The Labor of Food Isn’t Invisible, It’s Ignored

Local eggs can be bad, too

When I read “Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands” I was glad they didn’t use the word ‘invisible.’ The mega-article by Robin McDowell and Margie Mason starts at “a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country’s largest maximum-security prison” and makes a compelling argument that slavery was merely replaced by the prison industry. The article is very much worth your time. And it reminded me that Hickman’s Family Farms, Arizona’s largest egg producer, was in the news during the early part of the pandemic for moving inmates to their facilities to keep working when nearly everything else was shutting down. At the time, a statement said the women were moved to “ensure a stable food supply while also protecting public health and the health of those in our custody.” Some articles lauded it as a groundbreaking experiment and a great act of public service.

The labor it takes to be able to buy eggs 24/7 isn’t invisible, it is ignored and hidden. Partly because the work is dirty, isolated, and dangerous. And because the laborers (and don’t forget the hens) are considered commodities in the eyes of the food system. But, this is a false construct because, as Sydney Mintz wrote in Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, “a human is not an object, even when treated as one.”

The U.S. is built upon humans being treated as objects, and that fact will not disappear no matter how many try to make it invisible. Prisons and egg companies profit off forced labor. Women who were abruptly taken to live at the Hickman’s facility breathed the stench of raw sewage and shivered or sweated because there was “no built-in heating or cooling” and got sick because there wasn’t room for social distancing. A number of them were injured and sued Hickman’s.

As a woman living in a capitalist and patriarchal culture, I have experienced being treated as an object and being reduced to my roles. My world ignores the work I do as a mother except when there is a national holiday. The labor of cooking meals for my family falls at the lowest end of cultural importance even as it sustains life. I feel a pang of recognition when I see headlines about the “invisible labor” of motherhood or cooking or other domestic things.

But we all know an egg comes from somewhere. And dinner doesn’t magically appear on the table. 

In Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, Laura Shapiro wrote, “As the old-fashioned kitchen was reduced in size and function until it became the kitchenette, more than one reformer was happy to predict that it was about to disappear entirely.” The work of the domestic reformers of the late 1800s seems to hinge on the hope of making the labor of shopping, cooking, and preparing meals invisible. They didn’t want to drudge away in the kitchen, they wanted to outsource that work to factories, businesses, and low-wage workers in the name of efficiency.

Much of the labor of food has been made as invisible as possible and called ‘progress.’ It’s hidden behind walls of factories and paid minimum wage – or less if you’re in prison and have deductions taken out. It’s been this way for generations and people are raised thinking, or being told, that it’s easy and accessible to have eggs and so become entitled to eggs all while not looking at how they get the eggs, who is processing the eggs, how the hens are treated, or what it’s all doing to the environment.

Eggs are big business.

Hickman’s “is the state corrections department’s largest labor contractor, bringing in nearly $35 million in revenue over the past six fiscal years.” When the pandemic hit, both Hickman’s and the state prison system stood to lose a lot of money if work halted. So they decided to bring inmates to live at the egg facilities all to keep the food system going – for us, the consumer. And this plan did keep the food system going, eggs continued to be on the shelves, it’s just that the food system is exploitative and my presumed need for daily eggs was placed higher than the workers’ safety.

I wonder what they’d think if the women Shapiro wrote about could see the U.S. food system today. Would they feel successful? Would they notice that millions are still hungry, and untracked numbers of women still feel trapped in their kitchens?

Hickman’s Family Farms is founded and operates in Arizona, so yes, they’re a local egg supplier. Their packaging features a cartoon rooster wearing sunglasses and Converse-like shoes. When I look at their cartons next to others at the grocery store, Hickman’s can feel like a better option. Their eggs aren’t the most or least expensive, plus–they’re “local fresh,” the slogan on the carton tells me. And yet, they are the “largest egg producer west of the Rockies,” pumping out 1 billion eggs a year. Hickman’s and Sprouts Farmers Market (which is actually a chain grocer) collude to make me feel like I’m buying eggs from a small family farm through their messaging. Local isn’t synonymous with good.

But I’m sure they’d protest: On the Hickman’s website they brag about how many plastic water bottles they’ve recycled into egg cartons and the excellence of their operation. The domestic reformers of the turn of the century would love their copy, “We don’t have backyard chickens anymore, we have state-of-the-art technology. … We have robotics and step-by-step quality checkpoints.” All the labor, human and animal, all the sweat and pain and shit hidden in a few blustery words.

M.F.K. Fisher famously wrote, “Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken.” The egg industry, I assume, would like privacy of its own. When looked into, the image of happy hens on a family farm splits. The conditions on egg farms for chickens and workers are often horrible, and the labels slapped on the cartons misleading. The hens and the workers are being treated as commodities to serve the consumer’s appetite. Hickman’s Family Farms is no different. Just because they are still located where they were founded and run by a family doesn’t absolve them of responsibility.

Let me contend with how my life is built upon turning living beings into commodities.

If the labor was actually invisible, then there would be no fault in not seeing it. But to ignore things that are happening in plain sight is a failure. The heaviest burden lays upon the systems and people benefiting from this forced invisibility, this forced labor. And also, what is my part in this? What can I look at more closely? How can I reject the social lie that the labor is invisible? It’s hard to look at something that threatens the foundation of your life or the price of your eggs. But it is not the same as having your labor extracted by the prison system, or having your home bombed by the IDF. The differences are clear.

So what are we to do? Build the habit, the muscle, of not acting like visible things are invisible. Look straight at the lies that exist for our own comfort, so we can reject them. Bring more people along with us, to make it normal. Reject again and again, again and again, anything that depends on humans and animals and the earth being turned into commodities. Return to a full awareness of the hen and human labor that brings the egg to our plate. 

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Thank you for reading! The Good Enough Weekly comes out every Friday, alternating an essay (like today) with Of the Week. This time last year I wrote: “Confessions of a cranky pre-emerging writer.” I also take on freelance editing and writing projects. Reach out if you’re looking for help in those departments — I’ve worked on everything from zines to textbooks. Learn more here.