Labor and the Locavore: The Making of a Comprehensive Food Ethic by Margaret Gray (review)

From Upton Sinclair’s exposé on the work conditions in the turn-of-the-20th-century Chicago meat packing industry to César Chavez and Delores Huerta’s leadership of the campaign to boycott grapes to highlight the plight of California farmworkers, there’s a rich history of labourbased political movements in agriculture. Though far less radical than some of the historical examples, contemporary fair trade movements similarly draw out this connection. More recently, strikes by fast food workers in cities across the United States have focused attention on the low wages and dangerous working conditions in that sector. And as food has become an increasingly salient political topic, there appears to be rich ground to continue to express political demands in the food and agriculture sector.

Surprisingly, however, the intersection between alternative food movements and labour conditions in agriculture has been less theorized. The local food movement, perhaps under the spell of the Jeffersonian myth of the yeoman farmer, has benefitted from a popular image that conflates the scope and scale of production with the nature of the labour system employed on farms. Thus we seem to believe in a binary system of food production comprised of two sectors: an immoral the system of factory farming that relies on extensive chemical inputs and widespread use of seasonal, migrant labour versus a system of food production rooted in small-scale, family farms employing organic production methods that serve as the basis for a system of moral consumption. Margaret Gray’s Labor and the Locavore interrogates that binary, critically examining the ways in which small-scale, local family farms often rely on seasonal labour, and explains how the relationship between farm owner and farmworker plays out on small farms.

Drawing on a rich tapestry woven from strong theoretical foundations, detailed ethnographies, and engaging interviews with farm owners and farmworkers in Hudson Valley, New York, Gray makes a strong case that the alternative food system has conflated local, alternative, sustainable, and fair in ways that hide the underlying labour dynamics on the farm. This conflation leads to Gray’s most striking and compelling observation, namely, that “despite the veneer of ethical production, it remains the case that local or small agricultural producers are driven by market dictates and regulatory norms that render their approach to labor relations more or less undistinguishable from those of larger, commodity-oriented, industrial farms.” (2)

The book itself is divided into five substantive chapters. The first outlines the geographic region of study and traces its agricultural history. The second and third encompass the bulk of the text and are dedicated to interviews with farmworkers and farm owners respectively. The fourth traces the evolution of the local labour market, focusing in particular on the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, and labour status in the region. The final chapter outlines the contours of a comprehensive food ethic sensitive not just to the environmental and health concerns of the product, but to the working conditions of the farmhands as well.

Gray’s extensive ethnographies paint a compelling picture of the labour dynamics in the region. While clearly a strong empirical text, there is also a deep normative argument that runs through the book. As Gray describes it, “at a time when the American public is open to new ideas about food advocacy and sustainability, and the national spotlight is positioned on undocumented immigrants, my study aims directly at the convergence of these themes in order to focus some attention on the role of labor in the local agricultural economy.” (6) Despite this strong normative framework, Gray is careful to let the farm owners and farmworkers speak for themselves. Indeed, this is perhaps the most powerful part of the book. The narratives of individual farmworkers portray the key issues raised in the text in ways that more academic prose could not. Similarly, Gray is able to craft a picture of farm owners that avoids the pitfall of painting them...