Camaraderie in the Streets

The problem is that everyone has to work 8 hours, pretty much no exceptions, and with getting ready time + (unpaid) lunch + commute, “8 hours” is actually anywhere between 9 and 12, every single day, with more work to do when you get home because our society and culture was built around having one member of the household home full time and nothing has changed now that almost everyone works.

Thanks to FreshDirect and Instacart, consuming meat no longer even requires coming into contact with a deli butcher or grocery clerk. With a few taps on a keyboard or the swipe of a screen, consumers can get as much beef, pork, and chicken as they want delivered to their doors, without ever having to think about where it comes from. And yet, as the popularity of bestselling books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals attests, a lot of Americans do think about this. In recent years, more and more consumers have begun to carefully scrutinize the labels on the packages of the meat and poultry they buy. The ranks of such consumers have grown exponentially, paralleling the rise of the “good food” movement, which promotes healthier eating habits and reform of the industrial food system.

Although the movement is, in Pollan’s words, a “big, lumpy tent,” composed of a broad coalition of advocacy organizations and citizens’ groups that sometimes push for competing agendas, one of its aims is to persuade consumers to become more conscientious shoppers and eaters. Among those who put this idea into practice are so-called locavores, who buy food directly from local farms, ideally from small family-run enterprises that embrace organic, sustainable practices: ranchers who raise grass-fed cows that never set foot in industrial feedlots; farmers who sell eggs that come from free-range chickens reared on a diet of seeds, plants, and insects rather than genetically engineered corn and antibiotics.

Locavores engage in what social scientists call “virtuous consumption,” using their purchasing power to buy food that aligns with their values. The movement appeals to the growing number of Americans who want to feel more connected to the food they eat and to the people who raise it, with whom locavores can interact directly at farmers markets or through community-supported agriculture programs. It is a captivating vision, and the benefits of eating locally grown food—which is likely to be more nutritious, to come from more humanely treated animals, and to be better for the environment—are manifold.

But locavores have some blind spots of their own, most notably when it comes to the experiences of workers on small family farms. As the political scientist Margaret Gray discovered when she set about interviewing farm laborers in New York’s Hudson Valley, the vast majority of these workers are undocumented immigrants or guest workers who toil under abysmal conditions, often working sixty- to seventy-hour weeks for dismal pay. “We live in the shadows,” one worker told her. “They treat us like nothing,” said another. In her book Labor and the Locavore, Gray asked the butcher on a small farm why so few of his customers seemed to notice this.

“They don’t eat the workers,” the farmer told her.

“He went on to explain that, in his experience, his consumers’ primary concern is with what they put in their bodies,” Gray wrote, “and so the labor standards of farmworkers simply do not register as a priority.”]

yes!!! i work in a small poultry slaughterhouse and it's such a small operation that i also sometimes work directly at the farmer's market. i usually do eviscerating on the production line for the slaughterhouse, and then i often also am doing the direct-to-consumer marketing. and i try, and try, to bring up this fact to customers, i tell them about the slaughterhouse conditions, and who the workers are.

nobody asks. nobody wants to know. if i bring it up they're disinterested, think it distasteful. they want to know about conditions for the poultry. they want to know if they're humanely treated. they are! they are, and we have photos up on the website, in the newsletter, some displayed in the farm store or at the stand at the farmer's market, of the conditions the poultry is raised in, the pasture, the pasture units, how they're moved.

i take pictures in the slaughterhouse sometimes. because i think that, that is what we're doing that's really different. (I've learned if I share one that has blood in it, make it black and white first.) we're the only state-inspected facility in our entire county, and we only do our own birds. the crew is made up of a mix of community members; paid full-time employees from the farm crew, a bunch of paid part-time employees, family (me!), and a whole bunch of occasional workers, mostly overqualified underemployed parents of young children who can get a Tuesday morning off every couple of weeks or over the summer, who are mostly paid in-kind for their work (which is legal and aboveboard in our state).

I don't know any other operation that does it like us. (I've helped at another one but it's over state lines, in MA, and their laws are different, and that farm has had to switch over to sending their birds to a federally-inspected USDA plant because MA's laws were so onerous it was not possible for them to have a boutique abbatoir like we do. most of our profits come from selling cut-up parts, and that is just straight illegal in MA, only USDA slaughterhouses can sell parted birds, and there was no path for this farm to legally do that.)

(our quadrupeds, meanwhile, can't be processed by us at all under NY state law. we have to either sell whole/half/quarter animals by custom butchery, which we hire a guy to come do on-site, or we have to have them transported to a USDA slaughterhouse. the one we use recently had almost its entire workforce quit at once, for reasons we totally understood. my BIL has been trying to quietly get them to unionize. then the boss tried to sell the operation to him. BIL escaped, but is aware, somebody needs to fill that niche. COVID fucked them up, but also the guy who owns the place is a total dick. our custom butchery guy isn't much better, and he pays all his guys under the table, and on the one hand yay no taxes, but on the other hand, whoo no worker's comp either guys, you sure about this???)

But. nobody cares. customers straight Do Not care. people talk about the ethical treatment of the animals. i cannot get anyone to be interested in the slaughterhouse workers. it is filthy, disgusting work and you could not pay me enough to do it, though i don't mind it; i do it for love, and because somebody's got to.

yeah the chicken is $6.50/lb for a whole bird. yeah it is. it should probably be more. but not because the birds get to eat grass and experience sunshine. it's because the nice (mostly) white (mostly) ladies pulling their guts out can take a bathroom break whenever they want to, and I decorated the wall with a sign that says "soap scrub rinse bleach" in the Live Laugh Love font, and my mom makes us a coffee cake for break every time.