Low-wage distribution workers are essential to the food economy. In a globalizing world, the distance between sites of production and consumption expands as firms search the world for more diverse and profitable sources of food. Truckers, seafarers, and warehouse employees dedicate their working hours to the safe transport and storage of food, often in dangerous and treacherous conditions, yet they remain largely invisible to consumers. Many of these workers face precarious employment conditions—temporary, unstable, and insecure work with little or no employer-provided benefits—emblematic of jobs in the neoliberal labor market.
Capitalist features of the modern food chain, including advancements in technology, the growth of e-commerce, and the logistics revolution, tend to prioritize speed and efficiency over workers’ well-being. From a political economy perspective, the pursuit of profit is reflected in ever-intensifying efforts to extract value from labor, introducing flexible, neo-Taylorist, algorithmic forms of employee monitoring and adopting just-in-time management logics. These changes have accompanied a deterioration of workers’ rights and conditions, making it critical in the 21st century to spotlight the human cost alongside “progress” in building a sustainable global food system.
The neoliberal ideology of individual responsibility increasingly pervades managerial practices, often contributing to labor suppression and absolving employers, including Walmart, Whole Foods, and other giant food retailers, of any obligation for employee welfare downstream in their supply chains. The conditions of workers in the global food economy are complicated by demographic inequalities, with the most socioeconomically vulnerable groups experiencing the most precarious, dangerous, and demanding conditions. This highlights the need for an intersectional approach to understanding hierarchies of exploitation in the global food economy.
Key theoretical frameworks provide insights into broader implications for labor in the food economy. Racial capitalism explains how economic development inherently pursues racialized directions, perpetuating inequalities, and employing a predominantly black, brown, and immigrant workforce at the bottom rungs of distribution sectors. Segmented labor market theory helps explains dual hiring practices, divided between “hegemonic” and “despotic” workforces, and influenced by multitier ownership structures with the rise of subcontracted “perma-temps” in warehouses, lease-to-purchase contracts/debt peonage in trucking, and agency-based competitive bidding in the unregulated international maritime market.
Theories of masculinities explain gender dynamics within male-dominated sectors like trucking and seafaring where men struggle in bottom-level, precarious jobs in order to maintain their breadwinner status back home. The concept of gendered-racial capitalism has shown to be a formidable research framework for examining how distribution labor is organized, exploited, and shaped by gender, race, and class. The structural power of distribution workers at critical “choke points” in the global supply chain is an important area of interest in discussions around low-wage food workers’ rights to basic human dignity and the potential for improvement in their conditions. Finally, it is essential to question what progress truly means and for whom it benefits.
41-58 of 58 Results
Article
Low-Wage Labor in Distribution Sectors of the Food Economy
Jennifer Parker
Article
Mezze and the Lebanese Table
Aïda Kanafani-Zahar
[This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article.]
The study of mezze in Lebanon is based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in rural and urban contexts, in the mountains and along the littoral. It explored the foundations of this tradition and prompted the analysis of the Lebanese cuisine.
One of the most appreciated culinary traditions for the Lebanese people is to partake in a restaurant-prepared meal that includes an assortment of appetisers, grilled meats or the day’s special, and dessert. Mezze is generally understood as the diversity of hot and cold vegetable and meat dishes served along with the main dish. In a particular type of meal, the gourmet meal, however, mezze is the prelude to the main dish, generally consisting of grilled meats followed by fruits and sweets, the three courses articulating in a continuous and fluid movement. Enjoyed in renowned establishments to celebrate festive events or simply to share an agreeable moment with family and friends, the gourmet meal is destined to seek a particular emotion, kaif.
Mezze is composed of a large number of starters brought to the table in groups of dishes appearing one after the other in a precise order. Each group displays distinct ingredients, flavours, modes of cooking and temperatures. Guests indulge in the dishes as they come along. The wide range of starters shapes a specific time sequence and devises a pattern of eating, that of “tasting”, of “savouring”. The study of the sensorial complexity regarding its sequencing, scenography, and gustatory structure, reveals the representations of appetence in the culinary Lebanese culture. It provides insight into the visual requirements that a gourmet table must display and the flavour hierarchy aimed at kindling appetite and at preserving it throughout the meal. Further, it brings to awareness the categories of foods that necessitate the application of precise techniques to neutralise odours that cause inappetence. These elements offer the opportunity to examine the culinary sensibility expressed in the Lebanese culture. Notwithstanding the differences in organisation, time span, table manners, and purpose, the gourmet meal, in which mezze is embedded, possesses the same logic as the ordinary daily table: to stimulate and maintain the desire to eat. Both types of meals epitomise a sense-sustained culture of appetence designed at averting ill eating and sickness, a realm of research that merits investigation.
Article
Natural Food
Michael S. Kideckel
The question of what makes food natural or unnatural has spawned controversy for generations. Many people desire “natural food,” but all people struggle to define it. Its definition has been the subject of marketing lawsuits and government hearings. Within Europe and the United States, especially, people have turned to the phrase “natural food” to signal religious commitments, respond to food safety regulations, market their product, and advance political objectives. The definition of natural food at any given moment illuminates much about the values, trends, and political and economic dynamics of that period.
Article
Peasant Agroecology in Africa and Latin America
Boaventura Monjane and Peter M. Rosset
Agroecology is a word with multiple definitions. Some define it as a narrow set of technologies to make farming more sustainable, while in a broader sense it is multifaceted and seen as: (a) critical thought —offering critical analysis of agrifood systems, both dominant and alternative—; (b) an inter- and trans-disciplinary science, both a ‘Western science’ and a ‘peasant science’, concerning how agoecosystems and food systems function, which provides the understanding needed to development transformative alternatives; (c) a variety of agricultural practices that allow sustainable farming without farm chemicals; and (d) a social movement that fights for social and environmental justice in the food system. Agroecology is currently being contested by different food system actors and is at risk of co-optation by various institutions and players, who attempt to redefine it within the confines of industrial food production, thereby diluting its transformative potential. Despite such attempts at appropriation, peasant agroecology, in particular, has a fundamental role as an alternative to the industrial food system, underlying the construction of local, sustainable food systems rooted in peasant agriculture and the principles of agroecology. In Africa and Latin America, for example, agroecology is an historical practice deeply embedded in indigenous and peasant knowledge systems, that today is critical to sustainable food production while offering challenges to dominant paradigms of agricultural development. There are intricate relationships among peasants, agroecology, and the broader struggle for food sovereignty, and social movements play a pivotal role of in advocating agroecological practices and resisting corporate control over food systems, agriculture, land, and territory.
Article
Processed Foods
Garrett M. Broad
Traditional forms of food processing have deep roots in human evolutionary history and across ancient civilizations. Food-processing innovations that began in the 18th century played a key role in spurring the Industrial Revolution and shaping the development of the global food system as we know it. Starting from the mid-20th century, novel food-processing technologies led to an abundance of processed foods in the marketplace, spurred on by industry-led research applied in the service of meeting increasingly large-scale consumer demands. Processed foods are championed by some as a crowning achievement of the modern food industry, a central element in a system that provides safe, affordable, and convenient foods to diverse populations around the world. To others, processed foods are most notable for their social, environmental, and public health downsides. Specifically, advocates of the NOVA food classification system, proposed and developed in the early 21st century, have raised concerns about the uniquely pernicious impacts of what they deem “ultra-processed foods” (UPFs)—industrial food formulations designed for maximum convenience and palatability—and have called for regulations to rein in UPF production and consumption. Critics of the NOVA framework, however, call into question the scientific validity and public policy utility of the UPF category. These opposing stakeholder perspectives reflect a combination of both fact-based and value-oriented differences of opinion.
Article
Proteins and Meat
Laura-Elena Keck
[This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article.]
Proteins held a special position in 19th-century nutritional debates: “Discovered” in the mid-1800s, they were thought to be the source of muscle energy and seemed to offer solutions to many of the problems and challenges of the industrial age. Meat, in particular, was praised by doctors and nutrition experts as a protein-rich food that could help to combat malnutrition, shape more efficient human bodies, and enhance industrial and military performance—serving not only the needs of the individual but also the interests of the nation state. Meat consumption was also associated with normative concepts of masculinity and “civilization” and was frequently cited as a reason—and justification—for colonialism. In this new equation, meat equaled proteins equaled strength. This attitude slowly started to change in the early 1900s: A growing number of nutrition experts joined early critics—vegetarians and nutrition reformers—in advocating the use of more “efficient” protein and energy sources, while excessive meat consumption increasingly came to be identified as a risk factor for disease. Nevertheless, today we can see many of the 19th-century preoccupations with proteins, meat, “civilization,” and masculinity lingering or re-emerging in dietary trends like the “paleo diet,” protein-enriched “functional foods,” or books written by vegan bodybuilders. Transcending nutritional debates, these phenomena are symptomatic of broader attitudes toward eating, health, society, and the human body.
Article
Racism and Restaurant Tipping in the United States
Saru Jayaraman
The subminimum wage for tipped workers—a legacy of slavery and still only $2.13 an hour federally as of 2024—has always been a source of poverty, racial inequity, and sexual harassment for six million tipped workers and 13.6 million restaurant workers nationwide. Tipped workers of color earn less than White tipped workers due to implicit customer bias and occupational segregation of workers of color into more casual, lower-tipping establishments.
With the COVID pandemic, racial inequity, harassment, and economic instability for workers of color grew and resulted in differential experiences for workers of color when they were asked to enforce COVID protocols during the pandemic and when they returned to work as tipped workers postpandemic. As a result of these worsened experiences, 1.2 million workers left the restaurant industry during and after the pandemic, creating the most acute staffing crisis in the history of the US restaurant industry according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
As a result of this moment of worker power, thousands of restaurants have voluntarily sought to end this legacy of slavery, and there is more momentum than ever for policy to end the subminimum wage for tipped workers in multiple states nationwide. One Fair Wage, the organization the author leads, is at the forefront of these policy changes. Though there are historical and ongoing racial inequities that emanate from the current wage structure for tipped workers, 2024 also represents an incredibly hopeful moment of transformation in the marketplace and in the policy arena in dozens of states.
Article
Spices in Cuisines and Cookbooks
Ken Albala
Spices are defined in culinary terms as plant products such as roots, bark, stems, seeds, and other parts, usually dried, which have been historically important in recipes around the world and in global trade. Because they traveled great distances and went through the hands of many different merchants, they were often extremely expensive and a perfect marker of status in medieval and Renaissance European cooking. They were also considered medicinal and perfect for balancing the humors. Pepper, ginger, and cloves, for example, were categorized as hot because they left a burning sensation on the tongue and presumably in the body as well, so ideal for counteracting cold imbalances. The height of the spice trade into Europe was the late Middle Ages into the 17th century, handled primarily by the Venetians, Portuguese, and then Dutch in turn. Their decline in popularity may be attributed to the advent of classical French haute cuisine, in which it was thought that food should taste of itself and not be adorned with complex exotic flavorings. Because they were imported in greater volume, they also lost their power as a marker of status and were generally relegated to the end of meals, along with sugar, or were used in moderate amounts. The only major spice to remain on the table in the early 21st century is pepper.
Article
Spices in the Ancient World
Matthew Adam Cobb
The movement and consumption of spices and aromatics have been a feature of human history for many millennia. They have been found in contexts as diverse as early Iron Age Phoenician flasks, containing traces of cinnamon, to black peppercorns inserted into Rameses II’s nose cavity, as part of the mummification process. Traditionally, these plant products have been viewed as the preserve of the elite, at least in the Mediterranean world and parts of Europe, where many of them do not naturally grow. However, by the 1st millennium ce, thanks to a growing web of connections spanning Afro-Eurasia, especially via the Indian Ocean, a much wider range of peoples got a chance to experience spices. This impacted on everything from how their food tasted and smelled to the way in which religious and funerary rituals were performed.
Advances in archaeobotanical and the archaeological sciences enable us to build an increasingly more complex picture of the contexts in which spice consumption took place, the social paraphernalia that was associated with this, and the diversity of people involved. Moreover, these methods and bodies of data are also contributing to the identification of the spices and aromatics that were being consumed, adding more detail to the sometimes hazy picture provided by ancient authors.
Article
Spice Trade in Europe
Bobbi Sutherland
Spices made their way to Europe before the Roman Era, but it was during the Roman Empire that the spice trade and its routes fully developed. Spices arrived in the Mediterranean via three overland routes through Central Asia, through the Middle East via the Red Sea and up from the Horn of Africa. By the 2nd century ce, the Romans were also using a maritime route directly to India from Egypt. The rise of Axumite and later Arab traders led to a decline in European merchants engaging in the spice trade in the Early Middle Ages. However, the trade did not cease, and trade in spices continued as far away as England. As the Middle Ages progressed, Europeans, especially the Venetians, once more entered the spice trade. With the Black Death, the trade contracted slightly but did not cease. The fall of the Mongol Empire in Central Asia made Europeans more reliant on Arab middlemen and motivated a quest to find alternate routes to India. Famously, these led to the discovery of the Americas and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. Subsequently, the price of spices dropped, although they still remained highly prized for over a century. They were, however, joined by new “spices,” such as chocolate and tobacco, arriving from the Americas. By the 18th century, spices no longer conveyed status and were used in new ways, causing the importance of the trade to severely decline.
Article
Surplus Food and the Rise of Charitable Food Provision
Charlotte Spring, Rebecca de Souza, and Kayleigh Garthwaite
Many wealthy but unequal countries have seen a significant expansion in systematized charitable food provision, usually in the form of food banks and food pantries. The use of food charity as a way to manage both food surplus and household food insecurity was pioneered in the United States at a time of cuts to cash-based welfare entitlements. It has expanded to Canada, Europe, Australia, and a growing number of middle-income countries, often in the wake of socio-ecological crisis including recession and pandemic, but also ideological shifts around effective and just solutions to poverty and inequality. While food charity is often presented as a “win-win” solution to food waste and hunger, it has been criticized from numerous perspectives that are explored in the article, including the argument that corporate-backed food charity in its currently expanding form masks structural causes and thus fails to resolve either problem, while offering a largely inadequate and undignified food offer to marginalized people. Alternative solutions include rights-based policies to ensure people’s access to basic needs, mutual aid in the face of systemic precarity, and movements for food sovereignty as means to address both ecological and social harms caused by existing food production and distribution systems.
Article
The Tasting Menu
Alison Pearlman
A tasting menu is a set multicourse meal that a restaurant offers to all diners for a single price. Diners do not have a choice in what they eat or how many courses. Restaurants throughout the world—at various price points, with casual or formal service, in lengthy or concise lists—advertise tasting menus. These resemble other set-meal types previously served in restaurants, such as the French prix fixe and the Japanese kaiseki and omakase. They have at times influenced or have been influenced by the tasting menu. Nevertheless, one can distinguish the tasting menu by its French origin and global rise as the ultimate proving ground for the chef as a culinary artist.
Apart from a chapter devoted to its history and the perspectives of restaurateurs and diners in Alison Pearlman’s May We Suggest: Restaurant Menus and the Art of Persuasion (2018) and scientific publications on limited aspects little scholarship has substantively or comprehensively focused on the tasting menu. Instead one finds extensive studies on related topics such as fine dining, the history and social science of other meal ordering schemes, the global influence of French and Japanese gastronomy, modernist cuisine, gastrophysics, the evolution of the chef profession, and the history of restaurants. An account of the origins of the tasting menu, how it became the choice medium for the culinary vanguard worldwide, trends in its design, industry constraints and adaptations, and cultural reception can provide points of departure for further scholarship.
Article
The History and Future of Famine
Alex de Waal
Famines are shapeshifters. They have changed over human history and will continue to do so in the future. Potential causal elements of famine include food supply disruption, failure of market or welfare entitlements, and political agency that creates starvation. Famines have affected societies over the ages from prehistoric times, through ancient, medieval, and early modern agrarian societies, to the age of imperialism and the short 20th century of total war and totalitarianism. In the 21st century, calamitous famines that kill a million or more people have disappeared, but protracted, complex humanitarian emergencies persist. The immediate threat is posed by starvation crimes committed by armed actors at scale with impunity, and the longer-term threat is a state of permanent humanitarian emergency as governance and economic systems buckle under the pressures of the climate crisis and contested adaptations to it.
Article
The UFW, Cesar Chavez, and Struggles for Farmworker Justice
Matt Garcia
In September 1962, the National Farm Workers Association held its first convention in Fresno, California, initiating a multiracial movement that would result in the creation of United Farm Workers (UFW) and the first contracts for farmworkers in the state of California. Led by Cesar Chavez, the union contributed several innovations to the art of social protest, including the most successful consumer boycott in the history of the United States. Chavez welcomed contributions from numerous ethnic and racial groups, men and women, young and old. During the 1970s, Chavez struggled to effectively transform his movement into a functioning labor union and maintain the momentum created by the boycott as the state of California became the first to give farmworkers the right to protected union activity and representational elections under the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act. Although Chavez and the UFW ultimately failed to establish a permanent, national union, many labor organizers acquired valuable experience within the UFW, and many applied the lessons they learned to movements for farmworker justice elsewhere. The strategies devised by the UFW continue to be used in farmworker struggles all over the nation in the early 21st century, including among organizers too young to have known Chavez or to participate in the UFW.
Article
US Farm Employment and Farm Workers
Philip Martin and Zachariah Rutledge
The average employment of hired workers in US agriculture is about 1.5 million. Farm labor markets are significantly different from most other labor markets. For example, they are spread out over a wide geographic region, and the demand for labor depends upon a number of factors, including weather, wages, and the price of goods in some cases.
Due to the seasonality of agricultural production and job turnover, some 2.5 million people are employed for wages on US farms sometime during a typical year. The employment of hired farm workers is concentrated in three interrelated ways: by geography, commodity, and size of farm. The 10,000 largest fruit and berry, vegetable and melon, and horticultural specialty (FVH) farms in California, Washington, Florida, and Texas account for over half of US farm worker employment, including a third in California.
Two million farm workers, 80 percent of the total, are employed on crop farms. The National Agricultural Worker Survey (NAWS) finds that 70% of non-H-2A guest workers on US crop farms are Mexican-born men who have settled in one US place. Some 60 percent of these Mexican-born crop workers are unauthorized, making over 40 percent of non-H-2A crop workers unauthorized. If we consider all farm workers, including H-2A guest workers and hired workers employed in animal agriculture, the unauthorized share is lower, between 30 and 40 percent. Most settled Mexican-born farm workers have US-educated children who shun their parents’ seasonal farm jobs. According to US Census data, since the turn of the Great Recession, the non-citizen Mexican immigrant population has been declining, while the total number of Mexican immigrants started declining in 2016 (see Figure 1).
Article
Weight-Loss Diets
Evangelia Kindinger and Katharina Vester
Weight-loss dieting refers to purposefully regulating, usually limiting, food intake in order to achieve a specific goal, typically focused on weight management. Weight-loss dieting practices can involve reducing calorie intake, limiting portions, or following a particular eating pattern or regimen—for example, cutting carbohydrates and fats while preferring proteins. Yet dieting is much more than an individual activity. It is influenced by and mirrors a society’s power dynamics and social hierarchies that are also determined by weight and body shape. Looking particularly at the history of this phenomenon in modern industrialized societies like the United States, developments in weight-loss dieting are closely intertwined with gender and citizenship. Weight-loss dieting was a male practice in the 19th century and became a decidedly feminized practice in the 20th century. Furthermore, there have been concerns about the negative effects of weight-loss dieting as voiced by anti-diet nutritionists and the academic field of fat studies. Weight management is expressive of public discourses around health, capitalism, and body politics.
Article
“Wonder Foods”: Food Science and Food Industry
Clare Gordon Bettencourt
A wonder food is a packaged food product that promises extraordinary health and/or convenience benefits. These benefits are communicated on packaging, in marketing campaigns, and in media testimonials. Because of the industrial and mass market conditions necessary to package and market foods, wonder foods are unique to the industrial food marketplace.
Health wonder foods boomed in the 19th century due to advances in nutrition sciences, the intensification of industrialization, and the eugenicist, imperial, and extractivist politics of this time period. Nutritional entrepreneurship prompted the creation of unique foods that were situated at the intersection of commerce and science, including digestive biscuits, meat biscuits, digestive ferments, sodas, and grain cereals. Following World War II, a range of wonder foods promised to feed the world, as public and private Western global food aid efforts intensified to mitigate the spread of communism. Algae, fish flour, dried milk, and spun soy protein each had moments in which they were poised to solve global hunger and win the Cold War. Later, genetically modified Golden Rice promised to feed the world and solve vitamin A deficiency.
Concomitantly, the post–World War II era ushered in a food processing renaissance. Wartime technologies helped create convenience wonder foods like TV dinners that claimed to change consumers’ lives through the added value of time, longer shelf lives, and more processing to cut cooking time. In the 1990s, the Flavr Savr tomato was genetically modified to produce delicious and hardy tomatoes that would be a win–win for growers, shippers, grocers, and consumers. Finally, complete meal replacements like Soylent promised a 21st-century lifestyle imagined by Victorian futurists, yet digestive complications bring this wonder food full circle to the digestive anxieties of 19th-century wonder foods.
Article
Worker-Driven Social Responsibility in the Food System
Teresa Mares and Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern
The worker-driven social responsibility (WSR) model has emerged as an effective approach in centering the needs and priorities of food and farmworkers in creating transformational change. WSR has become a powerful force in addressing the injustices of the contemporary food system. This model directly challenges the power imbalance created by corporate concentration and complex supply chains, which concentrate wealth and power at the level of corporate executives and deprioritize rights and protections for workers. To best understand the potential of and need for WSR in the food system, one must consider the historical, legal, and economic contexts of labor in the food system, particularly the experiences of agricultural workers. As more worker organizations embrace the WSR approach, the WSR Network brings together workers across different supply chains and national contexts. Two important organizations in this network bring dignity and justice to food and farmworkers in the United States: the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and Migrant Justice. The CIW’s Fair Food Program and Migrant Justice’s Milk with Dignity Program are exemplary WSR programs that have improved the lives of farmworkers and have garnered the support of thousands of allies. With the success of programs like the Fair Food Program and Milk with Dignity, the WSR approach is poised to extend even further across the food system, including sectors such as food processing.
