Review: Will Work for Food

Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern and Teresa M. Mares. Will Work for Food Labor across the Food Chain. University of California Press. 2025. ISBN: 9780520391611

Janis Brehler (Oregon State University)

In Will Work for Food, Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern and Teresa M. Mares examine labor across the United States food system and trace how work in production, processing, distribution, retail, food service, domestic spaces, and waste management is organized, undervalued, and often rendered invisible. Drawing on ethnography, worker narratives, policy analysis, and labor statistics, they show that the contemporary United States food system relies on precarious and uneven labor arrangements that disproportionately affect immigrant workers, women, and workers of color. Their central argument is that conversations about sustainability and “good food” must center labor justice if they are to meaningfully address inequities embedded in the food system, as failing to do so risks reproducing the very inequities that alternative food movements centered on local, organic, and ethically sourced food claim to challenge. In doing so, their book offers a crucial framework for understanding food systems not only as being economic and ecological systems but also as social systems structured around exploitative labor.

Building on this framework, their book examines labor across each stage of the food chain, with each chapter focusing on a different sector and the conditions workers face within it. Beginning with agricultural production, they situate farm labor within longer histories of racialized work, land dispossession, immigration policy, and industrialization. Many farmworkers, who are often migrants from Mexico and Central America, face dangerous working conditions, low wages, and limited legal protections, despite the essential nature of their labor. By foregrounding foodworker’s exploitative labor conditions, Minkoff-Zern and Mares push back against the often romanticized narratives of farming that dominate discussions of agricultural production, especially within local and sustainable food movements. As the book continues, they reveal that exploitation is not incidental but rather systemically produced.

Throughout their book, Minkoff-Zern and Mares demonstrate how labor is organized to prioritize efficiency and profit while subsequently transferring the risks onto the workers sustaining it. For example, food processing workers often endure physically demanding, dangerous, and repetitive tasks in highly industrialized environments for long hours and with minimal training. Similarly, warehouse and distribution workers operating under strict surveillance are evaluated according to productivity metrics and must navigate an increasingly gig-based system with minimal protections and benefits. Retail and service work, while often more visible to consumers, are similarly affected by unreliable scheduling, low wages, and limited benefits. Taken together, their examinations of these sectors make it clear that labor exploitation is not confined to any one part of the food system, but reproduced across it.

One of the strengths of Minkoff-Zern and Mares’ analysis, is how they extend their focus beyond waged labor to also include often invisibilized and unpaid domestic and care labor associated with food production in the home. This labor, such as cooking, feeding others, and managing food within households are often treated as outside of the economy and food system, yet it is essential to sustaining both workers and the broader production, consumption, and distribution systems. As the authors note, this labor is deeply gendered and continues to fall disproportionately on women, even when they are also participants of the wage labor force. Minkoff-Zern and Mares challenge the boundaries of what counts as food labor and also highlight how inequities are reproduced, lived, and negotiated across the food system. By connecting these different forms of labor, their book expands conventional understandings of what is considered food work.

This text offers a strong historical and contemporary examination of the hidden costs of labor across the food system, that will serve as a useful foundation for ethnographic engagement. Although labor narratives are present at the start of each chapter, they are secondary to the broader analysis of the text, as they were not interwoven or utilized throughout. I can imagine future work in anthropology and its adjacent fields that examines the everyday narratives of laborers and how labor conditions are lived and navigated on a daily basis. This would respond to the book’s insistence on the imperative to make the harmful effects of systemic exploitation and precarious labor conditions visible, while also supporting the authors’ call to restructure the food system and associated policies to center laborers’ essential contributions.

Another area for further exploration is the relationship between labor justice and consumer participation in food movements. Minkoff-Zern and Mares critique consumer-driven approaches to cultivating ethical food systems, opening space for further research to examine how consumers might engage in labor justice efforts without reproducing the same harms they are trying to challenge. The book inspired me to ask questions such as: How can labor justice be meaningfully integrated into “good food” movements without leaving the work solely to consumers? What could real solidarity between workers and consumers look like, and how might it help address the inequities built into the food system? And how can policies and organizing efforts be shaped so that the essential work of marginalized laborers is recognized, valued, and protected? 

Overall, Will Work for Food makes a significant contribution to the fields of food studies, anthropology, and labor studies by inviting readers to reconsider how they think about the food system and the “workers who provide the sustenance on which all our lives depend” (p. 2). Whereas public health leaders, politicians, and even food studies scholars will typically frame food around terms of taste, nutrition, culture, and environmental impact, Minkoff-Zern and Mares remind us that food is fundamentally about labor. Every meal is connected to networks of workers whose contributions are rarely acknowledged but whose labor makes the food system possible. Acknowledging this precarious labor across the food system is a necessary step toward cultivating a truly equitable and sustainable food future that the “good food” movement often overlooks. For readers interested in food systems, labor justice, and social inequality, this book offers a critical, timely, and thought-provoking discussion that challenges readers to move beyond narrow definitions of sustainability and to instead consider what it would mean to value and make visible the long invisibilized labor and bodies who sustain the food system.