Madeline Leung Coleman | The Atlantic 2021 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights,2020:50-617219<p class="dropcap">I<span class="smallcaps">n April 1954, James Beard flew from his</span> home in New York to San Francisco and set out on a culinary road trip across the western U.S. The prolific cookbook author was about to turn 51, and feeling stuck in a loop of magazine deadlines, TV appearances, and product shilling. The hustle was constant, satisfaction elusive. “I am pooped, bitched, bushed, buggered and completely at sea with ennui and bewilderment,” Beard wrote to one of his road-trip companions before they left. “But off we go.”</p><p>As John Birdsall describes in his new biography of Beard, <em>The Man Who Ate Too Much</em>, the Portland, Oregon–born cook had spent much of his career trying to retool French classics for American housewives—boeuf bourguignon with a transatlantic accent. Like a lot of white American gourmands of the time, Beard saw France as the <em>ne plus ultra</em>. “Thus far,” writes Birdsall, “James had fumbled at articulating a true American cooking.” This road trip finally turned his gaze homeward. En route, Beard and his friends ate blue cheese made in Oregon with Roquefort spores; baked shad and apple crisp; Swedish pancakes and French 75s. These meals electrified him. They amounted to his kind of American food—far from kitschy TV dinners, these dishes used local ingredients and bore an unforced resemblance to European classics. And, writes Birdsall, they confirmed Beard’s growing belief that “all good food in the present bore an echo of [his] past.”</p><p>Over the next three decades, Beard chased that echo through countless magazine stories, cooking classes, and dozens of books, including kitchen bibles whose titles claimed definitive status (<em>A Complete Guide to …</em>) until Beard’s name alone did the trick (<em>Beard on Bread</em>). <em>The New York Times</em> dubbed him “the Dean of American Cookery.” Beard was also gay, a fact hidden from his public until the last years of his life. In <em>The Man Who Ate Too Much</em>, Birdsall aims to queer the record; he works to show that this man, who became famous during a brutally antigay stretch of U.S. history, fathered a whole branch of American cuisine—one contemporary readers might associate with artisanal bakeries, farmers’ markets, and Chez Panisse. “Though he was always present in American kitchens,” Birdsall writes in his preface, “Beard carried himself like an outsider, an alien with a secret, a man on a lonely coast who told us we could find meaning and comfort by embracing pleasure.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="">Read: The why of cooking</a>]</i></p><p>Birdsall surmises that readers see Beard as an “institution,” perhaps equating him with the James Beard Foundation and Awards established after his death in 1985. So he turns the icon—tall, bald, and bow-tied—back into a person: He lingers on Beard’s well-fed, emotionally starved childhood, his struggles as a fat man, the pain of sexual rejection and antigay bigotry. We get fun James and petty James, James as self-plagiarist and bitter competitor, who sometimes used the unacknowledged labors of his collaborators to burnish his own image.</p><p>Being ensconced in this very specific world is a pleasure, especially with a guide so invested in Beard’s emotional life. The book loses its footing, though, when it tries to turn biography into foundation myth—as though Beard’s vision for American food could be equated with what American food, in all its messiness, actually was. “He embodied America’s culinary identity for most of the second half of the twentieth century,” Birdsall writes. “James Beard <em>was</em> American food, its pleasures and excesses, its beauty and simplicity.” Beard was a famously big man, in body and personality, with a verve for eating that gave his American fans permission to love it too. But to <em>be</em> American food—has there ever been one person big enough for that?</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="Passes with an 'A'; James Beard (Individuals Gourmet) examines, drinks and reacts to sip of champagne at tasting session in New York City's Allied Chemical Building Friday. Beard, an internationally renown gourmet and writer whose columns appear weekly in the Denver Post was one of the judges trying to select best champagne of America. Winner hasn't been announced.; Credit: AP (Photo By The Denver Post via Getty Image" height="418" src="" width="960"><figcaption class="caption">James Beard in 1974: The renowned gourmet and writer drinks and reacts to a sip of champagne at a tasting session in New York City, as one of the judges trying to select the best champagne of America. (The Denver Post / Getty)</figcaption></figure><p class="dropcap">J<span class="smallcaps">ames Andrews Beard was born in 1903,</span> and reared on a West Coast where San Francisco was called the “Paris of the West” and French-cheffed restaurants were the pinnacle of glamour. His English mother ran boardinghouses before having a child, and James spent his childhood tagging along with her to dinner parties and trips to the seashore; she wasn’t particularly warm, but she  gave James the gift of her palate. (James’s father, a taciturn American customs officer, was something of an emotional void.) Like a lot of well-off Portland families at the time, the Beards employed Chinese servants. In one of the book’s tenderest passages, Birdsall recounts how the family’s Cantonese cook, Jue Let, nursed young James back to health by spoon-feeding him chicken jelly. Mostly, James’s world was one of butter-and-marmalade sandwiches, clam chowder, and towering birthday cakes heaped with coconut and white frosting, reflecting his mother’s tastes and the bounty of the Pacific Northwest.</p><p>The book tracks Beard closely through a series of failed attempts. He enrolls in Reed College, gets caught hooking up with a popular male teacher, and is quietly expelled—a trauma, Birdsall writes, that haunted Beard for the rest of his life. Beard attempts to reinvent himself in Europe as an opera singer and actor, but it’s not until he’s 35 and living in New York that his food career begins. He meets a wealthy gay man who hires him as a live-in caterer, someone to dish up finger foods and martinis during the cocktail parties that doubled as safe meeting places for Manhattan’s gay elite.</p><p>Food is a haven for Beard in even his lowest moments, and Birdsall, a lovely writer, honors that with delicate reconstructions of flavor: He describes the “smokiness and moldy specter” of a ham, and calf’s tongue “poached and shaved, the delicate curls wrapped around balls of creamed Roquefort.” In 1940, Beard is working at a catering company when he gets his first chance at a cookbook. He writes a guide to hors d’oeuvres in which he takes full credit for his company’s star dishes—including a now-infamous recipe for a mayonnaise and <a href="">raw-onion sandwich</a> on brioche, edges dusted with chopped parsley. With that, Beard is off like a rocket, sometimes pushing out multiple cookbooks a year over the next few decades.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="">Read: The myth of ‘easy’ cooking</a>]</i></p><p>Birdsall pulls no punches about Beard’s failings, particularly his stinginess with acknowledgments, and in the process sketches a blueprint for how a public personality is built. Beard reportedly enlisted a friend to help him develop a huge cooking tome—then neglected to pay her, or even thank her in the book. He stole recipes. His prose was apparently sloppy: Birdsall discusses Beard’s friend and “uncredited writing collaborator” Isabel Errington Callvert, who pre-edited his magazine stories before he filed them. Even Beard’s most personal books, such as 1964’s <em>Delights and Prejudices</em>, were heavily edited or ghostwritten by people whom he paid only a fraction of his fee, and who played a role in constructing the Beard readers likely remember today. (Somewhat ironically, Birdsall quotes regularly from these books to shape his narrative, even as he admits that any memoir of Beard “would have to be semimythical, to fill in the parts he couldn’t tell.”)</p><p>If some of the mythmaking was engineered by Beard himself, some of it was imposed, or at least enabled, by the nascent food media. In the lionizing 2017 PBS documentary <a href=""><em>James Beard: America’s First Foodie</em></a>, the filmmakers interviewed one of Beard’s editors at Knopf, Judith Jones, about what the industry was like in the 1950s. “There wasn’t a food world in the sense that we have one today,” Jones said. “It was the women’s magazines, and they had a lot of recipes, fast and easy.”</p><p>Beard stood out because he was a rare man in an industry that catered to, and mostly employed, women. To capitalize on that, editors and a small army of ghostwriters suppressed the campy charm that ran through his earliest writing. Postwar gender roles didn’t leave a lot of breathing room. “It was no time to be anything but a sexless bachelor with a crisp, professional voice, too focused on work or the singular pursuit of fine living to think about marrying,” Birdsall writes. For most of Beard’s life, being outed would have meant professional ruin. In exchange for passing as a straight man, though, Beard got something that women recipe writers and authors of texts such as <em>Joy of Cooking</em> had not: He got to be treated as an authority.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="">Read: Uncovering the roots of Caribbean cooking</a>]</i></p><p>Beard’s constructed image was something of a devil’s bargain. And women such as Julia Child—whom Jones introduced to Beard—and Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, and Edna Lewis, would later be treated as experts in their own right. Still, in the blatantly patriarchal media landscape of the 1940s and ’50s, it’s not a coincidence that the first model for the modern American-food personality would be a man. Beard could write for pulpy men’s magazines as “Jim Beard.” The fact that he was a man would later make it more acceptable for men to enroll in his cooking classes. Beard could be something that American women could not: a Great Man, awarded the kind of stature that made it worth editors’ while to iron out rambling copy. It also brought in sponsorship dollars. In a mid-century flour ad excerpted in the PBS documentary, Beard looks straight into the camera as a manly voice-over intones, “When this man speaks, master chefs listen.”</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt=" Author and top chef James A. Beard." height="640" src="" width="960"><figcaption class="caption">Beard, second from left. (Photo by Arthur Schatz / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty)</figcaption></figure><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">B<span class="smallcaps">eard, for his part, seems to have</span> embraced his status as paterfamilias. “More and more, he regarded his recollections as a kind of national seed bank of food memory,” Birdsall writes. But the notion of Beard as the keeper of America’s culinary flame merits more skepticism than the book allows, especially when it comes to American cuisine’s non-European influences.</p><p dir="ltr">Birdsall makes clear that Beard was focused on the food of European immigrants, a quiet acknowledgment that Beard didn’t seek to speak for all Americans or all their foodways. When he relates the story of a bad <em>New York Times</em> review for one of Beard’s books—in which a critic seemed to scold Beard for glossing over the country’s culinary diversity—Birdsall hits back, saying that Beard didn’t think he stood for everyone; he was just writing what he knew. Yet throughout the book, Birdsall also essentially describes Beard as the soul of a national cuisine, with no real competing narratives to that central one. Caveats are no match for this grand thesis.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="">Read: How American cuisine became a melting pot</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">You can see the limitations of the Beard-as-American-food approach in Birdsall’s discussion of the 1972 cookbook, <em>James Beard’s American Cookery,</em> which included recipes for dishes such as cream of tomato soup, chilled poached shrimp, and snickerdoodles. Birdsall writes that the book was in part Beard’s “lament” for the country’s natural resources, a tribute to the bounty of his childhood trips to the seashore. But that wasn’t the only way to read it: At a time of protest and political upheaval, the book “was bedtime reading for Americans who found comfort in its implicit celebration of traditional values … an 875-page elegy for America.” Birdsall doesn’t say which Americans those might’ve been. In the harsh light of 2020, it’s hard to read about traditional values and elegies for America—delivered during the era of Black Power and rising immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America—and not assume that the cookbook reader who yearned for these things would be white.</p><p dir="ltr">Also notable is that, of the many significant figures mentioned throughout <em>The Man Who Ate Too Much,</em> only two likely wouldn’t trace their roots back to Europe, and both were domestic workers, employed by Beard or his parents: Jue Let, his family’s Cantonese cook, and Clayton Triplette, a Black and Iroquois gay man whom Beard hired as a housekeeper and manager in the 1950s. They were consequential people in Beard’s personal life, but we don’t get a good sense of how influential they were, if at all, to his most fundamental ideas about America’s culinary identity.</p><p dir="ltr">Birdsall is at his best when he focuses squarely on Beard—unearthing his connections to other queer luminaries, and tracing the lines between his memories and his palate. Perhaps a deeper consideration of non-Eurocentric American cooking is too much to ask of a book about this one man’s life. But Birdsall seems to want to tell more than the story of a life, and that’s where he overextends—claiming that Beard embodied American food, instead of letting his subject be important enough on his own.</p><p dir="ltr">Birdsall began writing <em>The Man Who Ate Too Much</em> after he published an essay in <em>Lucky Peach</em> magazine in 2013, titled “America, Your Food Is So Gay,” about the queer culinary aesthetic of Richard Olney, Craig Claiborne, and Beard, three gay white men acknowledged as masters. Birdsall couldn’t have known that his book about Beard—this asterisk on the canon—would land in a year so hostile to the idea of a canon itself.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p dir="ltr">In the past eight months, the pressures of the pandemic and protests against anti-Blackness have forced the culinary world’s skeletons out of the closet. Workers have pushed back against alleged inequity at publications such as <em>Bon Appétit </em>and at restaurants across the country. The Beard Awards were postponed, then curtailed, whipsawed by accusations about the “personal or professional behavior” of some of the nominees, according to <em>The New York Times’</em> Pete Wells, as well as <a href="">public complaints</a> from James Beard Foundation employees over pay disparity and working conditions. (Plus, as Wells <a href="">reported</a>, not a single Black chef had won a restaurant award.) Birdsall, who has been both a judge and a member of nominating committees for the Beard Awards, as well as a recipient of its writing awards, responded to the chaos in a<a href=""> <em>Washington Post</em> op-ed</a>. He wrote that Beard would have hated the awards: “I believe that if Beard were alive today, his voice would be the loudest calling for radical changes to the ceremony that bears his name.”</p><p dir="ltr">It’s a nice thought. And, arguably, it misses the point. One takeaway from this year of upheaval is that, for too long, the same kinds of voices—Beard’s included—have been amplified above others. He may have felt like an outsider, but Beard still helped build the establishment that now faces a reckoning. Nonetheless, his life is an example of an enduring truth: American food, that undefinable thing, is best represented by the people who cook it and love it. There are just a lot more of them than history tends to remember.</p>Madeline Leung Coleman Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection / GettyThe ‘Great Man’ Theory of American Food2020-11-29T08:00:00-05:002020-11-29T10:04:52-05:00The prolific cookbook author James Beard helped shape the nation’s culinary identity—for better and for,2020:50-615151<figure><img alt="" height="671" src="" width="672"><figcaption class="credit">(Peter Marlow / Magnum)</figcaption></figure><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">W<span class="smallcaps">hen the stay-at-home orders were issued</span> in the first weeks of the pandemic, a new term quickly spread across the United States: Suddenly, some of the most precarious people in the country were called “essential workers.” This didn’t just mean the doctors and nurses who braced for a deluge of patients. It also meant <a href="">farmworkers</a>, supermarket employees, and the people sorting and packing shipments in <a href="">Amazon warehouses</a>. It meant home health aides, bodega clerks, and janitors. <a href="">Confusion</a> ensued: What did <em>essential</em> really mean? Of all the ways Americans were used to talking about jobs—in terms of money, stability, power—we’d not often talked about which workers were most necessary, and which workers were not. When New York Governor Andrew Cuomo <a href="">announced</a> the services that needed to stay open, even as he reiterated that he wanted everyone else to stay home, he said, “Look, society has to function.”</p><p>The priorities of politicians and business leaders quickly showed that it was the labor these workers performed that was essential, not the workers themselves. In California, <a href="">growers gave their undocumented employees letters</a> that they could show if they were stopped on their way to the fields: The papers said the employees were essential, though no document short of a U.S. passport could stop ICE from detaining them. In New York City, nurses hailed as heroes ran out of gowns and were forced to wear <a href="">garbage bags</a>. COVID-19 ripped through meat-processing plants, and bosses <a href="">made workers work faster</a>. Across the board, essential workers got sick. The toll on Black and Latino communities has been devastating. The society being protected is one in which these workers’ lives matter less.</p><p>The South Korean writer Yun Ko-Eun’s novel <em>The Disaster Tourist</em> confronts that brutal calculus head-on. Although it was first published in Korean in 2013, this tale of complicity and denial (reintroduced in a new English translation by Lizzie Buehler this summer) feels nauseatingly on point this year. Hurtling from a Seoul office building to a remote desert island in Southeast Asia, Yun’s late-capitalist satire makes the case that the identity we find through work is almost always shaped by how we have been exploited—or how we have exploited others.</p><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="375" src="" width="250"><figcaption class="caption">Counterpoint Press</figcaption></figure><p>The book follows the 30-something Seoul office worker Yona Ko, a tour coordinator at a travel company called Jungle. The company specializes in disaster tours—vacation packages to places ravaged by tsunamis, earthquakes, or poverty, where adventurous travelers can seek “moral lessons.” Death tolls and Richter magnitudes are “as quotidian to Yona as the changing colors of a traffic light.” After a decade in the office, however, she has recently endured a series of humiliations­, including an unexplained demotion and shameless sexual assaults by her boss. When she tries to quit, her boss persuades her to take a new assignment instead: She has to go on one of the company’s least popular disaster tours, and make a full report on how to improve it. As it turns out, the only way to freshen up a disaster tour is with a new disaster—and soon Yona is pulled into an outrageous conspiracy to stage one on the fictional island of Mui. In this novel, unlike in life, the chief conspirators make no bones about what it will take to sell their idea: If they want this scheme to work, people will have to die.</p><p>In a <a href="">recent interview</a>, Yun—whose story collections and novels have won accolades in South Korea—said she had toxic status quos in mind while writing the book seven years ago. “There’s a tendency for individuals, both in the workplace and in society at large, to say, ‘That’s not my job. That’s not my problem,’” she said. “But if everyone only focuses on his or her respective role, this myopia, this willingness to look the other way, accumulates into tragedy.” She acknowledged the explosion of #MeToo stories that followed the book’s Korean publication, although the imbalance she sought to address was broader than that: She uses the Korean word <em>gapjil</em>, which she translates as “abusing one’s authority to take advantage of those in lower positions.”</p><p>The novel’s central scheme is so ambitious, it’s surreal: It’s hard to imagine someone staging a plausible natural disaster. <em>Gapjil</em>, though, is all too familiar. In the book, the most powerful figures are corporate entities such as Jungle and the shadowy conglomerate Paul, which rules everything on Mui: Although their leadership is invisible, their decisions ride roughshod over everyone else. Below them are the people in the middle, paddling madly to stay in place. At the bottom are those who have no choice but to put their bodies on the line. The characters in the novel are lightly sketched (even Yona’s motivations can be mysterious), and they’re not developed so much as ushered along by plot. But that just adds to the aura of inevitability. Instead of agency, an immovable hierarchy of power shapes the characters’ expectations and propels the story forward.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="">Read: The literature of the pandemic is already here</a>]</i></p><p>The Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye wrote that for satire to work, it needed to include “a token fantasy, a content which the reader recognizes as grotesque”; otherwise, the satire “breaks down when its content is too oppressively real.” <em>The Disaster Tourist</em> comes close to being oppressive at times, especially in Yona’s seemingly uncritical view of a workplace that keeps her down. When some colleagues approach her to say they’ve also been harassed by the manager who assaulted her, and ask her to join them in protest, Yona rejects them: “She had no desire to join the group of victims, the has-beens and the losers, the dregs of the company.” When she arrives on Mui, she seems to scoff at the way locals are forced to play up their misery. That she’s spent the past decade designing tours that require this work doesn’t seem to register.</p><p>Yun gets the narrative on track when Yona meets the people on Mui who pull her into their scheme. If something does feel, in Frye’s terms, like a “token fantasy,” it’s that these characters are so frank about what their deadly goals will require. To really make their new disaster legit—and, they claim, save the island—they’ll need at least 100 casualties. Their reasoning is that Mui’s economy can’t survive without its disaster industry, and no good disaster comes without a death toll. “There’s not really a difference between dying in a natural disaster and starving to death, is there?” one co-conspirator says to Yona. “In the current situation, dying in a natural disaster would be preferable … if disaster disappears from Mui, life disappears, too.”</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p class="dropcap">T<span class="smallcaps">he disastrous fallout of the coronavirus pandemic </span>was not planned by a shadowy cabal. Yet Amazon, Apple, Pfizer, and other massive entities have <a href="">profited enormously</a> during a crisis that has <a href="">devastated small businesses</a> and killed more than 162,000 Americans. These corporations would never admit that this disaster has been good for them—that if “disaster disappears,” their tumorous profits could too. And this state of affairs is magnified by politicians who keep putting profit before lives: Last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis even <a href="">suggested expanding</a> the definition of “essential workers” as a way to bring more people back to work. His state was registering then, on average, more than 7,000 new cases of COVID-19 a day.</p><p>Responsibility to human life has long been a matter of rhetoric, as the writer Danielle Evans <a href="">wrote</a> in <em>The Sewanee Review</em> in April: As a Black woman whose anxiety in doctors’ offices can send her usually normal blood pressure soaring, she pondered what would happen if she got sick with COVID-19. “Someone would say <em>hypertension</em>,” she wrote, “someone would say <em>comorbidity</em>, someone would read the summarized statistics and say, <em>That one doesn’t count, she was basically dead anyway</em>, because this is the game we are playing with language, one where I and most of the people in my family cannot count as dying of this because we are already not alive.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="">Read: Americans are living in an alternate history</a>]</i></p><p>As in the real world, death in <em>The Disaster Tourist</em> becomes more optional the more powerful you are. Late in the book, struggling with the implications of the Mui conspiracy, Yona makes a long-distance call to the Jungle office. The rep who answers tells Yona that her abusive boss has left the company—and Yona smells a possible way out.</p><p>“Okay, I’ll quit too,” Yona says. “I’ll quit so I can finally do what I want.”</p><p>“According to the rules,” says the rep, “it’s only possible for you to quit in the middle of a business trip if you die.”</p><p>Yona has it better than the locals who have agreed to playact, and likely die, in Mui’s fake new disaster. One actor contemplates what lies ahead: “If he had really good luck, he’d get his $4,000 and still survive. He’d been assigned lines to recite if he did make it. He practiced them once more, and grew frustrated that he couldn’t remember them precisely. It was an upsetting prospect, forgetting the lines he’d have to say if he survived … He’d chosen to go down this path, so he didn’t know why he felt resentful.”</p><p>Under capitalism, a slim chance of survival can start to look like a lucky break. “Disaster lay dormant in every corner, like depression,” Yona thinks, before her own downfall begins. “You never knew when it might spring into terrible action, but if you were lucky, it could remain hidden for a lifetime.” By the end of the novel, that “if” has burned to a crisp. Yun allows her characters just a few moments of solace and connection—and a surprising show of solidarity, right when all seems lost. Ultimately, though, they don’t rail against the system they’re stuck inside. They are resigned to it, or they enable it, and they’re annihilated anyway. Look, society has to function. This is what happens when it does.</p>Madeline Leung Coleman Marlow / MagnumThis Is What Happens When Society ‘Has to Function’2020-08-13T08:00:00-04:002020-08-26T09:47:27-04:00<em>The Disaster Tourist</em>, a grim satire of capitalism, resonates during a pandemic that has revealed the brutal calculus of “essential work.”,2020:50-610288<p dir="ltr">When Luis went to work in the fields of California’s Salinas Valley over the past few weeks, he noticed a clear divide: His supervisors and crew leaders were wearing masks; his fellow farmworkers were not.</p><p dir="ltr">Luis, who requested I not use his real name, is one of the nearly 2.5 million farmworkers in the United States—and one of about 400,000 in California. Without the work that Luis and others do in fields, packing houses, warehouses, and processing plants all over this country, the American food system would collapse. Luis and other farmworkers know they are essential workers. But with little protection from the federal government and employers, many of them feel that they’re treated as expendable.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="768" src="" width="960"><figcaption class="caption">Farmworkers, <em>top</em>, pick, sort, and pack broccoli along a conveyor system at a farm in the Salinas Valley, California. The United Farm Workers union says that many companies are not providing protection for their workers during the pandemic, despite state health guidelines.</figcaption></figure><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="768" src="" width="960"><figcaption class="caption">March and April is peak harvesting season in the Salinas Valley.</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr">Farmworkers in the U.S. were struggling long before the COVID-19 crisis, and the pandemic has heightened the paradoxes of their lives. The federal government needs them to keep working; it is peak harvest season in places such as the Salinas Valley, and strawberries and broccoli must be picked, packaged, and shipped. (These photos were taken at different farms across the region.) The State Department has even <a href="">loosened visa restrictions</a> to bring in more seasonal labor.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="">Photos: The essential work of farmers</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">However, maintaining social distancing on the job is near-impossible for farmworkers, especially in packing houses and the shared buses and carpools that many must take to the fields—and most farmworkers are not given personal protective gear. Luis works under a United Farm Workers union contract for D’Arrigo Brothers, a large vegetable grower known for its Andy Boy–brand broccoli. He said that, before this week, the company was only giving masks to supervisors. When he recently asked a boss if he and his fellow farmworkers could get masks too, the man told him he would have to buy them himself.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="768" src="" width="960"><figcaption class="caption">Many farmworkers wore bandanas to protect themselves from dust, pesticides, and the sun before the pandemic. These coverings have taken on another purpose now.</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr">His supervisor’s response was especially frustrating because the <a href="">company had already donated</a> protective equipment and food to other organizations. “But they can’t even spend a few cents on a mask for their own workers,” Luis told me through a translator last weekend. (In a follow-up conversation on Wednesday, after I contacted D’Arrigo Brothers to ask about the masks, Luis said that the company had finally given them masks and was encouraging social distancing.)</p><p dir="ltr">In an email, a representative for D’Arrigo Brothers did not respond to questions about whether workers had been given personal protective gear, but said that the company works closely with the UFW union to “protect the health and well-being of our valued employees.” A union representative said that the masks D’Arrigo Brothers donated were N95s intended for medical workers, and that the company had ordered thousands of masks for its workers. He added, though, that most companies had taken no steps toward providing protective equipment, and that some were even requiring workers to bring their own masks or risk being sent home.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="580" src="" width="960"><figcaption class="caption">A man in Watsonville, California, <em>left</em>, waits to be called into the field during berry season. Workers pick strawberries in Salinas, <em>right</em>.</figcaption></figure><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="768" src="" width="960"><figcaption class="caption">Farmworkers work closely together in the strawberry fields, making social distancing practically impossible.</figcaption></figure><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p dir="ltr">The federal relief bill passed in late March allocated as much as <a href="">$23.5 billion</a> to the agricultural industry, after lobbying from big corporate farmers. The Agriculture Department has broad discretion to decide how to allocate the funds, and—according to Diana Tellefson Torres, executive director of California’s nonprofit UFW Foundation, a sister organization of the UFW union—no part of those funds was promised to workers. “Given that they are the backbone of the industry, that is completely unacceptable,” she told me. “That funding should be utilized to make sure that farmworkers aren’t being furloughed, that farmworkers are being provided sick leave, that they are getting the hazard pay they deserve given that they are putting their lives out there. They do not have the luxury to shelter in place.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="">Read: How the coronavirus could create a new working class</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Farmworker advocates say that most workers will never receive a $1,200 relief check from the government because many are undocumented, or in the U.S. on specialized visas. Even those covered by union contracts may not get hazard pay. And although <a href="">California mandated paid sick leave</a> for food-sector workers last week, many other states have not.</p><p dir="ltr">The Department of Labor has found that about 50 percent of farmworkers are undocumented—although some estimates are <a href="">closer to 70 percent</a>—and that <a href="">65 percent have no health insurance</a>. Many farms also rely on temporary agricultural workers who enter the country on H-2A visas, seasonal permits that tether laborers to their employers, must be renewed every year, and offer no path to residency or citizenship. H-2A recipients now make up about 10 percent of farmworkers and have become so crucial to American food systems that federal officials <a href="">waived the interview requirement</a> for some applicants last month, after agricultural-industry representatives complained that the closure of U.S. consulates in Mexico, due to the coronavirus, was creating a bottleneck in processing visas that would result in labor shortages.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="768" src="" width="960"><figcaption class="caption">A sign, featuring a worker carrying an irrigation line, boasts of this area’s contributions to the country. Nearly 400,000 people work in California’s farms.</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr">Although Trump <a href="">tweeted</a> on Monday night that he would issue an executive order temporarily suspending immigration, it is <a href="">not expected</a> to keep out farmworkers; in fact, the Department of Homeland Security <a href="">confirmed earlier this week</a> that it would continue fast-tracking H-2A applicants to keep migrant farmworkers in the United States.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="377" src="" width="960"><figcaption class="caption">Stay-at-home orders forced some farmworkers to quit their jobs to care for their children. This economic hardship makes paying rent and buying groceries difficult, so some have turned to food banks, <em>left</em>, in Seaside, California, as well as free meals from school, <em>right</em>.</figcaption></figure><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="768" src="" width="960"><figcaption class="caption">More than 50 percent of the country’s farmworkers are undocumented, which disqualifies them from government assistance. An undocumented farmworker picks up food from the United Farm Workers Foundation food bank in Salinas Valley.</figcaption></figure><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="">Read: The problem with telling sick workers to stay home</a>]</i></p><p>Many farmworkers already live precarious lives and are more vulnerable to mental-health issues and injury, Dr. Pedro Moreno, a family physician in Salinas who has been working with farmworkers for decades, told me. He has seen how hard labor and often crowded, unstable living conditions saddle his patients with back pain, hypertension, and lung disease, among many other chronic conditions. Anxiety and depression are rampant, and the current situation is making it worse. “There are three pandemics right now,” said Moreno. “The pandemic of COVID-19, the pandemic of poverty, and the pandemic of fear.”</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="768" src="" width="960"><figcaption class="caption">A mother, along with her three children and partner, lives in company-owned affordable housing, but is now facing eviction.</figcaption></figure><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="768" src="" width="960"><figcaption class="caption">“The contradiction here with both state government and federal government historically is that farmworkers are excluded from many of the protections that other workers have,” said Torres of the UFW Foundation. “And yet, they are the individuals who provide our food security in this country. That irony is being exacerbated now.”</figcaption></figure><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p dir="ltr">Luis has been a farmworker in California for more than 30 years. He knows that the country needs his labor, and that the labor farmworkers do makes millions of dollars for big growers. He wants all companies to take care of their employees by giving them proper masks. More than anything, though, he wants his undocumented colleagues and those on H-2A visas to have the same protections as others. They deserve stability, he said, and a path to residency.</p><p dir="ltr">“We do a very difficult job,” he said about all farmworkers. “We’re bringing regular people vegetables that they get to enjoy with their families—while we work hard, risking our lives.”</p>Madeline Leung Coleman Workers Are Being Treated as Expendable2020-04-23T06:00:00-04:002020-04-23T12:07:14-04:00Farmworkers risk their lives so Americans can eat, but they receive little protection from the virus.