Senaga: "Comfort, Food, and COVID-19"

Comfort, Food, and COVID-19

Karen Senaga, Pierce College

The Covid-19 pandemic has reminded us that the industrial production of meat in the U.S., for all its remarkable productivity, is a fragile system. In this essay Karen Senaga explores the fraught recent history of meat processing in her profile of southern catfish plants, showing how applying labels like “heroes” to food workers is not as straightforward as it may seem. The author is an assistant professor of history at Pierce College, in Lakewood, Washington.

We welcome essays that apply the stories and methodologies of our allied fields to the issues that currently affect our daily lives. If you are interested in contributing, please contact Adrienne Petty at ampetty@wm.edu or Drew Swanson at drew.swanson@wright.edu.

It should be cited as: Karen Senaga, “Comfort, For, and COVID-19,” The Short Rows, March 9, 2021. www.aghistorysociety.org/ahs-blog/senaga-comfort-food-and-covid-19

For the past year, I’ve thought a lot about comfort and food. Since the first case of COVID-19 was detected in the United States, near my home in Tacoma, Washington, fear and uncertainty have plagued the world as much as the virus itself. Local governments issued shelter-in-place orders. Whole communities shut down except “essential” businesses like grocery stores, where consumers soon searched for and bought comfort. For some, this meant stockpiling toilet paper, rubbing alcohol, and hand sanitizer. For many others, it meant hoarding food--meat in particular. And they bought a lot of it. Between March and July 2020, meat sales soared 34.6 percent. These sales amounted to an additional 1.4 billion pounds versus the same period the year before.[1] Beyond the reality that many more people cooked and dined at home, food was a salve for the anxieties of the unknown. Conjuring the most profound, sentimental memories of place and communion, food could be a reminder of the familiar when the world turned upside down. But as people hoarded, leaving barren shelves and empty freezers, consumers were reminded that their food came from somewhere beyond their control. 

In the early days of the pandemic, national headlines informed shoppers that meatpacking workers were contracting COVID-19 at alarming rates. Although some plants temporarily shut down, by April 28, 2020, Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep the meat churning. Trump’s message was clear. The beef, chicken, pork, and fish that consumers demanded to fill their bellies and restore some sense of certainty and enjoyment would not be cut short. Meatpacking workers were widely hailed as “heroes” who guaranteed that “protein for Americans” would come first.[2]  When thinking about heroes, one might imagine people who fight against injustice and save lives. In this case, heroes sacrifice their lives to save consumers the inconvenience of an inconsistent supply of meat. Yet, they have always put their bodies on the line to provide cheap labor for cheap food.[3]

Americans have known for more than a century that meatpacking chews up workers and spits them out. The work to turn animals into meat on an industrial scale tears workers’ bodies apart. Meatpacking is one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States, with high rates of lacerations, dismemberment, and the loss of sensation and mobility due to rapid, repetitive hand motions. Bathroom breaks are hard to come by too. Some workers resort to wearing diapers. Discomfort is a fundamental element of kill lines that produce the country’s meat supply.[4] This low-wage work persists amid aggressive efforts by companies to obliterate unions and keep them out. 

While focusing on profits and selling the altruistic message that producers kept plants open in order to feed the country, corporations’ complete disregard for workers and the rural communities surrounding the plants turned them into viral hotspots. Working long hours in cold, cramped quarters, meatpackers soon found that their bosses flouted Center for Disease Control recommendations to socially distance until outbreaks struck, as doing so would slow down the kill lines. Mandatory mask-wearing and the erection of plexiglass shields often occurred only when someone tested positive for COVID-19.[5]  In fear of losing their jobs, sick workers still showed up. Already economically vulnerable, many were deportable, and most didn’t have the option to shelter-in-place. They risked their health to make a living. “For a lot of people, this is the only way that they can bring food to the table for their families, and it’s not easy for them,” observed the daughter of a Smithfield pork processing plant employee in Crete, Nebraska, in May 2020.[6]

Companies like Tyson consistently defied local health department recommendations and wielded considerable political and economic power along with Trump’s executive order to stay open.[7] Since the pandemic began, this clear lack of care has led to more than 270 deaths and 54,000 cases of COVID-19 among meatpacking workers nationwide. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has only doled out some $80,000 in fines. The federal agency has levied a majority of its penalties against JBS, Tyson, and Smithfield, the biggest producers of pork, beef, and chicken in the United States.[8]

The current plight of meatpacking workers, and the sense of fear that consumers sought to cure with food, reminded me of my research on farm-raised catfish.[9]  I study the transformation of the wild fish into a bland, standardized crop that became a mainstay in southern cuisine. Fried catfish, in particular, has become a symbol of southern comfort. It is described by chefs and the hungry public alike as deeply rooted in memories of home, family, and comradery. But there was a paradox behind this fat-fried bliss. Farmed catfish, like other comfort foods that evoke delight for many eaters, is produced in the most discomforting and hazardous of conditions by skilled though poorly paid workers who wouldn’t likely see the products of their labor in the same way.

This image is courtesy of the Congressional and Political Research Center, Mississippi State University Libraries and may not be reproduced without written permission.

As the press kept consumers abreast of COVID-infected meatpackers, I recalled a 1990 strike at the Delta Pride catfish processing plant in the Yazoo Mississippi Delta. From September to December of that year, workers at the plant in Indianola, Mississippi, caught national attention as they fought for their physical and emotional health. The workers, who processed the bulk of farm-raised catfish in the United States at the time, staged the largest strike in the state’s history. Led by African American women and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), some 1,000 workers implored shoppers to look, listen, and care about who made their food. “We’re women, and we’re trying to stand up for our rights…we’re black, we’re proud, and we’re crying out so somebody will hear us,” strike leader Sarah White told the Congressional Black Caucus that fall.[10] The women emphasized their poor wages, their dangerous, fast-paced work in cold, fetid plants, and the damage that work did to their bodies.  They were exposing more than the underbelly of the farmed catfish industry. The strikers interpreted their struggle as a continuation of the civil rights movement and as a fight to secure economic justice. White and her colleagues used the powerful imagery of bondage to illustrate that the legacy of slavery was still alive in Mississippi. For their part, Delta Pride’s managers espoused a color-blind language of meritocracy born of uncompromising anti-laborism and the American exceptionalism myth that hard work always pays off. Yet the reality for many catfish workers was perpetual poverty and a lack of opportunity inseparable from the history of racism, white supremacy, and agriculture in the Delta.  

From the 1990 perspective, it seemed catfish had just replaced cotton. “If we don’t fight now, we’ll go back into slavery. We’ll be working for nothing all our lives,” one worker observed.[11] Strikers compared themselves to slaves, called the plant a plantation, and ascribed a “plantation mentality” to Delta Pride’s management. Workers told reporters they felt like they were picking cotton for overseers who wouldn’t let up. The UFCW backed their rhetoric by urging consumers to close their pocketbooks with a boycott. In a circular that depicted a factory building in the foreground of a plantation home, workers criticized the company’s treatment. The message was clear. It was unethical to buy Delta Pride. Grocery retailers listened and some 1,200 stores stopped selling Delta Pride Catfish, including the company’s largest buyer. The firm’s leadership saw the strike in a paternalistic light, and argued their business was a “godsend” to an area with high unemployment. Upon workers’ backs, catfish farmers—the majority of whom were White—like Turner Arant could claim that “The catfish industry has been good to me” as he showed off hundreds of acres of glimmering catfish ponds to reporters.[12] Arant’s tone-deaf appraisal was one held by several farmers of the region. [13]  

Delta Pride catfish workers exposed their hurt and humiliation to the world. Management expected them to fillet six-hundred pounds of fish during a shift. Quickly extracting muscle tissue from catfish numbed their hands and arms. Employment at Delta Pride left them devastated. “They hire you, cripple you, fire you," remarked Rose Walker on the picket line.[14] Keeping speed and profits in mind over workers’ well-being, management kept strict schedules of bathroom breaks. Armed with stopwatches, management tracked the weekly allotment of six bathroom breaks at five minutes apiece. Workers constantly felt the throbbing urgency associated with the inability to relieve themselves. Some women resorted to wearing diapers to avoid soiled clothing. The bathroom environment embodied the company’s irreverence too. In the face of missing stall doors, workers resorted to covering their bodies with jackets and other pieces of clothing. In their struggle over the physical agony and indignity prompted by Delta Pride’s bathroom policies, the workers met racist and sexist contempt from management. Management attacked Black motherhood and sexuality and accused workers of having too many children. They equated employees to rabbits. The strike was an incredible act of resistance to the dehumanizing, merciless managerial culture of Delta Pride, and the long history of racial exploitation in the South. After four months of striking and boycotts, workers won a new union contract that offered higher wages and better working conditions. 

In the decades since 1990, Delta Pride strike leader Sarah White has continued her fight for workers’ rights in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. In 2011, she testified to the General Assembly of the United Nations in Durban, South Africa, where she observed “people are still dying to make a living.”[15] In the light of COVID-19, White’s words ring true now more than ever. It seems not much has changed.

The COVID-19 pandemic amplifies the risks workers confront on the kill lines, whether those lines produce catfish, chicken, or beef. By calling workers “heroes,” we lose sight of the ways in which meatpackers are casualties to corporate greed.  The term prompts us to look away from their humanity and fixate on our own desires for comfort. Calling meatpacking workers heroes today is as insensitive as Arant crowing the rewards of the farm-raised catfish industry in 1990. The language of the Delta Pride strikers reminds us of the enduring pain of meatpackers through a visceral, simple message: they were slaves. It is a discomforting thought. The women in Indianola would not allow consumers to look away and disregard them as they made down-home southern goodness as convenient as rolling up to a local eatery. They would not allow consumers to look away from how history shaped their workplace. In recent months, branding meatpacking workers as heroes provides companies and politicians alike the social capital to continue wrecking bodies and ruining lives. It also affords consumers the luxury to avert their eyes from the dangerous and infectious conditions of meatpacking plants just as panic buying dulled the uneasiness of a foreboding future. The cost of comfort can be dehumanizing and deadly.

Notes

[1]Michael Brown, “Consumer buying habits for meat shift during pandemic, as sales increase 34%” Supermarket News, September 28, 2020,  https://www.supermarketnews.com/meat/consumer-buying-habits-meat-shift-during-pandemic-sales-increase-34

[2] “USDA to Implement President Trump’s Executive Order On Meat and Poultry Processors,” April 28, 2020, https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2020/04/28/usda-implement-president-trumps-executive-order-meat-and-poultry

[3] For discussion on cheap meat and labor, see Bryant Simon, The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

 [4] Several scholars have investigated the meatpacking industries, a few include Simon, The Hamlet Fire; LaGuana Gray, We Just Keep Running the Line: Black Southern Women and the Poultry Processing Industry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014); Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

 [5] Michael Grabell, Claire Perlman, and Bernice Yeung, “Emails Reveal Chaos as Meatpacking Companies Fought Health Agencies Over COVID-19 Outbreaks in Their Plants,” ProPublica, June 12, 2020, https://www.propublica.org/article/emails-reveal-chaos-as-meatpacking-companies-fought-health-agencies-over-covid-19-outbreaks-in-their-plants

 [6] Christina Stella, “Some Meatpackers Questions New COVID-19 Safety Guidelines,” National Public Radio, May 11, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/05/11/853972668/some-meatpackers-question-new-covid-19-safety-guidelines?ft=nprml&f=1003%2C1004

[7] Grabell, et al., “Emails Reveal Chaos as Meatpacking Companies Fought Health Agencies Over COVID-19 Outbreaks in Their Plants.”

[8] Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, “Select Subcommittee Launches Investigation Into Widespread Coronavirus Infections And Deaths in Meatpacking Plants,” February 1, 2021, https://coronavirus.house.gov/news/press-releases/select-subcommittee-launches-investigation-widespread-coronavirus-infections-and

[9] For more on this research, see: Karen Senaga, “Catfish Image, Catfish Taste: The Land-Grant System and the Development of Catfish Aquaculture in Mississippi,” Journal of Mississippi History 73, no.1 (2013): 33-52; Karen Senaga, “Muddy to Clean: The Farm-Raised Catfish Industry, Agricultural Science, and Food Technologies,” in New Materials: Towards a History of Consistency, ed. Amy E. Slaton (Amherst, Massachusetts: Lever Press, 2020), 39-72. My manuscript entitled The South’s Fish: A History of the Farm-Raised Catfish is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. 

[10] “Statement of Sarah C. White, Member United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1529 Employed at Delta Pride Processing Inc. Before the Labor Braintrust of the Congressional Black Caucus, October 11, 1990,” Mike Espy Papers, Catfish Folder, Box 4, Congressional and Political Research Center, Mississippi State University Libraries.

[11] Philip Dine, “Dispute in the Delta: Struggle at Catfish Plant Pits Poor Blacks Against Prosperous Whites,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, October 8, 1990.

[12] Donna St. George, “More Than Money at Root of Catfish Worker Strike,” The Seattle Times, December 10, 1990.

[13] Not all catfish farmers in the region were White. There were a few Black catfish farmers in Mississippi, including Ed Scott, who was also the first Black owner of a catfish processing plant in the United States. See: Julian Rankin, Catfish Dream: Ed Scott’s Fight for His Family Farm and Racial Justice in the Mississippi Delta (Athens: University of Georgia, 2018).

[14] Richard Schweid, “Delta Strike: Civil Rights or Just Plain Economics? : Labor: Moving from cotton to catfish has saved many a farmer from foreclosure, but there may still be a touch of the old plantation involved,” The Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1990.

[15] Sarah C. White, “Intervention of Ms. Sarah White, Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights” United Nations Generally Assembly, Durban, South Africa, September 22, 2011, https://www.un.org/en/ga/durbanmeeting2011/pdf/Mississippi_en.pdf