Maybe all owners should "loot" their own stores to donate to the community
Issue 196: Plus — meatpacking giants are (maybe) exaggerating shortages as a ploy to protect profits and exploit workers. The power of co-op groceries. Historical ice cream flavors.
Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a lunchtime-ish food solutions newsletter. On Mondays, I send a reading guide of food system fix news, and on Thursdays, I dig deeper with an original reported essay.
Check out last Thursday’s dispatch — Will the Regenerative Organic Certified standards save us?
>> Penzeys Spices continues to set the bar astronomically high
In addition to selling some of the best spices on the market, CEO Bill Penzey has long been unafraid to use his resources and voice to advocate for social change. So when the Penzeys Spices location in Kenosha, Wisconsin, ended up unscathed after protests there in recent weeks, Penzey wrote in his newsletter:
“Someone wrote to say that you would be singing a different tune if it was your store being looted. I'm by no means perfect but seriously no, I wouldn't. Human life means everything; stuff, not so much.”
So, he thought: What if he ‘looted’ his own store for the benefit of the community?
“What if we looted our own store? What if we took a snapshot of our Kenosha store’s inventory tonight and simply gave away exactly that amount of inventory in the coming weeks? … What if we just gave away our spices and seasonings to food pantries and gift boxes to organizations trying to raise money to fund change?”
I’m really intrigued by this course of action, not only as a model for other stores to donate resources to their communities, but also as a way to recast and reclaim the language of looting.
In this really interesting article at The Atlantic, Olga Khazan unpacks the sociological view of looting — a.k.a., why do people do it? To lash out against repressive authorities or capitalist systems; to even the scales between corporations and poor neighborhood residents; to reclaim dignity; to get media attention; to mirror the aggression displayed first by police; to simply cause chaos in an already chaotic society.
“Most of the experts I spoke with agreed that looting is a side effect of protests, which are a side effect of the conditions causing the protests. In this case, the root cause is yet another killing of a black man by a white police officer. To fully eliminate looting, you’d have to eliminate the conditions that make people upset enough to protest.”
So here, it seems to me that Penzey is interpreting looting not as inexplicable lawlessness but as a sort of call for help — as community members, who have been targeted and discriminated against and denied resources, taking matters into their own hands to get the resources they need. As a store with said resources, Penzey’s move is not toward shielding his stuff but shielding his community. And I think it’s interesting too that he chooses to retain the term “looting,” because perhaps it keeps our focus on the issue of corporate accumulation of capital at the expense of workers (and Penzey’s ideas to subvert it).
(Here’s Penzeys Spices’ Minneapolis location, btw. Photo from Kenneth Tompkins on Twitter)
I think this presages a new and more equitable model of food provisioning that I really like, where food stores/co-ops are responsive staples of the community; where they are not simply there to turn a profit from residents but instead to genuinely help fulfill local needs.
And on that note…
>> “Food co-ops are on a mission to fix our food system. They might just succeed.”
For the reasons I just talked about, this is perhaps my favorite solutions-oriented story I read this week. I’m energized by the potential of local cooperative groceries and kitchens to turn food provisioning into a more social, sociable, and socialist endeavor.
As we’ve seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the small producers and purveyors that have stayed afloat have done so by being extraordinarily nimble and attuned to the needs of their communities. For all their rationalized capitalistic efficiencies, this is something big players in the food industry simply aren’t equipped to do. And the intrinsic, centralized profit motive of shareholder-run corporations means that, no matter their rhetoric, community needs will always come second. In the article, Alec Tilly talks with Malik Yakini, the executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network and co-founder of the Detroit People’s Food Coop:
As with many cooperatively run stores, the Detroit People’s Food Coop seeks not only to run a successful store but to revitalize the community it is based in. “We want to stock items that are produced in Detroit, they’re processed in Detroit, they’re sold in Detroit,” explains Yakini. “We employ people who live in Detroit, who take the money they earn from sales and spend it in Detroit.”
“Co-ops become the only solution that I’m aware of, within the context of a capitalist system, where groups can organize their economic strength collectively and also benefit collectively,” said Yakini. “The broad benefit that comes from broad ownership doesn’t exist in American economic society in any other form.”
>> Was a supposed national “meat shortage” a corporate ploy to further exploit workers for profit during COVID-19?
Again, although farms and producers of all sizes were devastated by COVID-19, a small farmer has much more flexibility than, say, Tyson Chicken does. By design, those industry power players do one thing very efficiently (often via the exploitation of workers), which makes them sluggish to change.
So as COVID-19 hit and threatened large meatpacking companies’ markets, they claimed a looming meat shortage was forcing them not only to remain operational through the pandemic but to also actually ramp up production. They convinced Trump, who invoked the Defense Production Act to keep meatpacking plants open. Meanwhile, they scrimped on COVID protections for workers.
So, Lisa Held investigates for Heated, was there actually a meat shortage on the horizon? Or were these corporations simply throwing a Hail Mary to protect their profits — and trying not to to let any pesky worker protections affect their bottom line in the process? Absolutely worth a read.
This anecdote is just chilling, and not as isolated as you’d hope it would be:
One Tyson plant worker in Arkansas, who wished to remain anonymous, told me that the company began implementing limited protective measures in April and then was forced to enact more after an outbreak in June. She described her job as “opening the chicken and removing the guts that the machine doesn’t get,” and said she makes $13.35 per hour and has been working for the company for nearly 20 years. After more than 200 employees at the plant tested positive, the worker said those without symptoms were told to return to work after just one week. “The workers who came back after a week, they infected other workers. After that time, a lot more workers began getting sick,” she said. “Really, Tyson has never treated workers right, but now with the pandemic, it adds more fear, and you don’t have other options, and you just keep working.”
>> And here, this gets personal: “My Family Pays the Price for America’s Chicken Dinners”
For Bitter Southerner, a brief and incisive essay by Shorlette Ammons about her many aunts and cousins who have worked in meat processing facilities. She highlights much of the same industry hypocrisy Held does above through a family portrait of the injuries and deaths of workers deemed “essential” for corporate profit.
“However, such endurance assumes Black women, immigrants, and other frontline workers must simply abide the worst conditions, dependably returning to a hazardous and exploitative workplace in the midst of turmoil and elevated risk. What good is personal resilience if it bounces you back into desperate conditions as opposed to uplifting you beyond disparaging circumstances? This justification for the daily grind is pain, fear, and risk.”
(photo illustration via Bitter Southerner)
>> “How Overlooked History Yields Unforgettable Ice Cream Flavors”
Fellow BU Gastronaut Hannah Spiegelman’s incredible history-based ice creams are profiled in Gastro Obscura!
If you don’t follow her Instagram/website for her essays and intricately clever ice creams (think salted nasturtium ice cream with a black sesame swirl, to honor painter Kehinde Wiley, or the Fannie Lou Hamer-inspired local honey ice cream with candied bacon and celery seed/sunflower seed brittle), what are you doing?! (You can support her Patreon here.)
>> “From Spent Grain to Fresh Bread: A new grain co-op in Minnesota turns breweries’ waste into baking flour” @ Modern Farmer
See you back here on Thursday!
— Jared
