The paradox of those "Immigrants Feed America" shirts
The paradox of those "Immigrants Feed America" shirts
Issue 157: Alicia Kennedy's essay on the often-invisible immigrant labor behind the food system — and white consumers' reactions to it — is 100% worth reading.
Hello! Happy Tuesday and welcome to Nosh Box, a lunchtime-ish food newsletter.
Read last Friday’s dispatch: "Upcycled food" is now officially defined, and we need to ask some questions
Today I’d like to share with you one of the best food essays I’ve read probably this whole month: the unassumingly titled “On Culture,” from Puerto Rico-based food + drinks writer Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter (which is always searingly on-point and I highly recommend subscribing).
She described it on Twitter as “personal essay + venomous polemic + food studies all at once,” which is, if you ask me, the best possible combination. I found it to be not only a thought-provoking read but also somewhat of an unmooring one in a necessary way.
She begins the essay as such:
All the discussion of who does and does not have “a culture” (we all do) has had me considering my own, which I’ve come to define as Long Island—what else, where else? It’s Italian pizza and Jewish bagels and Greek diners and Chinese takeout and Japanese sushi, and never was it not clear that these foods had origins and cultures and people attached to them. Roots. None of these were mine, but I was and am of them, the composite effect of their nonchalant availability built on immense labor.
Using the new book The Immigrant-Food Nexus: Borders, Labor, and Identity in North America, edited by Julian Agyeman and Sydney Giacalone, as a guiding text, she digs further into the ways America’s capitalist food system, as an institution, upholds whiteness as the norm — a.k.a. white supremacy.
Part of what struck me was her exploration of the way white consumers talk about the labor of immigrant workers. About how the rhetoric of even progressive food system folks — like those who’d wear “Immigrants Feed America” shirts — is, as she argues, glorifying migrant labor in a way that traps them out of view in fields and processing plants and restaurant kitchens.
Versions of the “Immigrants Feed America” shirt have popped up somewhat frequently over the past few years as people pay more attention to the unjust treatment of farmworkers, particularly during Covid-19. Last year, chef José Andrés wore the shirt to last year’s State of the Union. After the 2016 election, the magazine Modern Farmer began selling the shirts in their online store, and they donate part of the revenue to the organization Farmworker Justice.
(photo courtesy The Hill via HuffPost)
The shirt and its rhetorical ilk are certainly drawing attention to the role of immigrants in America’s food system, but Kennedy argues they do so in an essentializing way — that they draw a box around immigrants as exclusively and intrinsically the feeders of America.
In the essay, she describes this via her elation when a local Pizza Hut closed and a new Colombian restaurant opened in its place, and her surprise at her white neighbors’ resistance to the changing demographics of her neighborhood. (I added the bolded emphasis)
They’d have preferred that place stay a Pizza Hut, in ways that had implications far beyond the gastronomic. I, child of a brown father, finally knew what some people really thought about my lineage.
It’s with this knowledge of how white America really thinks, really acts, really talks that I consider how we discuss our inherently racialized food system and why I know shirts that say “immigrants feed America” and other dehumanizing nonsense aren’t effective. They want immigrants “feeding” America; they want them in the fields and the slaughterhouses and the restaurant kitchens, far away, working invisibly for a pittance in fear of deportation to keep them in constant supply of iceberg lettuce and shitty tomatoes and cheap steak. Among the white urban liberal bourgeois, they want immigrant populations equated with their food, divvying up worth based on whichever flavor of “authenticity” is cool that week. Consumption is consumption is consumption.
This second paragraph in particular has stuck with me. Since I read her essay, I’ve been asking myself: Against the backdrop of a food system that centers white people’s experiences and voices (and allows white people to claim they “have no culture,” as Navneet Alang unpacked in a stunning Eater article last week), what’s the subtext of equating immigrant labor with food production?
Do “Immigrants Feed America” shirts and similar rhetoric make invisible injustices visible in a necessary way — or do they perpetuate the thought processes that allow food to become “ethnic,” “exotic,” or “discovered” by white eaters in a neo-colonialist sort of way? Or… both?
Again, here’s Alicia Kennedy’s essay if you’d like to read it in full. She may put it behind her newsletter’s paywall soon, so read it while it’s still available.
I shall send you off on this Tuesday afternoon with some good tweets, which don’t really relate to food but which I found amusing:
That’s it for now! I tried to enable a new comments feature I thought I didn’t have access to, so you might be able to comment below. Tell me what you think! If it works, I’ll probably be using it much more in the future so we can think through these food system topics together. Stay tuned!
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I think this was one of my favorite lines from the essay – "We can talk about culture and melting pots and all the things we learn from people different from us—the richness of gustatory pleasure, the bourgeois exuberance of a well-cooked, well-sourced meal; we can talk about the inequities and we can even try to do something about them to the best of our abilities, yet this is the backdrop, no matter how hard we might try to divest ourselves of it."