline used in this process. And I've thought about this, but I don't know how we could do something like that better. And then there's also a dependence on volunteer labor, right? Yes, absolutely. And then that's a really important piece of it too. Yeah, I mean, I think that this is something that, whether it's meals on wheels or whether it's just, our transformation to eating so much takeout, this is like just the rise of Grubhub and Uber Eats and all of the takeout that we have seen increase with the pandemic has come with a lot of environmental waste, right? A lot of plastic, a lot of packaging. I think you're pointing to like, there's some things that we gain by things being centralized, right? Efficiency in some cases, but we lose a lot of the texture, right? We, like what I think about is if things aren't so centralized, how might we meet people's needs better? How might we accommodate various dietary needs and preferences and cultural preferences? But I think it points to, in my mind, the fact that in the United States, we don't have strong enough social safety nets for really anyone, right? And that if we rely upon volunteer labor, if we rely upon government surplus to feed our children, right, there's a lot of places where in the name of efficiency, we lose some of the dignity and some of the sustainability of actually providing them. It's interesting in Vermont, not the same case as meals on wheels, but the transition to universal school meals where now no child has to pay for a meal in the state. I mean, as a mother, this has been like, wow, this is a whole new thing, right? But I think that you're pointing to a really interesting place where we don't always have the best solutions to provide food to the people who need it most, right? And what are the externalities or the costs of that are really, really messy, messy, messy in terms of plastic waste, but also just, you know, is that food that people even want to be delivered? Travis. Okay, so hello. Last November, Vermont decided to pass proposal two, which abolished slavery. How, if any, impact did that have in our food labor system? I haven't heard that it's had any. Yeah, that was a really important kind of codification, right? To have it something that people kind of took for granted, that that was the case, but to have it actually codified and illegalized, I think is a really important statement. I am not aware of any direct ways that it's impacted the food system, but I wouldn't be partially because if, well, I'll say, in places where slavery persists in the food system is often so underground and so unseen, that enforcing that policy in cases where they may still exist, I think would be complicated, but it would be something really interesting to look into because, you know, there are definitely cases where questions of freedom and questions of ability to move freely for agricultural workers in the state are really compromised. Good question. All right, one more. To what do you owe the major improvements in the quality of food served to children in our schools? Oh, boy. Ooh, I'm not a school meals expert. I'm not a school meals expert. And I do think that, I mean, this is where Vermont is a leader in a lot of ways and the fact that we passed universal meals is a huge triumph, right? And I think that the growth and the amazing work of the Farm to School Network, you know, connected to Shalbert farms, connected to a lot of different entities has made our state really well known for the quality of food, for the diversity of food, for the strength of school gardening programs. I also think that doing it in a small state is a very different thing than doing it in California, right? And so I think there's something, I've heard Vermont in the food systems world described as right-sized, that we're the right size to do a lot of things really quickly, right? Because we don't have to convince 5 million people. We have to convince about 51% of 650,000 people. So I think that that's where, you know, the size of the state and also just the strength of a lot of these networks that have been working for years is really impressive. Yeah, my kid loves school food. She comes home and I was like, do you want me to make you lunch? And she's like, no. That's nice. Anyone else? In the last 10 years I've seen, I had a presentation on one innovation in the waste part of the system and another innovation on the first, the food production, I guess you'd call it that first block. And I wondered if you'd heard anything about them. One, in the waste part of the system, the digester that was a million dollar project but could be, could go from farm to farm to farm and actually turn their manure into very expensive and wonderful fertilizer that they could then sell. Is that progressing and is that helping on the waste part? Yeah, and there's actually an engineering professor at UVM that's been doing a lot of work on the anaerobic digesters. I don't know if he's working with the mobile ones. I think he's working on the ones that are situated at farmers mostly but yeah, that's a really interesting proposition, right? That taking, in general, taking something that is seen as waste and turning into something that can be a source of livelihood and revenue is really cool. And I know that there is quite a bit of energy around that here and research being done on it. And the other part was, I saw a documentary on a biodome kind of that you could actually produce food for a whole village, if you will, in one dome without soil, without the slave labor, without all of that. And then it got burnt down by some farmers or ranchers in the area, I can't remember. I don't know about that. There's been a lot of movement to hydroponics and to different kinds of growing food that don't require soil in the same way. But I'm not familiar with that case. I can be interested in that. One more, one more question. My question has nothing to do with the information you presented or the data, but I was very curious about the pictures that you showed. Those, the black and white pictures were from the 30s or 40s. And I think that the young people today can't relate to that at all. They can't relate to a kitchen where the counters don't even have a toaster. Yeah, yeah, those pictures. So we had an amazingly young, vibrant person doing some of this research for us. And a lot of these are held by Library of Congress. And so Library of Congress has a really cool online archive of a lot of these images. So this is just a selection of some of the ones that will go in the book. What we tried to do in each chapter is to have a historical picture that showed kind of an early iteration of a restaurant or in this case, sharecropping families, kind of descendants of sharecroppers, and then trying to bring it up to really more recent history. But yeah, I think that that's where my students, while they might look at that and see it as really unfamiliar, what I'm really excited about is that my, maybe I'm just lucky, but my students have a real desire to learn those histories and to not repeat the mistakes they make, right? So what we've been thinking about as we've been doing these images is that question, like who's gonna relate to these and who's gonna understand what a kitchen looked like in 1930 in a totally different historical period? But yeah, I appreciate the comment. Thank you so, so much. This is very interesting.