Sometimes a great story will get lost in the never-ending torrent of news and analysis coming out of the Fair Food movement. This past October, just such a story took place in the historic college town of Oxford, Mississippi, and, by no fault of its own, promptly got lost in the shadow of last month’s big march in New York City.
But consider the story lost no longer. Susan Marquis, Dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School in Los Angeles and author of the exceptional history of the CIW and the Fair Food Program “I Am not a Tractor”, gave a remarkable talk on the CIW and the Fair Food Program at the 2019 Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) Fall Symposium, and now you can read her remarks in full
on our website.
But first, a bit of context. The theme of this year’s symposium was “Food is Work”, with a focus on the labor undergirding every level of our nation’s massive food industry. Here’s how the SFA framed the conference:
For 2019 the Southern Foodways Alliance tells stories of the domestic and public labor that powers growing, cooking, and serving food. Join us in Oxford, and on the University of Mississippi campus, October 24-26, for our twenty-second fall symposium. In a way that welcomes all, SFA weaves together smart talks, great food, compelling art, and challenging conversations. Join us.
We will showcase work songs from Georgia cane fields and Carolina mills. We will tell stories of the cooks who feed working folk at construction sites and tobacco fields. We will sing songs of soup beans and the fight-for-fifteen. Leading the way will be – among many other good and smart folk — Kiese Laymon, Carnegie medal winning author of Heavy, chef Maneet Chauhan, the pride of Nashville, and Jessie Wilkerson, author of To Live Here, You Have to Fight.
Susan began her own remarks with this beautifully written introduction:
