Humans In Our Food - Digital Version

Early morning in Guatemala City’s wholesale produce market.

The Faces and Voices of the People behind Our Food Supply Chain

By Robyn Metcalfe 4

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9 Introduction

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MAKERS

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Makers as Artisans

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Hands and Feet

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Maine Makers

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The Right Tool for the Job

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My Decade as a Maker

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Making and Breaking Bread

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MOVERS

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Low-Tech Movers

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Humans Alone

Text copyright Š 2020 by Robyn Metcalfe.

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Humans in Markets

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except that brief passages may be quoted for reviews.

104 Women in Markets

All photography by Robyn Metcalfe except for pages 16-17, 32 (top), 63, 68-69 (all), 70-71, 76-77, 84-85 (all), 86-87, 88-89 (all), 90-91 (all), 92 (both), and 118-119 by Lucas Alvarado-Farrar, Far Fetched Productions; 126, 127, 128 and 129 by Matt Cosby; 34 (bottom), 36-37 and 48 by Michael James Murray; 15 and 137 by Julia Metcalfe; 22 from Library of Congress; and 122-123 from Alamy.com.

Printed at Edition One First Edition, 2020

114 Politics in the Cuban Market 120 Human Storytellers 136 Pandemic Sellers

Published by Foodtracker LLC 3203 El Toro Cove, Austin, Texas 78746

141 Conclusion

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020912067

144 Acknowledgments

ISBN: TO COME

Two years ago, I finished writing my last book, Food Routes, about the future of our global food system. Each chapter contains stories about robotic planters and harvesters and protein made from cells in labs, without animals. If the future that Food Routes explores came to pass, labs would fill with technicians who would combine microbes and proteins to make new foods and meatless meat. Food delivery would be done by drones and driverless cars and trucks. The grand exodus of humans from warehouses and foodservice companies would begin. According to the United Nations, a global workforce of a billion humans would need new jobs. We are witnessing the exodus now.

This new food system would be optimized to minimize damage to the climate and to improve public health. Technology up and down the food supply chain would minimize food waste, make work and food safer, lessen the impact of our food system on our environment, and produce healthier food. Food safety could be increased, and food and medicine could finally find a way to work together, enabled by our personal data and precision food production.

And yet, I felt something was missing from my view of the future food system: We were missing. Humans. What would happen to us humans, including the millions working within the industrial food system, from harvesters to grinders and from food servers to bakers?

If humans were eliminated from our food supply chain, what would happen to our relationships to food and each other? Food, and all the stories Chinese wet market, Beijing

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created and shared as a result of our relationship to food, would change in ways we can’t imagine.

From cooking lessons with our grandmothers to homemade dinners around the family table to brunches out with our social tribes, the stories told over and through our food knit us together.

They build connections. They offer us a way to understand how we arrived in this place, with this food, grown and fashioned for our plates in this way.

These are stories of human survival, as food supports life itself. These stories make us human. And the humans who make and move our food—growing, processing, and sending it toward our kitchens—have their own complex and intensely human stories to tell. My fear was that distancing humans from food would mean losing their stories and the human connection with food in favor of cold, robotic convenience and optimization.

into new careers, new specialties? How would automation affect not only the food industry but the economy as a whole? How would this massive group of suddenly displaced humans find their footing in a transformed world?

But in March 2020, everything changed when a novel coronavirus made the leap from China to the rest of the world, igniting the COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly, we were all asking ourselves the same questions I was asking about the food industry. How would this affect the economy? How would the tens of millions of suddenly unemployed Americans earn their livelihoods? Would they be able to go back to the same jobs, or would they have to pivot into new careers? And, of course, what would this pandemic mean for the present and future of human connection? (I’m writing in June of 2020 when, desperate as we may be, we still don’t have answers to most of these questions. I hope that, by the time you read this, we do.)

Our lives had suddenly become quantified in new, chilling terms: the number of infections, deaths, hospital beds open, masks available, jobs lost, and dollars allocated to new welfare programs. And, of course, the distance we must keep between us.

So, I set out to write a book that introduced readers to the humans in our food system. Initially, this was going to be a book about the evolution of the workforce in the food industry.

What would automation mean for the millions of humans whose jobs would be lost? Would they find other work in the food industry? Would it really be so easy for all of them to pivot

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As the virus spread, we discovered a new term: social distancing. It means, essentially, leaving a six-foot space between all humans at all times in an effort to “flatten the curve” and ensure the virus’s impact won’t overwhelm the healthcare system. When this strategy became standard operating procedure, it meant restaurants, retail stores, and office buildings could no longer operate regularly, and many had to close their doors, at least temporarily. Meeting halls were quickly reduced to half the number of open seats in order to maintain the proper distance. Businesses like grocery

stores and post offices set up caution tape to mark that magical six-foot radius around each customer. Aisle monitors began limiting the number of shoppers allowed at one time so we wouldn’t rub elbows while contemplating how many bags of pasta we could buy.

In March, most cities and states in the United States imposed stay-at-home orders, limiting outings to essential activities and in-person social gatherings to only the people living in our homes. We yearned to touch each other, just to reassure ourselves of our presence in this world and our connection to other humans. At a moment when we yearned for hugs, when we wanted to gather together closely, intimately, to comfort one another, we were told to withdraw instead.

We found accommodations, and some of them were intensely human. Within a few weeks, we created new ways to interact, waving instead of hugging or shaking hands, and speaking to one another across the defined “safe distance.” When toilet paper supplies

evaporated, some of us stepped up to barter our rolls for bread or eggs, two humans meeting one another’s needs. When we suddenly found we couldn’t get food at the grocery store, we began ordering online and watching lone souls walk up our driveways, deposit our bags of food, and wander back to trucks jam-packed with other human-delivered food. We drove up to restaurants’ newly improvised curbside windows and reached out our car windows to receive hot meals prepared by humans in the backs of the restaurants. Or, if there was no curbside window, mask-wearing humans came from inside the buildings to thrust our suppers into our cars, apologizing— always apologizing—for the strangeness of this new relationship with customers. We could see the worry in their eyes, the quiet hope that things would return to normal eventually. But as the pandemic has lingered, we’ve all found it more and more difficult to hide our doubt and discomfort.

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But for all the humanity involved, many adaptations relied entirely on technology. Family dinners occurred over Zoom; happy hours, the same. Our colleagues, once at desks across from ours, became reachable only through screens as the majority of the workforce suddenly became remote. We shopped online more than ever, catapulted to our new virtual world in a matter of a few weeks. We stopped buying things from people, buying instead from computer screens. Though there may have been humans on the other side of our screens, we no longer saw them, spoke with them, or shook their hands.

All but very few of our everyday interactions became virtual.

Even in the early stages of the pandemic, people felt a twinge of grief as contact with family members, lovers, coworkers, and friends became physically distant, often remote. We discovered the limits to our collective stamina for videoconferencing and began to fiddle with virtual backgrounds in search of meaningful connections and some sense of novelty among all the sameness of our own four walls.

While the social distancing strategy and all the adaptations it’s inspired may be effective in flattening the curve, the longer we stick to these new regulations, the more they indicate there are limits to our ability to conduct our lives through the Internet.

Many of us, once starry-eyed at the possibilities of automation and optimization through technology, never dreamed we would find these boundaries. But now that we’re experiencing life entirely online, we’re learning that, in some ways, we may have been romanticizing the personal digital transformation. How much distancing can we tolerate before the bonds between us unravel? Or before we unravel, ourselves? How much safety and convenience can we trade for phys-

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ical contact? We may be feeling the first urge to set boundaries around just how far we are willing to physically distance ourselves from one another. We may even find that we are willing to accept new risks in order to remain connected as humans.

One thing that’s become clearer than ever is just how critical humans are to the process of keeping food moving throughout communities across the globe. Many of us have recently felt food insecurity for the first time, whether due to job loss or simply due to inability to snag a coveted grocery delivery appointment. Though not directly related to the virus itself, this sense that we are too far from our food has added another layer of anxiety to the pandemic.

After all, proximity—between ourselves and other humans, or between our food sources and our dinner tables—shapes our behavior and sense of wellbeing.

This pandemic already has and will continue to change how we understand distance, both in terms of each other and in terms of our food supply chain.

We’ve seen it happening on the world stage and felt the impacts in our homes at the kitchen table and on sidewalks outside closed restaurants.

The distance between our food and the humans who produce, process, and deliver it is vast and little understood. Humans in our food supply use their hands, heads, arms, and legs to process food and get it to us.

For a while now, we’ve considered that perhaps much of this movement is unnecessary, and some of it is dangerous to us humans. Humans moving ships send carbon into the air by burning low-grade fuel to send containers of food from China to the United States.

Humans processing heads of romaine lettuce leave traces of E. coli that infect consumers. Humans working with

the fast-moving forklifts required to move and handle our food hurt their backs or lose fingers and arms in the machinery. And this isn’t just in our industrial food supply chain. Small farmers submit their bodies to hard, relentless hours in the field harvesting our food. And these dangers have been the inspiration for much of the digitization and optimization of the food supply chain, but as we’re seeing now, automation comes at its own cost.

We can find a way to lift humans and our environment out of this harmful role, but we need to think carefully about how we approach the replacement of humans with technology.

until now, been faceless and unknown, even to many of the visionaries who aspire to improve our global food system. Now, we are thinking carefully about the humans in our food system in a way we haven’t before, and we’re meeting many of them for first time.

Workers in a slaughtering facility in Minnesota appeared recently on the news as their manager scanned them with a temperature sensor. And when we do go pick up groceries or takeout and someone in a facemask reaches toward us with a bag full of food, we feel a little more emotional than usual, grateful for both the sustenance and the brief moment of (contactless) connection.

Before the pandemic, shoppers in Safeway or Whole Foods and diners at Denny’s or Momofuku knew relatively little about what goes on the in dark, industrial side of their food’s path to their forks. While diners may have seen the chefs and waitstaff in restaurants and may have been introduced to some farmers, the humans who work in the middle of our food supply chain have,

These humans have gone from being invisible to being our heroes, courageous beyond belief to continue delivering groceries, packing tomatoes, baking bread, or driving trucks across the country with loads of eggs and milk.

The farmers are heroes, too, rerouting their harvests and soldiering on, even without the assurance of normal markets. All of these heroes have

Coffee robot, Austin-Bergstrom International Airport 13

adapted, usually by cooperating with other humans, to keep feeding hungry humans even as the pandemic transformed life as we know it.

So how do these events and these adaptations change the future of our food system and, in particular, the role of humans who feed us every day? We may not be able to answer that question yet, but we do know one thing: The need for humans, in some capacity, even in a highly technological world, will endure.

The world we left behind seems at least temporarily suspended. That world promised us robots, cellularmade meat, and plant burgers that now seem impossible even though they had so recently seemed just within reach.

We believed these and other technological wonders were right around the corner. It was all right there, and then it wasn’t. At least not as soon as we thought.

When the food supply chain was road tested, all its pre-pandemic weaknesses came to the forefront. We had optimized our food system for factory models, predictability, scale, and standardization. Now, we suddenly, desperately needed the flexibility that comes with smaller, more adaptable models. Even big food companies needed to act small and agile. And humans came to the rescue.

Humans have always been the ones to come to the rescue, even when feeding the community has seemed like an impossible task—whether due to political unrest, impassible roads, or global pandemics. And so, as the pandemic evolved the way we think about our food and the humans who provide it, it’s also evolved the way I’ve thought about this book. I’ve been curious about how food systems work for over two decades. I’ve traveled all over the world in order to improve

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my understanding of how the food supply chain works. In the process, I’ve meet wonderful people—warm, intense, dedicated, family-loving, aspirational human beings who’ve graciously invited my questions and shared their stories.

This book has become a celebration of these humans who, for years, have made their livelihoods by feeding our communities, whatever obstacles governments, customers, or Mother Nature herself throws their way.

I took most of the photographs in this book over the last decade as I met humans all over the world who are in charge of making and moving our food.

They are what they are: photos taken on the move. They represent the discoveries I’ve made and the people I’ve met as I studied the food supply chain. Sometimes I used my cell phone; other times I lugged my fancy camera with me and managed to get some better shots along the way. More importantly, I’ve gotten the opportunity to listen to these people’s stories, and I’ve learned that the humans in our food system are incredibly independent, resilient souls.

I invite you to see, appreciate, and get to know some of these humans—and our food system—in this book. Consider how we might accommodate and even embrace all this humanness as we return to pre-pandemic conversations about how to automate our food supply chain in a new, post-pandemic, distance-centric world.

Untouchables: grocery carts outside Central Market 15 in Austin.

Manuel, Cheesemaker Los Altos Food Products, City of Industry

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Historically, humans make food. Through the movements of our own bodies and the application of our knowledge and ingenuity, we produce raw ingredients and process them for other humans to consume. A fisherman catches a fish, or even farms it. Other humans clean, fillet, smoke, package, store, transport, and store it again before we take it home for dinner. Humans enable this miracle to occur as it has for centuries.

Processed food is increasingly maligned by fresh, organic food activists who want food to arrive on our plates with as little intervention as possible.

And if you talk to nutritionists, they would argue that most raw ingredients need some processing to make the nutrients accessible to the human body. The actual process of making our food relieves us of our romantic and human connection with our dinner. We yearn for food that appears minimally processed and uncomplicated, unadulterated. But actually, all food is processed, and much of the processing is done by humans. Food makers.

Think of it this way: Millennia ago, humans used stones to grind grain into flour for bread making; now, we wash and chop our lettuce for salad making.

Whether it’s done by humans or machines, the transformation of raw ingredients into palatable and nutritious food is necessary.

The human processors or makers in this chapter transform meat into chops and sausage, pick and trim seafood, grind flour to make bread and pastries, distill seawater for salt, and make the tools and equipment needed to locate and harvest the raw materials in the first place.

As I met these people throughout my travels, I was drawn into their work through their stories. The humans bring more than their hands and feet into our food system; they bring their culture, family history, and stamina as they work long hours indoors and out, all year ’round.

When you read their stories, think about how their lives may be transformed by the technology already on its way to replace them. As you’ve ridden out the pandemic of 2020, you have seen both the gains and losses of humans in our food system.

Farm to table, Caoba Farms, Antigua, Guatamala

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Thinking of makers as artisans usually spins up an image of a craftsperson working on handmade pasta or carefully wrapping small batch cheeses for a few appreciative and high-paying customers. And humans in the industrial food system, working in foodservice businesses or in grocery stores and food manufacturing, also display their skills as artisans. I’ve met many butchers in the back rooms of grocery stores like Walmart and H-E-B whose knife skills are impressive. I met a carpenter in the industrial area of Los Angeles who can repair and remake old wooden pallets with the same care as a woodworker who dovetails joints for sculpted mahogany coffee tables.

Bob, Rockland Bob has an impish smile and big, strong hands that wield some serious knives in his meat market in Rockland, Maine.

Until they sold it in early 2020, he and his partner, Deborah, ran a small meat shop located on a two-lane rural road that leads to Owls Head from Rockland.

I had a chance in late 2019 to ask Bob about his work while enjoying breakfast at the Rockland Café. By then, he had been in the meat business for at least fifty-five years, in one form or another, and had watched it change throughout his career.

During the 1960s, while still in high school in Rockland, Bob looked for part-time work after school. He found a position in the produce department at First National, a grocery store that had opened in Somerville, Massachusetts, in 1927 as the first retail supermarket in the United States. After trimming and washing lettuce, he would wander over to the meat room to clean saws and cut stew meat to make hamburgers. That’s when it all started, he says of his life as a butcher. He asked the meat manager if he would teach him how to cut meat.

He was only fifteen years old, so the manager told him he’d have to get his parents to sign a waiver. They did, and soon he had learned how to break down an animal, separating the carcass into prime cuts. Sometimes, in the early days, he’d go to work at midnight, using an electric ratchet saw to cut the meat hung on hooks.

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Bob worked in several grocery stores and meat shops in the years between First National and today, leaving the meat industry only for a few years to repair F4 Phantom II jets during the Vietnam War. As he recounted his stories on that day in his shop, one consistent theme was clear: For Bob, meat cutting is an art, and until he retired, he took pride in making quality cuts that kept his customers coming back for more.

Today, when I pass Bob’s shop, I wonder who’s at the meat counter and how the new owner felt as the pandemic hit in March. Bob is in Florida, and I imagine he’s probably relieved he hung up his butcher’s apron just in time.

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Ruben, Buenos Aires I visited this manufacturer as part of a larger quest focused on the ingredients for making a traditional choripán sandwich, simple street fare for Argentinians. After my visit to the sausage company, the manager of the business offered to drive me to the flour mill two hours outside of Buenos Aires. During the long ride, we chatted about his work, his country, and the foods he likes to eat. When I asked him about his family, I heard a catch in his voice as he took in a long, slow breath of air. Not taking his eyes off the road ahead, he told me about his children. He has three, he says, though only two are living.

The second child nearly killed his wife due to complications during birth, and though his wife survived, the baby passed away only a few days later.

Employees at a chorizo manufacturing company just outside Buenos Aires are busy unloading pig carcasses and breaking them down into smaller cuts in order to feed the meat grinder. Up in the room where the sausage takes shape, workers in white gowns, hairnets, and gloves put pork and seasonings into the large industrial meat grinder, nudging the meat with a shovel. The ground meat mixture travels through an extruder to fill the sausage casings. Despite the rush of activity, the humans making the sausage are friendly with one another, working hard and fast while continuing personal conversations—about their families, their weekend plans—that seem to flow from one day to the next.

Though his eyes never left the road ahead, they filled with tears as he described how he felt. He said that everything changed for him after the baby died, and his work became the only constant, reliable thing in his life. He drew his work closer, using it to shield him from the grief that overcame him at home.

This story made him much more than his work. Transcending his sausage making persona, he seemed a “man in full,” as Tom Wolfe wrote. He was hopeful and courageous in spite of a broken heart.

This glimpse into Ruben’s home life— this moment of vulnerability—was a powerful experience, and one I’ve reflected on frequently during the pandemic as the barriers between our work and ourselves have broken down.

We’ve suddenly had to find peace with our coworkers peering into our living rooms via videoconference, studying our bookshelves, hearing our dogs bark at strangers, and maybe even getting a peek at our families as they go

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about their own lives. While it may feel vulnerable to let others in like this, there are benefits to seeing one another as “humans in full.” We become more connected and perhaps more empathetic as we remember we are all so much more than our work.

As we move on from the pandemic, will we preserve these moments of visibility into parts of our lives that we once kept distant? And how might these moments shine light on the invisible, unknowable humans who make and move our food? As we stand in judgment about our industrial food system, I wonder how we can balance the desire for automation and optimization with empathy for those humans we don’t see and don’t know.

The more distance we put between ourselves and each other, the more we thirst for contact, flesh, stories.

What happens to our own humanity when machines make our sausages, the conversations end, and the alignment with making things with our hands disappears?

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Natalia, Moscow One overcast day in November 2013, I visited Nikolai, a piroshki shop in Moscow, and met the owner, Natalia. We sipped fragrant Russian tea served in glasses that were hot in our hands.

Also on hand were samples of her warm piroshki, baked nearby in a warehouse that had been an aircraft factory during the Cold War, just one of many lingering monuments to the Soviet era.

Natalia spent her childhood cooking pastries with her grandmother and eventually became an engineer, working on space acoustics equipment transmitters. But she never forgot the early morning smell of the sweet, freshfrom-the-oven piroshki her grandmother used to bake. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she joined other entrepreneurs starting new businesses.

She had been at the helm of the bakery and shops for four years when we met.

(And in Soviet years, that’s hardly a weekend.)

Every morning, Natalia’s team begins their ritual baking process early, as the shop supplies most of the businesses in the surrounding area. As we talked, we wandered through her bakery, Natalia in a warm, woolen sweater.

She wore a hairnet, too, but her long, thick, brown hair escaped and tumbled down onto her shoulders. Her bakers, all young men and women, wore their white uniforms, and many were giggling in the corner. Some, presumably with time on their hands, carved pumpkins with typical scary expressions, even though it was November.

After the bakery tour, as we sipped our tea and nibbled on piroshki, she described how she felt about her business. To Natalia, the piroshki business evoked a sense of belonging to a larger community. It also

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provided her the means to share her childhood love of piroshki. All of these associations were baked into her pies.

Natalia’s grandfather, Nikolai Andreevich, started baking pies in Moscow during the 1930s as Stalin was collectivizing agriculture and centralizing economic controls. He came from a musical, artistic family. Both Natalia’s grandparents were musicians, in fact. The company’s website refers to their “harmoniously combined creative energy and natural talent, delicacy and high professionalism.” In running—and growing—her grandfather’s business today, Natalia likes to think she’s creating something Nikolai himself would enjoy.

When we spoke in 2013, Natalia already ran three shops, including one in Spain and one in France, and she was as excited about her newest shop in Moscow as any entrepreneur would be. But she hadn’t planned to stop there. Just as Natalia was preparing to launch her business in the United States, trade sanctions between the West and Russia closed down any aspirations for further expansion outside of Russia. Russia had become the target of trade sanctions as a result of its actions in the Ukraine. Some of Moscow’s restaurants could no longer get European cheeses, among other items, and Natalia wouldn’t be able to seek out the European butter that made her piroshki so light and flakey. But I wasn’t too worried about Natalia, because during our conversations, I got the idea that overcoming obstacles was her sweet spot. The pandemic is another obstacle, and I imagine she’s finding a way to survive this, too.

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Throughout my travels through food markets, stalls, warehouses, and buildings thrumming with mixers, ovens, and extruders (my favorite unappetizing food-related word we use to describe food), I watch hands.

Hands that grow, process, pack, store, and ship our food are strong, and they tell their own stories. Our hands connect us to the process of making food and reflect how we transform raw ingredients into what we eat.

As I write this paragraph, I notice my own hands. They are not hands that drive a tractor, operate a forklift, or fillet fish all day long. They are small, full of knots and knobs common to arthritic hands. Some fingers wander from one end to the other or

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take sideways detours at their tips.

A few digits display scars from the odd knife slip while chopping onions or slicing tomatoes. My ring finger on my left hand constantly aches, and when I bump it against a hard surface, pain surges through my hand. Almost unbearable. I think I cut that finger decades ago while chopping food and exposed a nerve, which sits too close to the skin’s surface now.

A few faded scars decorate the tops of my hands, a result of tumbles on rocky trails. My nails are short, but mostly even. They are the hands of a writer. They are bare, uncovered.

Clean and not apparently strong, yet strong enough to turn out a decent loaf of bread.

My hands kneading sourdough, a pandemic pastime.

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Over the course of ten years, I have watched other human hands at work in our food system. Some are bare hands and, increasingly, many hands wear gloves. Before food safety became our obsession, our hands left prints, tracks on our food, as evidence of a human connection.

With hands hidden now, we leave no trace of our identity. Even before the pandemic hit, we’d begun to worry about safety, and in many ways, we felt safe food was contactless food.

In the wake of the pandemic, of course, the idea of a contactless food system is even more appealing to many. But what does it mean? Fewer humans touching, slicing, and packing our food? No humans at all? And will this contactless system remove the satisfaction we feel when our hands make and shape our world and the things in it?

Before the 2020 pandemic, food workers followed FDA guidance that addresses glove specifications. Food workers could use their bare hands if they were not making ready-to-eat-food. And

most food processors opted for gloves even if handling food that would continue onward to other processing before becoming “ready to eat.” Before the pandemic, we could find many instances where we were handed our food with bare hands. Now, don’t even think about it. If we see someone handle our food without gloves, we react in new ways: fear, loathing, disgust, distrust. We’d prefer the human makers be out of reach, keeping a rubber barrier between them and us at all times. Never mind that some criminals use gloves to hide their identity; when it comes to food, gloves are a signal of trust.

While wearing gloves isn’t a bad thing at all—it’s often a wise choice to protect ourselves from harmful contaminants, whether bacterial or chemical—gloves don’t equate to safety on their own. After all, a dirty, overused glove may be more dangerous than a just-washed hand. Has the pandemic solved for public health or only camouflaged more complex problems hidden within our food system?

Green gloves, hung out to dry outside a seaweed lab in Maine.

Orange gloves in bait factory (opposite).

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Of course, gloves aren’t the only accessories makers wear to protect themselves.

Humans who work in our food system often wear head-to-toe protection, creating a dramatic visual that may evoke memories of the Chernobyl disaster or other highly toxic areas and events. In these environments, the very features that define us are hidden from view. Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve experienced more than one moment when I’ve been alarmed by a masked person looking in my direction, only to realize I can’t see a smile or tell that he’s trying to get my attention through the facemask. Our eyes can meet, but little else.

In a seafood processing facility in Maine (top), humans making smoked fish fillets and mussels are covered head to toe with protective covering. Not only gloves, but hair and beard nets, common attire for foodservice workers. This human waits for his turn to sweep salmon fillets through a sanitizing wash before they enter the salting and seasoning stage. Humans often wait in cold, wet spaces to handle our food, their personalities hidden behind nets, gloves, and aprons. Once work ends or during daytime breaks, we can get a glimpse of their faces, their hairstyles, and their eyes. This is when we can see the real humans in our food system.

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Throughout my studies of the food supply chain, I saw rubber gloves covering hands in many situations. Here, in a converted Cold Warera airplane factory in Moscow, a young woman wears gloves to handle dough for piroshki that are sold in a nearby cafĂŠ. But regulations are spotty, and some of her peers wear no gloves at all.

In some situations, like flour mills I visited in Los Angeles (above) and Argentina (right), hands are very visible. In LA, Jose shows me his flour-covered hands.

In Argentina, a technician holds out his hand to display the bran removed during the bolting process.

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Shucker, Richmond In a lobster shucking company in Maine, workers wear their blue gloves for both sanitation and protection from the sharp edges of the lobster shells. Using a system much like sealed, pressurized packaging, the company prepares the shells for shucking by immersing them in a sealed, pressurized container that releases the lobster meat from the shell. After the shells have been immersed, the worker cleans and packs the lobster tails for foodservice buyers that find the easy-to-eat lobster tails a feature for their premier customers.

Clammer, St. George Humans use their hands to peel, pick, and pack our food. Steve, a clammer in Maine, uses his strong, powerful hands to pick clams out of the muddy sand flats of the St. George River. While some clam diggers use forks and shovels, he uses his brawny hands to dig and extract clams, creating a slushy, sucking sound as he brings one to the surface. He moves as if he’s a dentist determined to remove a molar from the mouth of a stubborn patient.

Pig Farmer, Central Argentina A typical invitation to enter a food handling facility comes with a request to put on protective booties. Some facilities also require that visitors wear the booties as they walk through a sanitizing bath. After donning a white paper jumpsuit, I slipped on these booties for a stroll through a pig farm in central Argentina.

We entered a building filled with sows and piglets, all in spaces washed with chemicals that killed bacteria that might infect those squirmy, hopelessly adorable piglets.

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Whether booties, jumpsuits, hairnets, beard nets, or gloves, protective gear is becoming more and more of a requirement for food workers. The proliferation of this gear for food workers and, during the pandemic, even in our daily lives, may be a barometer for how much contamination we can tolerate. As we don our own facemasks for walks in the park or trips to the grocery store, it becomes easier to remember that there’s a human hiding within these garments. Let’s not forget that as the food system evolves.

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Krista, Lobsterman Working out of Spruce Head, Maine, on her thirty-six-foot lobster boat, Krista is one of the few women who fish for lobster along the rocky coastline. Joining other fisherman hit hard by the pandemic, she has diversified into scallops, urchins, oysters, and anything else that can keep her afloat against the accelerating winds of change.

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My family has deep roots in Maine, and I’ve long been fascinated by the makers who populate the area’s coastal communities. (So fascinated, in fact, that I spend my days now working on a film about them.)

Layers of makers wind through the coastline, usually lone, fiercely independent, and tenacious. Clammers, bait bag makers, seaweed farmers, lobster fishermen, and more. And most work with their bare hands.

Bait Bag Makers No one catches lobsters without a trap of someone’s making. Here, at Brooks Trap Mill in Thomaston, Maine, women sew bait bags that contain herring, among other bait. At this company, men make the traps. The wire comes from Italy, China, and the United States, and the selection is carefully curated for various reasons, some rational

(lobsters don’t like the smell of some of the wire coating) and others that seem to hinge on myths (blue wire just fishes better). Inside a small room connected to a large warehouse where the traps are made sit about half a dozen women making bait bags with plastic netting of all colors. The decorations on the walls reveal more about their lives outside the mill.

Children’s artwork, pink drinking cups, photos of their kids. Stickies with reminders to stop by the grocery store.

Shopping lists.

Alan, Scallop Fisherman On a winter’s day, Alan drags his catch out of Spruce Head Harbor, Maine. The cool air is salty, and bright sunshine reflects off the ocean’s surface, perforated by bubbling froth in the boat wake. Specks of other boats dot the water in the distance as they haul lobster crates.

I remember thinking Alan’s boat was too clean, wondering how long it took him to get it ready for our visit. But maybe he’s just that way, paying attention to detail and keeping surfaces clean. Most boats I see are oily and disheveled, with no visible logic as to how the occupants’ belongings are arranged. Each boat has a personality, usually closely tied to its owner.

Alan is proud of his boat and his work. Most fishermen are, but not obviously so. He spins his boat around to find the scallop bed, drops his net, and scoops up shells, water trailing in with them. These fishermen know no season other than all seasons, geared up for whatever season is open and whatever quota is available. Some weigh the quota, the weather, and the price of fuel, among other things, and head out to fish for scallops, lobsters, herring, urchins.

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Lobster Shuckers These young men, all immigrants from Africa, work in a seafood processing facility in Maine, running lobster legs through a machine that extracts tiny bits of meat from the shell. They work quickly, expertly managed by a diminutive Iranian woman, feeding the lobster legs through the machine. The thrum of machines sends water sloshing over the concrete floor, littering the space with bits of meat and shell as they masticate the chitin into lifeless exoskeletons.

The men perform a dance among the lobster containers, machines, and each other, barely hesitating between their moves. The choreography of humans, the mashup of languages, the flashing of sharp knives held expertly in hands. This scene brings a lobster tail to your plate.

Urchin Packers An unmarked building in Portland, Maine, houses a small business, run by two Japanese entrepreneurs, that deftly removes the ochre-colored meat from live urchins and packages it for wholesale and retail customers. Some pickers and packers wear masks, others not, as this team of mostly women stand on foam pads. Their white gloves are thin enough to allow delicate work, their fingers tucking bits of meat into tight patterns. They spend hours picking out the meat and carefully placing it in the boxes that restaurants will display in their sushi bar cases.

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Lobster Bait Makers

Glenn, Herring Fisherman What’s most striking about Glenn are his eyes. They’re blue, steady, and unflinching, as if they’re waiting for your move. His intense gaze is a bit unnerving, not quite confrontational, but demanding commitment. Sitting in his sandwich shop, Clan McClaren in Rockland, Maine, it’s easy to doubt whether he wants you to be there. He seems born for social distancing.

Having supped many times in his restaurant, I hadn’t known Glenn as a herring fisherman, too. But of course, why not? Maine is full of multi-gigging workers who cobble two, three, or even more jobs together to make ends meet.

Glenn has been fishing for lobsters, pogies, whatever he can net or hook, for at least fortyfive years, and now he fishes for herring, too. His boat, Double Eagle, is the last Eastern Rig sardine boat. Built in 1929, the fifty-six-foot boat originally moved odiferous catches from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to Nova Scotia, carrying herring

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from weirs and seines. Fishing year-round now, Glenn sells his herring to either canning companies or bait dealers, shuttling between Gloucester and Maine. In spite of his quiet demeanor, he’s not quiet about fishing quotas.

He’s vocal at meetings hosted by the Department of Marine Resources, speaking on behalf of smaller bait fishermen like himself. His boat can’t compete with the big steel trawlers that head into his waters from out of state. As he describes his spat with Maine’s fishery managers, he calls the ocean his garden. Voltaire’s admonishment, to tend to your garden, or stick to your own business, comes to mind. It sounds like Glenn just wants to be able to tend his garden.

In the backwater of Maine’s coastline is Cherryfield, where young entrepreneurs, former lobster boat sternmen, discovered an opportunity to make lobster bait from pig hides. Herring shortages, created by federal regulators that cut herring quotas, created a market for creative bait alternatives. Truckloads of pig hides travel from the midwestern United States to Cherryfield, Maine. The fishermen, now bait makers too, unpack the hides, trim them, and stuff them into white, five-gallon plastic tubs. I see these tubs on fishing wharves up and down the coast of Maine, where fishermen see the benefits of fishing with this reimagined bait instead of paying high prices for scarce herring bait.

The newly enlarged warehouse where they pack and salt skins contains playground toys, pallets of packed tubs awaiting delivery, a shiny forklift, and the owner, packing snuff and spitting into a coke bottle.

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Sarah, Kelp Farmer Sarah is a farmer who seeds the ocean to grow kelp. Working out of a small lab belonging to the University of Maine, she tests and improves her method of kelp farming. Working alone on her boat on a chilly fall morning, she sets kelp seeds along ropes for her crop, which she will harvest six months later, in the early spring.

Intrepid, insistent, and precise, Sarah goes about her work within view of lobstermen who have learned to trust her intentions and, for the time being, don’t cut her ropes or turn her away. Fishing rights, the tradition of ownership of fishing areas, are a contentious topic. Anyone who infringes on another fisherman’s grounds is angling for a fight.

In extreme cases, boats mysteriously catch on fire, fishing lines are cut, or buoys are destroyed. Maybe Sarah’s arrival doesn’t threaten the big guys; but if she’s successful, I wonder whether they’ll join her in that boat or throw a few obstacles in her way.

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Of course, the humans who perform these miracles of food making do so with the help of tools. This has been true since cavemen flayed animals with stone adzes, though our toolboxes have grown in the intervening years. Lowtech tools became high tech when we harnessed energy to create new forms of power and materials. But even with robotic arms and automated extruders at our fingertips, there’s nothing like a good knife to aid humans with

their work, whether pruning grape vines or filleting fish. During my travels through the global food system, I’ve admired the knives humans use to shape and trim their ingredients. A good knife in the hands of an adept craftsman need not be fancy, as long as the blades are sharp and the handles durable. A good knife is hard to separate from its owner. And some knives are pure works of art.

Some humans use stones to sharpen their knives, and others turn to sharpening machines that whir away to keep blades at their sharpest. I’ve watched food makers use knives to trim fish in London, slice meat in Maine, trim pig skins to make lobster bait, and more. And of course, we use knives in our own kitchens every day, to chop vegetables, slice brisket, or spread butter on toast.

These knives are from Rockland butcher Bob (opposite top), the Kashgar livestock market in China (opposite bottom), a lobster shucking factory in Maine (top), and the pig skin bait processing shop in Cherryfield, Maine (bottom). Salt covered, sharp, for trimming pig skins before salting and packing them for Maine fishermen.

The knives that belong to humans making our food are basic tools—so essential, so varied, and many with personalities that match their owners. Respected, mostly cared for, and totally not of this new digital world we live in.

Of course, knives are just one example of the many low-tech tools humans use to grow, harvest, and produce our food before sending it on its way to our dinner tables.

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Rockland Seine fishermen spend the winter repairing their nets and buoys in a warehouse that contains their boat and piles of seine nets like these, anticipating the day they can head out to sea for their first catch of the season.

Naruto Straits, Japan Somewhat like Maine lobstermen, Japanese octopus fishermen lure their prey into traps, such as these clay pots attached to long hemp ropes.

Washington County In the poorest county in the United States, Washington County, Maine, many residents can’t afford a boat or fishing gear. But a plastic bucket is all Victor needs to fish his quota of periwinkles, small, edible sea snails. Known as winkling, his work occurs during the winter when he needs all the insulation he can find on the cold, gray days when his feet are numb. His thin body, so thin, gains some fullness when he dons workpants, rubber gloves, and a sweatshirt. He stays in the intertidal spaces as the tide goes out, foraging for these tiny winkles, rummaging through the seaweed, picking out the shells, and tossing them into his bucket. He almost always fishes alone. Then he’s off to a local buyer, a solitary, abandoned-looking shack where another man, alone inside, weighs the winkler’s catch. The small heater inside the buying shack, combined with the jokes that pass between them, generate warmth as these fellow loners come together long enough to earn a meager living. It’s just enough.

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Buenos Aires, Argentina Marcelo operates his bakery with a knack for controlled chaos.

Stacks of baking pans await the daily rush for choripĂĄn bread.

Tokyo, Japan The fish sellers in the old fish market, Tsukiji, used to stack old weigh scales as they cleaned up after a day’s sales. They abandoned these relics when the market moved into its new quarters, the Toyosu market in 2018.

Now digital scales are the norm, not as elegant as these old ladies.

Hyogo Prefecture, J a p a n (below) Near a seaweed research center, nori makers use this army of ovens to dry sheets of seaweed for the auction market.

Istanbul, Turkey Eryilmaz keeps his wooden boards near the door, ready for daily packing and delivering of warm simit to the sellers around the city.

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Mr. Takahashi, Fukui City, Japan In a small warehouse on the ocean’s edge in a seaside town near Fukui City, Japan, Mr. Takahashi, a salt maker, and his one helper, use a simple system to make small-batch salt in three flavors: natural, with nori, and with dried plum. (In Japanese culture, it’s common for adults to refer to each other by their surnames, so I followed suit.) At first glance, the hodgepodge of vats, garden hoses, a ramshackle greenhouse, and odd collection of measuring cups seems chaotic.

But, observing Mr. Takahashi work, it quickly becomes clear that this hodgepodge is a well-ordered system of tools that keep his business running.

For example, the small hose draped up and over a concrete storm wall hasn’t simply been left there by accident— instead, it’s set up to bring seawater into a glass house for evaporation before it’s heated in large cauldrons inside. A member of the artisanal food movement, Mr. Takahashi uses these tools to handmake his salt in small batches.

Mr. Takahashi also works in a small front office, where he sells his smoked salt and salt flavored with flakes of nori (seaweed). In this office, his tools include a hand calculator, notepads, pencils, and clips. But he doesn’t linger inside. As soon as a customer leaves his shop, he returns to his vats to inspect the progress of evaporation. You can feel his hands in every grain he sells, from its beginnings in the greenhouse to the moment it leaves his shop. You can almost see the salt forming on his own sweaty brow as he leans over the steaming pots.

This cycle repeats through his day and feels like one connected movement.

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Once in a while, he bolts outside to the greenhouse-like structure where sea water evaporates during the first step of salt production, a sort of distillery. The floor is constantly wet, the air humid and salty, the metal supports around the walls are rusty, bleeding burnt sienna into the seams of the white walls. He sweats always, it seems, the effect of both the steam from evaporating water and his constant movement. Wearing tall, white rubber boots, cargo pants, and a pink towel wrapped around his head, he moves from indoors to outdoors, scooping saltwater to fill his boiling vats. His blue rubber gloves match his blue Mizuno shirt, which he wears with the sleeves rolled up as high as they will go. He is intense, precise, and wildly enthusiastic, smiling whenever our eyes meet. He doesn’t stop moving even as he waits for the boiling salt water to yield a cup full of salt. I wonder what he’s like when he’s not at work, if he ever takes time off, that is. I wonder what his story includes beyond this small building in a small town along the Japanese coastline.

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I spent ten years as a maker on a working farm inland from Midcoast Maine. We created the farm to conserve endangered breeds of livestock.

We were open to the public and raised five groups of heritage breeds, such as Cotswold sheep and Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs. We had over two hundred animals on the farm, and we made products from their wool and meat.

We made dyes from our herb garden and blankets from our wool. Lambing, shearing, farrowing, spinning, and even a little milking (from our resident goat) connected me to the maker in all of us.

Our farm was named for Kelmscott Manor, the nineteenth century home of arts and crafts designer William Morris. His maxim was that we should only fill our homes with things that are both useful and beautiful. Art and design, craft and utility. These ideas became the foundation for my work at the farm. The farm and the

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animals were redolent in their beauty and exquisite in their utility. Farmers in the past had domesticated these animals for their utility and, now endangered, they deserved our care as we stewarded their return to our domesticated landscapes. Our draft horses were working animals, providing rides for visitors or helping us move heavy objects. Our pigs provided pork for local restaurants, and our sheep provided lustrous wool for blankets and yarn. And lamb for a few select restaurants in New England.

We displayed the animals for thousands of visitors who made the trek to Maine every summer. They participated in spinning, sheep dog trials, butter-making demonstrations, and wool dying.

These tourists, as well as the local schoolchildren, became budding makers.

Mostly, the maker urge comes from the desire to become intimately connected to the world around us, noticing with all our senses the world we inhabit. I

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remember the sweet smell of fresh-cut hay on a warm August afternoon. I remember the sounds of piglets rooting for a sow’s nipple and of both sows and boars scarfing up slop. Or the smell of Rescue Remedy drops we gave our sheep during the shearing shenanigans. Or the sound of a lamb knickering as it pulled on its mother’s teat a few minutes after its first breath of air. All the humans on the farm worked with the animals as part of an unspoken contract to honor the relationship between our natural and unnatural worlds. The purpose for these human activities was the act of making. Making food and, in our case, clothing, too.

I created stories about our life on the farm. Stories about night we herded sheep into our barn in the dark during an approaching hurricane; about the day we heard anxious llamas humming in our barn during a weekend of llama shearing; about the winter our cows slid down the fields of ice during an ice storm; about the weeks when lambs we thought would not make it through a winter lambing season survived; about weekends when we served sausage made from our pigs to our farm visitors just after they had visited the piggery; about those days when we unavoidably felt sad, our throats constricting, as we loaded our animals into the truck for their trips to the slaughterhouse. Being human can be at once humbling, empowering, exhilarating, and heartbreaking.

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Cotswold lamb (opposite top), one of many born each spring on the farm. Only about one thousand Cotswold sheep remain in the United States.

The farm produced blankets (opposite bottom) from the Cotswold wool and herbal dyes from our garden. An old mill in the British Cotswolds wove the blankets.

Our farm staff (top left) explains how important these pigs are to agricultural biodiversity.

These handy tipping tables (middle left) eased the task of delivering treatments to our flock. The sheep are heavy and greasy, loaded with lanolin.

Young visitors to the farm (bottom left) learn how to bottle feed a few lambs each season.

The farm was able to reestablish the herd of Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs (below) in North America after the breed population sank to four animals in early 1990. Now, at least one thousand animals thrive in the United States.

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Bakeries in cities around the world support urban populations as they go about their busy, often disconnected lives. Whether in Paris or Rome, London or Egypt, bakers are a privileged sort, a class of workers that provide humans with stable nourishment. Bread stands in for food in general, the stabilizing ingredient for society.

Bread keeps the peace. The French Revolution is just one example of how populations can come apart when a basic necessity, bread, becomes scarce or is overpriced.

Right after the pandemic hit, bread became scarce again as stores sold out of their usual loaves. But rather than revolt, humans turned in droves to breadmaking. This “old-fashioned” activity became so popular that, soon,

stores sold out of yeast, flour disappeared from grocery shelves, and my local bakery began selling sourdough starter. And it’s no wonder. What more human activity is there than breadmaking? Bread, the staff of life, is the most basic form of nourishment, of life support. We break bread as an act of empathy, friendship, and shared experience. What more affirming activity could there be during a global pandemic, when our communities and our lives feel threatened, and when our shared experiences have been whittled down to fear and uncertainty?

Working dough with our hands, shaping a loaf, and then seeing it emerge from our ovens connects us to our own humanity and, even if only for a few hours, returns some semblance of control. While the details of our lives have been wrested out of our hands, we can shape that one ball in any way we desire, creating nourishment, connectivity, and the assurance that life will continue. Consisting of just flour, water, and yeast, bread is basic enough to quiet the chaos outside our homes, whether that chaos is a political revolution or a global pandemic.

Melino Chacabuco, Buenos Aires Argentina is known for its football world championships, not for its bread; and yet, football fans (no matter which team they’re rooting for) consume thousands of the choripán sandwiches sold by street vendors and cafés across the city. So choripán bread, closely resembling French baguettes in taste and flavor, brings Argentina and France together—if not for the duration of a rowdy football match, at least for the time it takes to consume the sandwich.

Mill workers (top) load sacks of flour onto trucks that deliver to bakeries in Buenos Aires.

Communication between workers is still low-tech (left). Handdelivered paper notes bring humans together in this Argentinian mill.

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When I visited Melino Chacabuco on my great choripán quest, production manager Juan and food engineer Gabriela sat at a long wooden conference table with a slide projector perched at one end. American and Argentinian flags flanked each other, and a basket of sweet, sticky, shiny Argentinian pastries slowly circumnavigated the table.

Gabriela and Rafael showed me how they grind the shipments of grain the mill receives around the clock.

Rafael spoke about his work at the mill as the warm, damp air filled the room.

He was tall, with silver hair, and he wore a short-sleeved shirt on this midsummer day. He told me about his recent promotion to manager and how it made him uncomfortable. Trained as a mechanical engineer, Rafael confessed that he knows how milling equipment works, not people.

Gabriela appeared to thrive in her job as a food scientist, a position she’d had for the last twenty-nine years.

Her hair was short and dark brown, drawn back over her face by her reading A web of metal tubes (top left) hisses and vibrates as the mill transforms grain into flour.

In some parts of the mill (top right), a fog of flour dust infuses the air, covering the interstices of clothing, bodies, and equipment.

A technician (right) shows the variation in flour grading, from fine to coarse.

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glasses. Wearing a white lab coat with the company logo on one side, she conveyed the competence of a scientist, adding the occasional twinkle and smile. Slowly stirring her tea as she emptied a series of sugar packets into her cup, she explained how flour continues to hold her interest. A simple loaf of bread, she said, is not easy to make, and she believes that bakers today are not as skilled as in the past. They sometimes blunder through their breadmaking inconsistently, often tossing in ingredients without regard for precision or quality. As a result, Gabriela said she is in constant contact with her customers, advising and sometimes training them so they can create a stable, consistent loaf. After all, she wants the mill to stay in business, and it’s the flour that will get a bad rap if a bakery’s customers feel the bread doesn’t taste good.

Though clearly dedicated and skilled, Gabriela wasn’t all business. During our tour through the factory, we caught each other’s attention when we approached a large area where the polished pine floor begged for a dancer or two. Spontaneously, we both mimicked the motions of tango dancing, sliding across the floor for a few moments, undetected by the oblivious males in our group.

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Zach, Grain Craft, Vernon Grain Craft, a hundred-year-old independent flour mill with fourteen locations in the United States, operates one of its old mills in Vernon, right outside Los Angeles, near the railroad tracks, a common arrangement for mills and other factories that rely on transportation networks to deliver raw materials and ship finished products.

Zach is the superintendent who runs the mill that produces flour for bakers in Los Angeles. He wears boots caked with fine white flour dust that he must collect during his many daily walks throughout the mill.

He keeps an eye on nine mill operators and four mechanics, so he’s out on the floor quite a bit rather than sitting behind the desk. But that’s good for Zach, who understands the process and likes getting his hands and shoes dirty. Zach graduated from Kansas State University with a degree in milling science and management, a specialization born out of the university’s proximity to acres of golden wheat.

Generations of his family have been in the farming or ranching business, but he took his family heritage and went sideways into engineering, a specialization that might seem odd for someone making flour.

Zach sits in an office that shudders twenty-four hours a day as the milling machinery vibrates the whole building, shaking the flour dust into cracks and crevasses. Atop the building are bins that contain fifty thousand pounds of grain that emerges from the factory as bulk flour. He shares a sentiment expressed by many who work deep inside the food supply chain: He finds satisfaction in job, rolling with the changes, the breakdowns, and the gritty aspects of the work at hand.

During my visit, he led me through the mill and introduced me to his team, his eyes constantly scanning the dials and switches that control the mill. Outside the mill windows sits the Los Angeles skyline, a reminder that this industrial food factory sits right next to millions of consumers who are unaware of the old, trembling building that grinds out flour for their beloved avocado toast.

Zach’s flour-encrusted boots (left) are evidence of his travels around the mill, which runs all day and all night.

Zach and Jose (opposite) take me through their mill, housed in a time-worn early 1900s building.

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Simit Makers, Istanbul Nowhere in my travels was the stabilizing nature of bread more evident than in Turkey. In May of 2013, protests erupted in Istanbul against the development of Gezi Park. Many of the students and younger generations in the city had found the government encroachment on secularism intolerable. Police surrounded the park and roamed the streets, guns and shields alert, putting everyone on edge.

Yet, despite the unrest, bakers continued to sell simit, a traditional bread similar to a bagel, from the carts and food stands around the park in the center of the city. Both protesters and police shared simit from the same bakers, putting aside their differences for a moment, it seemed, as they broke bread together.

Istanbul’s simit acts as a connector even in quiet times, thanks to the local geography. Located where Asia meets Europe, the city pulses with the movement of food from east to west, bridging palates, cultures, and politics. Ustas, simit bakers, work night and day to supply Istanbul with fresh simit. Tarihi Bogaz Kesen Simit Firini, a simit bakery located in the Tophane area of the Istanbul, is one of the bakeries that fed the protesters in Gezi Park.

Eryilmaz and his brother, Ergun, ran the bakery in Tophane and were willing to show me how to make simit. Along with his helpers, all from Russia and the surrounding countries, they showed me how to roll the piles of dough into snakes and then into circles. Flour filled the air in the room, gathering in small clouds of dust whenever we began a new ring. We laid our simit down on the baking sheets before they went downstairs for the application of sweetened syrup and sesame seeds.

Eryilmaz wore his white apron folded at his waist, the red ties flapping about with his quick movements. His shirt was open, and his body sweated, even in these cool early morning hours.

His brother worked the simit on the trays as he readied each tray for the oven. His apron, too, was folded at his waist, revealing a clean white shirt embroidered with the logo of a flour mill they use. He worked fast, pushing trays into the oven, pulling them

The bakery has a tall gas oven in its front room that yields lightly browned simit from a tower of baking trays.

Most simit bakeries operate this way, though a few still use old stone ovens.

The old and new coexist in Istanbul.

Only now, the new wants to lead change, and the old doesn’t want to let go of its power, which explains the protest in the park. Meanwhile, the bakeries roll on, fresh simit every morning, protests or not.

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out, and placing the baked simit on wooden trays covered with layers of newspapers that undoubtedly told the story of the ongoing political protests outside. Still another worker would pick up the simit and heave the trays on his shoulder as he hurriedly passed through the door and crossed the street to load up the waiting van that would deliver the simit to street sellers, who would share them with protesters and police alike.

The connecting power of simit reaches outside the city. In this photo (opposite middle), workers in the industrial suburbs of Istanbul load a large tractor trailer for delivery to bakeries throughout Turkey. These men hoist bags of sesame seed while making jokes and bantering, generally suggesting they have done this together for a long time.

Importers buy Nigerian seeds for this seed roaster (above), who processes and roasts seeds for the city’s simit bakers. I met this seed roaster in his office, amid his awards for his equestrian accomplishments. He shared

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samples of a variety of sesame seeds, arranged in small piles atop white paper. As a curator of seeds, he rattled off different types, origins, and quality measurements, speaking about his seeds as a vintner might describe his grape varietals.

Simit are ever present in Turkish homes and social gatherings. Along with their simit, which they slather with a soft white cheese, Turks drink steamy black tea from small, hourglass-shaped glasses. The tea is sweet, or at least served with a stack of sugar cubes. At one point on my tour of simit-making in Istanbul, I accumulated so many partially eaten samples that I finally put them in a small trash can in my hotel room. The next day, the trash was emptied, but the simit had been placed on a small table nearby. After some consideration and research, I learned that many Turks consider placing food in the trash an act of disrespect. Turks, Muslims in particular, refuse to break the connection between humans and their bread. Not even an ignorant American tourist can fool them into breaking that bond.

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Samuel, Los Altos Food Products, City of Industry As a field manager, Samuel shuttles his fleet of twenty-eight trucks packed with Mexican cheese between eleven warehouses in the United States. One sits in Austin, where I live. He coordinates the arrival of milk from Tulare, California, through the different unloading docks (following page).

Manuel (below) uses the milk to make around eighty different types of cheese. Both Manuel and Samuel have worked at Los Altos for decades, and their families share stories about their children’s baseball games and their vacation plans. Samuel came to his job through family connections, through his uncle. And family means a lot to him, both in a personal sense and in his work. A few years ago, one of his best friends, a coworker, passed. Over the years they knew each other, they both worked and played together. He misses those days, and he muses about new hires, which are increasingly difficult to come by. The sign outside the cheese factory advertises job openings, but Samuel says most new hires try cheese making for a few days and then quit. He admits the job is hard work, and those who remain and who become connected with each other are fewer and fewer. The new company president is beginning to replace humans with technology out of necessity, both because of food safety requirements and because the hiring sign isn’t delivering the goods, or the humans.

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Los Altos Food Products, loading dock

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It took a pandemic to reveal the humans behind the scenes of our food system. The first scenes of empty shelves in our grocery stores shocked many of us back in March, and we became intensely interested in that smarmy thing we know as the food supply chain. Our gaze shifted from plant burgers and regenerative agriculture to our grocery and refrigerator shelves. Our desire for sustainably raised coffee shifted to just any coffee. We got hungry for boxed macaroni and cheese, no longer insisting on handmade pasta from Italian durum flour. We humans, until now oh-so selective, fixed our gaze on getting fed, period.

The industrial food system, with its cold storage warehouses and fleets of trucks, made front page news. We pictured it as so industrial, so human-less, with images of conveyor belts, truck cabs, and warehouses. But suddenly, there they were, the humans who work in those spaces and drive those trucks.

These humans became visible at a time when we needed to know how and when our food would arrive to feed us and our families. And the bigness that some had disparaged as “Big Food” became attractive as we needed big networks, trucks, and warehouses.

Experts assured us that we had ample food; it was just in the wrong places. Humans transporting our food began struggling to adjust their networks to feed new customers in new places. The humans in charge of moving our food had to figure out how to adapt to closures of the restaurant and hospitality industries.

As the pandemic has progressed and these humans have continued to adapt, we’ve watched their faces, worried, frustrated, tired, determined, resilient.

The movement of food is one of the bottlenecks yet unsolved by our digital designers. We can design sophisticated apps to order food and even grow food. But getting the food to us? Turns out that’s not so easy to automate, even in the best of times and especially in the worst. It requires an army of arms, legs, trucks, and planes. And donkeys and pushcarts. Even the back seats of normal cars.

Riding in style. Sheep being delivered by car to a 74 market in Peru.

My travels took me to places where I got to meet humans who transported food on foot, on the backs of animals, in vehicles, on the ground, over ocean routes, and in the air. I got a sense of how ingenious humans can be as they use available technology to overcome unimaginable obstacles. One such human was Dwayne.

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Dwayne, Port of Los Angeles Dwayne squints in the bright sunlight outside the Port of Los Angeles warehouse, where he has worked for the past seventeen years. While he speaks, he uses his hand to shield his face from the sun as he looks down and away from the light in between his sentences. He supervises a team that takes cargo from the Port of Los Angeles and transfers loads to trucks. A sort of distribution center. The five-acre gray warehouse where he works out of the sun’s glare is one of hundreds of distribution centers that shuttle food products out of shipping containers into trucks. One truck leaves every fifteen minutes, moving the ingredients for foodservice customers that operate hundreds of miles away from this global shipping center.

Dwayne is one of thirty-five workers in a warehouse located in the Bladerunner-like back streets of the Port of Los Angeles, where 85 percent of the cargo offloaded from the 70 million container ships that pass through the port moves produce from farm to plate. Wearing his union logo and a DayGlo vest, Dwayne explains how he landed his job and how he plans to become a line manager in the warehouse business. He has a family, hobbies, and hopes.

Dwayne’s mom and siblings moved from Omaha to Los Angeles when he was twenty-two. A college graduate with a good job in animal pharmaceuticals, Dwayne stayed behind to establish his young adult life. But when his family wasn’t doing well and his mom was in and out of the hospital, he moved out West to help out.

Today, he’s a forklift driver at the Port of LA, loading and unloading shipments on their way to their destinations.

Dwayne was originally training to be a team lead, but he stepped back from that track because he didn’t like some of the things he was seeing in the warehouse. Now, when Dwayne isn’t loading and unloading, he’s working with the teamsters to improve conditions for his fellow workers.

And with his fellow workers in mind, he shows some concern when we broach the subject of new, automated warehouse systems. While he thinks he’d be just fine adapting, he knows he doesn’t speak for everyone.

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China

Humans move our food with whatever technology and infrastructure they have. In the United States, we have sleek, straight highways with automated toll booths. In other countries, the only options are unpaved, rutted roads that flood during drenching monsoons. I found Malagasy, people who live in Madagascar, incredibly creative when it came to transporting food. Their imagination is fueled by a crumbling transportation system. I visited the island nation in 2014 as a participant in a multi-stage ultrarun. During a week, I covered miles of roads and trails that connected the country’s villages and towns. All of

In the early morning hours, farmers bring their animals to Kashgar’s ancient livestock market in crowded truck beds, on motorcycles, and even on foot, pulling and pushing their animals through the market to the field where buyers and sellers gather to negotiate.

Buyers prod the humans and animals to get a good deal, and eventually, everyone shakes hands and rumpled bills pass between them. The market is on the old Silk Road, the ancient trading route between China and Europe.

them were broken in some way. Sometimes roads were flooded and rutted such that they were almost impassable. Most of the roads are unpaved, even those that are designated as national highways. Those that were paved appeared to have been neglected since the French colonists built them in the late 1800s. When our race director informed us that it would take more than five hours in a bus to travel fifty miles, we scoffed. But we soon saw that he was right. Vehicles, including our bus, moved at fifteen miles an hour or less to avoid crashing through the deep and frequent potholes that riddled the roadways.

Peru In a Peruvian market town, farmers bring their livestock in burlap bags and on top of their cars.

The man walking his pig to market has just taken it out of a burlap bag to display his animal to potential buyers. The sheep on page 74 arrived by car—some on the roof and a whole flock, it seems, crowded into the back seat. I can’t imagine how the driver could concentrate on his journey, between the wiggling passengers and their aroma.

Images such as these, that are common among rural livestock markets in poor regions, tend to offend our more “sophisticated” sensibilities. But in my experience, witnessing these practices and getting to know the practitioners have contributed to my sense of empathy for those who live within different constraints.

Madagascar The disarray and dismal state of transport in Madagascar has created a determined network of humans who will work around the broken road system. They hand carry sugar canes, use oxen to rumble through the villages pulling heavy wooden carts, and deliver bread on a bicycle with a smile.

Because traveling long distances is so difficult, food and other commodities often find buyers at the farm or along the roads between villages.

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The containers we use to carry food around the world leave human tracks, or fingerprints, along the path our food travels.

Boxes made from Styrofoam in fish markets, cardboard for produce markets, wood for apple and tomato growers. One box in the back of a store tells us it carried potatoes named Sweet Baby Rays. Pallets, mostly made of wood, wait for a human to appear with a forklift to transfer the food they carry from one transport system to another. Sacks made of plastic, burlap, and paper, contain onions, tomatoes, or charcoal for barbeque restaurants.

Shipping containers, thousands of them loaded and unloaded by humans in ports in Los Angeles, Panama, Boston, New York, and Houston. None of these containers would move without human assistance at some point. Some containers carry messages about contents, their origins, or the humans who produced them. Sure, automated loaders and unloaders, robots on ships, and more digital innovations are arriving. But humans will ultimately decide how and when food moves from one place to another.

Thousands of wooden boxes (right) await Washington state’s apple harvest, when humans will fill them with Pink Ladies.

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Boston These two guys atop a pile of pallets in Boston’s warehouse district enjoy a smoke and the early morning sun. It’s a little after six o’clock, and they’ve just completed their first shift loading pallets of cooking oil from a truck into a warehouse storage room. They look like easygoing guys, maybe longtime friends.

One, the one with his collar popped, wears a diamond ring and a nice watch.

The white socks and black shoes tell a different story, but it seems he knows how to work hard and enjoy life. Both appear to be union workers on a shift break, approaching retirement but settled, at least for the moment.

Cairo Stacks of wobbly wooden crates in the Cairo produce market. These crates seemed fragile, and I wondered about crate life spans in Egypt. Paper, debris, and broken and rotten fruit lay strewn all over the ground when the market closed.

Cardboard boxes stacked in disorganized towers. I imagine that there is no official pallet or crate repair business. The ones I saw in Egypt soon splintered into hopeless piles of debris in the market. Or perhaps there is a thriving business making house furniture, such as coffee tables, out of pallets.

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Domingo, Los Angeles Many of the jobs required to keep our food system moving go unacknowledged.

Most of us wouldn’t view the making and repairing of pallets as part of our food system, but without pallets, food can’t move through warehouses or on and off trucks and ships.

Domingo, originally from Mexico, works on a back street in Los Angeles, repairing about 150 pallets a day, a job he’s done for more than fifteen years.

He has a wife and three kids, and he spends most of his time off with them.

One of his sons works at a car dealership, and another is in high school and wild about football.

His daughter plays the flute and loves to dance.

And between these moments with his family, Domingo works hard repairing one pallet at time.

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Luis, Los Angeles Luis works for Elias, who owns a stall dedicated to strawberries. Sometimes he carries kiwi, pineapples, and blueberries. Mostly, it’s strawberries, mostly huge ones the bakeries demand.

Los Angeles’s produce market near downtown is crowded with handcarts, towers of pallets carrying flats full of red strawberries, avocados, papayas, mangos, and all varieties of citrus fruits.

Luis turns his handcart through the crowded market, from Elias’s stall toward the parked trucks where stacks of produce await unloading or loading. Threading through these alleys of pallets, he manages to emerge with his load unscathed. It makes you wonder if there should be a handcart derby for these workers to demonstrate their alacrity.

Originally from Guatemala City, Luis arrived in Los Angeles when he was fifteen years old. Now, he has ambitions to start his own produce company. In the meantime, he’s learning how to play the piano and running so he can stay in shape for local soccer games. But mostly, he hangs out with his other Guatemalan friends, who all long for their plain, warm Guatemalan tortillas filled with butter.

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While food is an important centerpiece of many communities, bringing people together around picnic tables, kitchen counters, and formal dining rooms, making and moving food isn’t always a community effort. Many of the makers we’ve already met work alone—and do so happily. And so do plenty of movers, who relish their solo drives across the country or bike trips around town. Heads down, intensely independent, getting their work done, and content to spend time alone.

Bud, Long Beach Bike couriers have been delivering food since the late 1800s. Known often as bike messengers, they delivered documents in cities where parking was a problem and often stepped in when the railroad workers went on strike or other transportation networks broke down.

Bike couriers, usually independent, usually sole proprietors, can navigate through stalled traffic to get food delivered, still warm and still in one piece, often faster than a car.

Bud, a bike courier in Long Beach, California, has been delivering food by bike for nearly seven years, though he’s not quite going it alone. As co-operator of a bike courier service, he coordinates about thirty to forty couriers, many of whom are local students. Couriers are fiercely independent and, like many humans who feed us,

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they choose their vocation to maintain their solo lifestyle. As an operator of the business, though, Bud has to fill out paperwork and be the administrator for all his independent contractors. He’s quietly professional and possesses a patience that belies his riding style: fast, agile, quick. No gears for him; he rides a “fixie,” which means he uses his gears for braking. And he doesn’t just ride for work; he also races bikes for a local team. He’s got about twenty-five bikes in his garage, and he uses them for spare parts.

Bud is pure Californian, living and working near a beach. Both his parents are computer programmers and came from the Phillipines, but he grew up around Long Beach. He does graphic design work on the side, and he’s married with kids who adore ordering food for delivery, which Bud views as an extravagance.

Increasingly, he’s annoyed at the intrusion of food delivery services such as Uber Eats and Postmates. They compete on price and speed.

For now, Bud thinks he has it over these other services because he can always find a place to park his bike. I would imagine he’s finding a new, more demanding role as the pandemic has boosted food delivery.

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Raphael, Los Angeles Raphael, an independent trucker in Los Angeles, drives between Mexico and California, transporting everything from fruit to flavored milk. He’s aware that he’s the reason cities get fed and wears a smile most days as he sits aboard his gleaming white tractor trailer.

His cab, including his sleeping quarters, feels like a small living room, and indeed, his entire truck is pristine. That’s not to say it’s impeccable. Scuffs, dents, and wrinkled steel tell a story of heavy loads, cargo shifting from side to side, pallets on the loose, and forklifts that miss their targets. Government rules include the use of an electronic logging device, which means truckers like Raphael carry iPads loaded with software that follows their every move. Raphael’s device notifies him when he needs to take a rest and when he can work again. Most truckers are known to be independent characters, content with long hours alone and the freedom to choose when to work. So these iPad-enforced rules rankle some drivers. But surprisingly, Raphael appreciates the safety regulations.

The frustrations of driving on a road with truckers too desperate to stop for a rest pose a very real danger to him. He sees tracking devices as a way to improve road safety. He has seen too many overworked, exhausted drivers fall asleep at the wheel and weave their trailers across his lane.

Originally from Sinaloa, Mexico, known for its drug cartels, Raphael began his life as a trucker to honor his father, who died in a truck accident in Mexico when Raphael was two years old. After his mother brought

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him to the United States to escape the drug wars in Sinaloa, he eventually became a full-time trucker.

He’s been hauling now for twenty years, and he still enjoys his work, even calling it his hobby instead of his job. He says he drives to clear his mind. He has three kids who live in Los Angeles, and sometimes he takes his son with him on trips. Otherwise, most of his social life centers around truck stops, where he kicks back with other drivers. And, he admits, he’s pretty good at the casinos whenever he passes through Nevada.

Of course, this was all before the pandemic arrived, and now truckers are desperately trying to find clean truck stops and facilities that are open for food along their routes. Considered essential workers by the United States government, truckers like Raphael are not apt to leave their cabs, preferring the same touchless delivery protocols followed by other industries. In these times, being an independent worker can afford some assurance that contamination can be managed.

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Fruit Seller, Guatamala City This farmer’s bright, gold-toothed smile fills the cabin of his dented truck as he drives through the produce market in Guatemala City, carrying a load of oranges and grapefruit as cargo.

When I visited this cityowned wholesale market in January 2020, I saw buildings bursting with fruit, herbs, and vegetables brought to the market in trucks much like this man’s. Three months later, when the food system was adapting to curfews and border controls, hungry residents indicated their need for food by walking through the city’s thoroughfares waving handmade white flags. While Guatemala is generally food insecure, it has navigated much of the pandemic by keeping its wholesale markets open most of the time and being creative with smaller markets. CENMA, the wholesale produce market, operates in the early morning hours, and farmers such as this one may now be selling their produce outside of the city since the government has allowed farmers to sell outside the main wholesale markets.

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A Maine state ferry deckhand loads trucks full of food for island grocery stores.

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Food markets, whether cozy urban farmers markets or large, chaotic metropolitan wholesale markets, gather humans to buy and sell food. They are transaction hubs, highly social communities, often with their own rules and regulations. Families inhabit them as both buyers and sellers.

Some, like the Smithfield Meat Market in London, have existed for centuries. Others are relatively new, occupying parking lots and other borrowed spaces for local farmers to sell their produce. Since the pandemic began, markets have appeared in a new landscape that blurs the traditional boundaries between wholesale and retail. With the closures of foodservice and restaurants, our produce and pantry staples have begun to appear in the backs of farmers’ trucks or alongside hot meals delivered to us by empty restaurants-turned-grocery stores. Even big food distributors have turned their warehouses and trucks into pop-up markets, distributing food without the traditional middlemen. Humans have taken on new roles in this new, still-evolving food supply chain. Humans have been inventing new ways to distribute food, thinking ahead of the curve, over the curve, and around the curve. And they have stepped up and out to reassure us that, once again, the humans operating our food system are resilient in ways we are only beginning to understand and appreciate.

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Camel Sellers, Cairo Camels are not only transporters of humans across deserts, they are also food for much of the world. You can spin their wool, burn their dung, and eat their flesh. They’re highly valuable to those who live in Africa and the Middle East.

Along the road to this Cairo market, camel meat stalls display raw meat hanging in direct sunlight, encrusted with flies. Vendors occasionally shoo them away with half-hearted waves of their hands. Futile, really.

In the camel market, itself, humans gather in small groups of buyers and sellers. The camels wear “barcodes,” marks painted on their necks, humps, or legs that must signify their condition or value.

It’s clear from observing the market that transactions are based on trusted relationships between buyers and sellers. Some of these relationships pass down through generations. Men gather in groups to smoke their hookas, puffing clouds of shisha, and spontaneous handshakes signal purchases and sales. A few women, hidden behind burkas and often with children in tow, wander through the market.

But it’s the men who get business done as they tend to their herds.

The sellers have immobilized the animals, hobbling them, which looks highly uncomfortable. Yet the camels seem unfazed, and it’s apparent that they’ve been hobbled before.

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Rungis Meat Market, Paris Meat markets are redolent, often repulsive, repositories of flesh, both human and animal. Some are “wet” markets where humans slaughter live animals, butcher them on site, and sell the meat. Others receive already slaughtered animals and sell the trimmed, butchered meat. In the UK, these two varieties of markets are called the live meat market and the dead meat market. Both are gory. And some, like the Wuhan wet market, have received unwelcome notoriety.

I have visited meat markets around the world, mostly motivated by my research on nineteenth century urban food markets such as the Smithfield Market in London. What struck me was the lack of sanitation and cold storage, even today, in the twenty-first century.

Flies gather on chicken thighs, beef tongues linger in the sun, and blood bathes arms and legs of buyers and sellers. No wonder the 2020 pandemic was thought to begin at a wet market in China.

One of the largest modern-day meat markets is in Rungis, located southwest of Paris. A few years ago, I joined a group of tourists (yes, the wholesale food market is a tourist hot spot) for a visit.

As the sun rose, we entered the Fish Hall, lights glaring, floor shimmering wet, and white Styrofoam boxes lining the length of the icy-cool space.

During the 1960s, Rungis replaced the historic Les Halles market in central Paris, the site of Emile Zola’s novel The Belly of Paris.

We spent five hours walking through buildings that contained fish, beef, chickens, offal, vegetables, fruit, cheese, and more, much of which was kept chilled at forty degrees Farenheit.

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(Below) By midmorning, market sellers at Rungis meat market gather for their coffee break at cafés situated around the perimeter of the market.

Hot, black coffee, buttery croissants, sausages, and hefty snacks for those who have been at their jobs since two in the morning.

In the market, we joined other humans who sold meat to wholesale buyers such as foodservice companies and hospitality businesses. We wore their uniform: hairnets, booties, full-length white coats. We also joined buyers who gather at Rungis from all over Europe, from small restaurant owners to industrial-sized foodservice business managers. Their white jackets displayed bloodstains, and the wrinkles in their baggy pants revealed a morning of hustle and movement. The professionals in the market did not seemed annoyed with us as we blocked traffic, got in the way of carts moving produce onto waiting delivery trucks, and pointed cameras into the boxes of fish, meat, and chickens.

Hall after hall (and some halls were designated as Halal halls) of meat hung from hooks. The star attractions included the chickens with their heads looped around their carcasses; large, bloodied beef carcasses hanging alongside photos taken when the animals were alive, tranquilly grazing in their home pastures; cases of foie gras; piles of detached pig feet and stomachs and calves’ brains.

Americans find them awkward and often disgusting. Pretty tough going for a pre-breakfast visit.

In spite of all the gore, the halls were amazingly clean, stainless steel gleaming and floors immaculate, with the exception of a few drops of blood here and there, left by the animals hanging unsold.

(Above) By late morning, the market becomes quiet. Workers clean their space and stack boxes. Salesmen tally invoices and catch up with gossip.

Heavy brooms and streams of cold water gather broken bits of Styrofoam, paper, and plastic in the wake of humans buying and selling food. As the morning breaks into the afternoon sunlight, everyone seems to exhale, marking the end of another day at the market.

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Cubans and their canines occupy Havana’s public food market.

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Traveling from food market to food market around the world, I encountered countless individual sellers, who are often the first humans we see in our food system. Sellers face us, representing the entirety of the food supply chain yet unable to tell us the complete story. Some try, encouraged by customers who ask where a particular food item comes from.

Sellers may know who sold them the food that they sell, and on some occasions, they’ve heard about the grower (in many markets, the seller is the grower).

But rarely do they know all the hands that have passed the food from farm to plate.

Many of the sellers I’ve met along the way happen to be women. And while the division between men and women in my food supply studies hasn’t conformed to a predictable pattern, following the money has often demonstrated that women hold positions of power, managing the business and the cash flow.

Peru In a remote hill town near Cuzco, Peru, market sellers waste little time setting up shop.

Some don’t even bother to set up a stall. It may be that some sellers haven’t paid for a space in the market, which likely means they can come and go when they want. It’s a butcher’s market, in part, so there are live animals adding sounds and smells to the scene: guinea pigs, chicks, sheep, pigs.

It’s not a wet market; buyers take their purchases home for slaughter. Vendors sell hot meals along with produce and other cooking staples. Buyers and sellers gather as

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families, sharing market news, hopes for the next harvest, concerns over the weather, who’s sick, who got married, who didn’t. Everything is colorful here—so blindingly colorful— like a carnival held in a cloud of acrid, smoky haze mixed with the warm, comforting scents of corn tortillas and masa. Everything seems chaotic, but to an insider, it’s likely all ordinary and rational.

Women run the market, and men are helpers here. Producers arrive with their children, whom they tend to as they sell their goods, often employing them to pitch in by weighing, measuring, and bagging food items.

The woman selling bananas has her hands full of children, including one tiny fellow in the shade of the truck. Colorful plastic bags tied to the truck are all she can provide to help customers take their purchases home.

She looks like she’s ready for the market to wrap up so she and her brood can go home.

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Istanbul Two women, bakery managers in Istanbul, wear headscarves allowing them to work in a public space and to play key roles in businesses. I took these photos in 2013, and now I wonder if they are still wearing their headscarves. While Erdogan pushes religious education, some Turks appear to be moving away from the strictures of Islam.

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I s t a n b u l (top left) Not at all wearing a headscarf, this vendor sells simit from her stand near the edge of the Golden Horn, where the rivers converge as they flow into the Sea of Marmara.

She picks up her simit every day from the bakery, along with other food items that she purchases from the local wholesale food market for vendors. She’s shy and serious, with a hesitant smile, and she wears a T-shirt printed with an image of Jessica Simpson (my best guess) and the words “Just Remember, Don’t Be Normal.” Her iPhone and headphones are lying on the counter, implying that she’s listening to Jessica or one of Jessica’s friends.

G o b i D e s e r t (top right) This woman, selling oranges in a large livestock market in the Gobi Desert, keeps her face cast down, a gesture uncharacteristic of market sellers. But this woman is in a man’s market, and it’s possible that she’s required by the local cultural and religious traditions to avoid the male gaze, something that would be understandable in a region that is primarily Muslim.

G o b i D e s e r t (bottom left) While attending an aid station for a race in a remote area of the Gobi desert, I had a chance to visit with the local villagers. This woman wasn’t so much a seller as a sharer. She brought me this bowl of ripe apricots, so ripe, juicy, and sweet that they were soft globes of candy. She brought her family along, and other villagers swarmed around our makeshift aid station, too, sharing fruit and bringing children and entire families to have their pictures taken with us. We were enveloped in their lives for a small second.

I’m reminded of her now, during the pandemic, as I watch humans find ways to create community at a distance, building our own makeshift, virtual “aid stations” by shopping for elderly neighbors and sharing food with those who need it. It’s inspiring to watch fellow humans find ways to come together over food even when we can’t share a meal.

K a s h g a r (bottom right) Women are taking charge in some of these markets at a very young age. Markets are often family businesses, and this young girl works with her grandfather in the Kashgar, China, livestock market.

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T s u k i j i , J a p a n (top) This woman, hidden in her bunker away from the hustle of Japan’s old fish market, Tsukiji, keeps careful track of the money and paperwork.

A mess of wires run out from the ceilings and walls as an old rotary phone sits nearby. Women occupied positions of authority here, running transactions in the stalls at least until the market moved to eastern Tokyo in 2018.

And these were no small transactions, either. Some of the blue fin tuna sales took in over a million US dollars per fish.

Tsukiji fish market occupied the same location in Tokyo from the 1930s until it moved to the Toyosu fish market in eastern Tokyo. I visited it before the move and was able to see the old buildings and traditional practices. I wonder where this woman is today, and if she’s still calling the shots in the new market. Did she lose her job when Japan was hit with the pandemic, causing fish sales to plummet and closing the market to consumers?

Human interaction in these markets is now minimal, and those tuna are sold online.

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M a i n e (bottom) Lisa greets me during our summer stays in Midcoast Maine when I am looking for fresh fish. She brings local and not-so-local fish to her roadside market, known as Jess’s Market. While she’s very serious about the fish she is selling, she has a great sense of humor, usually evidenced by her broad smile or funny face, shown here. Wearing purple gloves, she can easily wrangle big fish, turning them into fillets and steaks. In the main room of the market sits a tank containing lobsters, and I wonder what fills it now, as in early 2020, tariffs and the pandemic closed off lobster fishermen’s main market, China.

The fish industry in general has been hit hard by the pandemic, as fish are mostly sold to foodservice companies and restaurants, which closed their dining rooms in early March and are just beginning to reopen as I write in mid-June. I wonder if Lisa is smiling in spite of the challenges of selling fish to her customers during the pandemic.

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B a r c e l o n a (left) The women fish sellers celona are vibrant and the more organized and I have visited so far, in London.

at the Boqueria in Barsmart, running one of clean fish markets that outside of Billingsgate

George Dodd, a nineteenth century writer, described the women who worked at London’s Billingsgate Market as “specimens of the fair sex,” referring to them as “fish-wives” who bought and sold fish that they carried atop their hats. These women in the Boqueria seem a bit more refined and charming than Dodd’s fish-wives, and I would imagine they can drive a hard bargain. The gold trim on the gloves they wear certainly suggests a certain self-confidence.

But the Boqueria is more than a fish market.

Founded in 1836, although it operated informally from at least 1217, it’s Barcelona’s largest food market, selling to retail and wholesale customers. My first visit began with black coffee and warm pastries called Xuixo, filled with rich, bright yellow Catalan custard.

C a i r o (below) This woman, who farms mangoes just outside of Cairo, Egypt, is the only woman seller in the market, yet she still seems highly respected as she sells her fruit to all-male retailers and brokers. I met her outside the market, though, in the hotel sauna, when I visited in the days leading up to a stage race in the Sahara desert. She wasn’t staying at the hotel. She’s a westerner married to an Egyptian doctor, and she uses the spa and gym as a private member. I spent a day with her, touring her farm and joining her workers for lunch: ripe mangoes, grilled flatbread, milky fresh goat cheese, and luscious tomatoes.

L i s b o n (right) This woman in Lisbon’s Mercado da Ribeira is one of many selling fish that were delivered early this morning from the nearby harbor. The Mercado da Ribeira has been around since 1882, when many large cities around the world built wholesale food markets during a period of urban reform that encouraged the removal of the ancient market stalls.

Public health and transportation improvements made the modernization of municipal wholesale food markets possible in Barcelona, London, Paris, New York, and Chicago.

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I arrived in Cuba in December 2014, just after the agreement between then President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro that enabled the two countries to begin normalizing relations, which had become highly abnormal since the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s.

I felt our timing couldn’t have been better: We would get an early look at a country we had only heard about but never visited. And the idea that Cuba might be loosening up its restrictions on the press, trade, and private enterprise was exciting. But not for long.

During that week, Cuban Ladies in White, a group of women protesting the disappearance of dissidents, were detained. And when I returned to my hotel room to find out more about these women, the site was blocked with error messages. While there were some visible signs that humans were not happy with the current state of

affairs, protests like the Ladies in White’s were uncommon then. The soft-power presence of community surveillance personnel kept the peace.

I followed our state-authorized guides to a coffee plantation where we toured the grounds and sipped the smooth, hot coffee. When I asked about buying some of their beans, the guides said that none were to be had. All beans are bought by the state, and the state grinds them and sells the ground coffee to Cubans. There are no options; the state controls who produces, processes, and consumes food. Though there is a little wiggle room for some entrepreneurs to set up small shops and restaurants, these are tightly controlled and exist only at the pleasure of the state.

I have found that experiencing statecontrolled or command economies provides a sober view of how many other nations live within the bounds of centralized state controls.

I first saw this when I visited the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and even though the country was on the verge of revolutionary change, the old Soviet command economy was still operating. The black market was normalized, and it was common for bread lines to wrap around city blocks and for store shelves to be empty or, conversely, too full of

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(Above) Plantains and yams sit on a primitive wheelbarrow on their way to a cafĂŠ in Havana, reliant on human energy to move them from farm to plate.

(Opposite) With so few options for entrepreneurs, those who attempt to circumvent the state-controlled economy are incredibly creative. In between the louvers of this window sit three clusters of bananas priced twenty-five cents per bunch, the seller hidden somewhere inside.

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Hand-drawn carts in Havana supply cafés and restaurants with local produce as enterprising farmers find ways navigate state controls.

Street food is common in Cuba, but the offerings are meager. This granita seller is an exception with a choice of three flavors. The vendors are determined and inventive, using old, broken equipment and few ingredients.

Regardless, the customers always seem pleased. American tourists regard these scenes as quaint and “authentic” when in reality, they’re reminders of human ingenuity in a land of dearth.

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one oversupplied item. I saw one store with nothing other than cauliflower.

Seeing the way these planned economies operate provides a context for some of the new measures the United States governments, both state and federal, have taken during the current pandemic as they lean in to the marketplace, mandating some factories to produce certain commodities and taking ownership of others. Humans may find the assistance of the government reassuring in the short term, but in the long term, they may also find that the state limits the individual creativity in the marketplace.

The balance between individual rights and privacy is increasingly coming up against the urge to create some sort of order out of the chaos in the global food system. Humans tend to find ways to work around state-controlled economies, especially as they operate in the food system.

The system in Cuba reinforced black markets as a means to sidestep the state-controlled economy. On a dare from a friend in the United States, I attempted to buy potatoes in the farmers market and found myself experiencing the black markets for myself.

After inquiring at every stall and finding that none were to be had, I began a slow walk out of the market. As I turned to go, a gentleman approached me and said he could lead me to someone who could sell me some potatoes. He beckoned me to follow him to a side street where he waved to a young boy on the other side. The boy quickly appeared with a bag of potatoes, and we negotiated. Only, there wasn’t much to negotiate. I had to buy the whole bag at his price, or no deal. In Cuba, these occurrences are just a way of life that has continued from one generation to the next.

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Downtown Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market

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By the time food makes it to our plates, it’s been bought and sold and transformed and transported, passing through dozens of hands. But all of those people are invisible except for the very last one: the human who sells us the food, facing us through our car windows during a masked delivery. Only at this late stage in the game do we really see the faces of our food system.

These faces who feed us evoke trust.

They are not machines, they are humans like us, and we see ourselves in their stories, either directly or indirectly.

As we make our selections and pay for our purchases, they talk with us about their families, their children, and how they do what they can to support their communities. And we share our stories, too, building empathy and camaraderie over the pastry cases, dine-in menus, and credit card machines.

Of course, some days we’re moving too fast to feel these connections or listen to these stories. I certainly find myself buzzing along sometimes, too distracted to stop. (At least, I did before the pandemic began. Now, I relish even the briefest exchange as a masked H-E-B employee loads groceries into my trunk.) We think our plates are too full and that a slight divergence from the path we’ve mapped out for ourselves will cost us dearly in terms of achievement or performance.

But wait. The faces we see, those few humans who are visible to us in our food system, are a sign of how much we value the connection between our food and our humanness. The pandemic has been a reminder to notice one another, and to listen to each other’s stories.

We draw our lives from other lives.

What makes our stories about our food so remarkable is that they change with the telling. We can all sit around the same table, eat the same food, and come away with different ways of telling others what happened. We experience food in ways shaped by our own pasts, our memories and relationships, our environments, and all five of our physical senses. Our stories are not objective, but art forms in themselves.

I saw this in many ways while I explored food systems around the world, but one experience in Paris captured the art of food storytelling perfectly. A simple ham and cheese sandwich in Paris tells a layered story of what it means to be a Parisian. As outsiders, we may see slices of cheese and ham between pieces of a buttered baguette. That’s it.

Except that’s not it.

When I was studying the food supply chain in Paris in 2013, I would ask Parisians to describe what they believed to be a typical ham and cheese sandwich. Like the layers of an onion’s skin, the stories about the sandwich felt flimsy, permeable, endless, and imprinted by an individual’s own identity.

of their beloved jambon-fromage. For example, one person declared with absolute conviction that the cheese in the sandwich is Emmentaler. No, actually, another said. It’s Gruyere. Oh, wait. Still another swore it’s Comte cheese. And in typical Parisian style, each declaration came with the conviction that the speaker had supreme access to truth.

Like the cheese, the ham existed in Parisian imaginations in many forms.

The ham used for the sandwich is sometimes call Jambon de Paris, or Parisian ham, but is really just a simple boiled ham, not tied to any location or terroir, which in other cases invalidates the Parisian claim to culinary authenticity.

Like these Parisians, we share our stories of pizza eaten with friends in a dorm, of beer and pretzels consumed over a football game, of glasses of wine in the Loire Valley, of matzos in Jerusulem. Each person’s story may be a little different from the next, and that’s part of the magic. And each story begins, whether we remember it in the telling or not, with the human sellers who hand us the food that brings us together.

After a week, I realized that everyone I met had a different conception

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The Parisian DĂŽner en Blanc, the epitome of connecting over food. Will it survive our new obsession with distance?

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The Martins, Paris The Martin family in Paris, who have closed their business since my visit, knew their customers as family. Standing by the door, watching them take orders (How many baguettes, croissants, croque monsieurs, s’il vous plait?), it was clear they knew everyone’s name. And their stories. The atmosphere felt less like a business and more like a family breakfast gathering. The Martins could be your grandparents. I remember entering their shop, pulling open the door and immediately sensing the sweetness of chocolate and the warmth of baguettes, fresh from their downstairs oven, piled high in the basket atop the counter.

Flour, tracked into the shop from the stairs leading to the kitchen, veiled the surface of the floor. The air was infused with yeast, sugar, and sometimes coffee. Invariably when I visited, Madame Martin’s apron was smeared with powdered sugar and chocolate, from the many times she’d wipe her hands after handling a pain au chocolat with chocolate sliding out the ends. And Monsieur Martin’s shoes were forever creased with flour dust gathered from countless trips down into the basement where he mixed his dough, pouring bags of flour into the stainless-steel mixing bowls. Flour even found its way into his eyebrows. I visited the underground baking area and was impressed with all the activities the Martins packed into the one small room that housed the mixers, proofing shelves, ovens, and all their ingredients and supplies. The ovens were always filled with pastry-laden trays whose contents would fill their small cases upstairs.

The Martins’ small bakery and café was located in the 10th Arrondissement in Paris. They had been married for almost all of their working life together, and they worked every day except Sunday, from the early morning hours until they closed in the late afternoon. They had been baking bread and pastries for fifteen years before they went out of business in 2015. She worked on the business side, and he was the baker. Their shop was on Avenue de Vinaigriers, “street of vinegar makers.” Paris street names telegraph the city’s gastronomic geography.

Family-run shops are often the only places where we see humans in our food system. They are at the end of the line that links us to the farmers and other producers. Often they don’t know the other humans who come before them; but they do know their work, and they know how to make a decent croissant.

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The Hillers, Rockland Delores and Steve Hiller are mom and pop to a grocery store on the south side of Rockland, Maine, a fishing town turned tourist town. Rockland’s seven thousand year-round residents have an annual median income of $30,000.

Fishermen still live and work in Rockland, but a few decades ago the town turned toward its art community for income, shedding its image as a working waterfront. Delores and Steve’s grocery store has endured through all these changes and more, defying those who predict an online future populated with robots and drones.

Passing their grocery store, you have to wonder what allows it to survive in a world designed by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerburg. Shuttered, dark buildings that were once corner grocery stores huddle in the shadows of bright, towering office buildings and urban condominiums across the country.

But Southend Grocery still thrives when many “mom and pop” shops seize up and close up, no match for the big retailers like Walmart and major grocery chains.

The Hillers’ store, called by some a convenience store, is convenient beyond measure. It’s open every day and is the third largest grocery store in Rockland. The top two are Shaw’s and Hannaford’s, two mega-supermarket chains, but Southend Grocery isn’t daunted.

The Hillers don’t own the building.

It’s been a grocery store for its lifetime, and the Hillers have run it for over twenty years, using a Radio Shack computer as their point-of-sale system. About 75 percent of their customers are fishermen, and 90 percent are repeat customers.

On a steamy summer day, customers fill the aisles and form a long line at the cash register. The building is so full of merchandise, from potato chips to packing tape and bananas, that it’s hard to take it all in. A shopper might feel that taking one item from the shelf would cause all the shelves in the store to explode. It’s that tightly packed. Sometimes a customer will ask for something they don’t carry, which is almost unimaginable. The Hillers will special order the item for the customer and hold it in the back room for pickup when it arrives.

You can find baseball memorabilia in one case, a hot pot of coffee in one aisle, and a bustling deli at the back of the store. An industrial pizza oven sends its warmth into the aisles lined with beer-packed coolers.

They are the top seller of beer kegs in the region, specializing in weddings and other big events. Shawn,

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Delores and Steve’s son, manages the bookkeeping and tech side of the business but also possesses an impressive knowledge of the tasting notes of local craft beers. Delores keeps the pizza oven and small takeout kitchen humming in the back of the store. She stays mainly in this area, preparing pizzas, subs, meatball sandwiches, and breakfast sausages. Steve is the logistics guy, always calculating how much more to order and where and when to store it, and he is on hand to meet every vendor and distributor that pulls up outside.

The family embraces the local community, and it reciprocates. Along one end of the store is a Red Sox-Yankee baseball scoreboard given to Steve by a Sam Adams beer salesman years ago. (Steve is a baseball fan and has coached local baseball teams for years.) A bright blue runner leads customers into the store through its one doorway, which is often shared with a community volunteer raising funds for the animal shelter or a bereaved family who just lost a young son to cancer. One year, Shawn dressed up as Santa Claus during the midsummer Maine Lobster Festival celebrating “The Good Things in Life.” In the backroom are cardboard boxes of pancake mix the Hillers plan to donate to a pancake breakfast to raise funds for a local family. They gave pizzas to the Navy ship that visited the harbor, and they send more pizzas to high school teams and first responders.

Southend Grocery’s shelves contain something for everyone, leaving no space unused. (Just watch out for loose potatoes!)

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(Opposite) The Hillers run an impressive recycling operation adjacent to their store.

will remain right there for them, announcing fresh crab when it was available and preparing hot meals to go. Through thick and thin, the Hillers have embraced their customers, pulling them in closer with familiar comfort food. They remained open, even on Easter, with a shout-out to eat lobster for Easter since so many fishermen were unable to sell to their regular markets.

These humans keep us connected to one another, in large part through our connections to them. When Walmart came to town in 2013, the Hillers wondered about their future. But after a few months of worry and a downturn in their business, customers came back and business resumed its brisk pace.

Turns out that some humans in our food system will remain, bound by deep, long-lasting stories rooted in time.

When the economic crash of 2008 occurred, the Hillers saw the fishermen struggle to make ends meet and decided to address their needs, seeking lower-priced products whenever possible. Now, as the pandemic rages on, the store’s Facebook page posts menus for takeout along with words of encouragement to those experiencing difficulties in the community. They’ve reassured their customers that they

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and potatoes. His son deftly peeled and sliced the potatoes in the back, immersing the slices in salted fluid so they wouldn’t soften before frying, then sliding them in and out of vats of boiling oil in a room that was small for two humans in motion.

Father’s and son’s hands worked together with a slightly syncopated rhythm. The flow linked their bodies, one responding to the other’s needs, moving in some sort of wordless communication developed over the years of working together.

During my visit to Mustafa’s shop, we had a few minutes to drink tea and talk about his story, how he became a fish and chips seller. Mustafa came to England from Turkey almost twenty years ago, married an English woman, and began working with the Turkish community that still oversees the fish and chips supply chain in London since ethnic and political crises brought waves of Turkish immigrants to the city in the 1960s and ’70s.

Mustafa, London As Mustafa slid open the metal door to his London fish and chips shop and opened for business, waxed white butcher paper packages of fried fish and potatoes began to move from the shop into the hands of hungry office workers. The salt and hot oil bled through the paper bundles.

Somewhere, in an office building, on a subway, in a local park, his customers would unwrap the still-warm packages to reveal their fried fish fillets, cosseted by handfuls of golden potatoes.

Mustafa and his son fried up fresh cod and potatoes for more than twenty years, wrapping them in sheets of white butcher paper all afternoon, every afternoon except Sundays, before the shop closed for good in 2016. Before the shop opened each morning, the two men hauled salt, vinegar, and frying ingredients between ports, warehouses, and the fish market to their small shop, where they hustled between the storefront and the back room. They unpacked Styrofoam boxes of fish delivered that morning from the Billingsgate Fish Market, feeling each one for small bones left behind by the busy filleters. Then, Mustafa trimmed the fillets again, following with a pair of pliers and then tweezers to snag the last little bones.

Large tubs of frying salts and oil lined his workspace, along with bags of flour

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Since he opened his shop roughly ten years before, he had watched the neighborhood evolve from a wall of gray flats lining a route to the nearby underground into a glass-and-steel artery to the new London Crossrail station.

As a trail of steam from our teacups settled between us, Mustafa spoke of a recent trip he’d made to Turkey, where he had hoped to reconnect with his past life in Istanbul. He had noticed that, after all the years he had spent in England, even as a business owner, his connections outside the Turkish community felt disingenuous and too pragmatic for his liking. And yet, his trip to Turkey felt vacuous, strangely foreign. He told me he felt like a foreigner in both countries, a fish out of water, frying fish. He seemed half in one world, half somewhere else, even in his native country.

Mustafa’s shop closed in 2016 when, like the Martins in Paris, he found he could no longer afford to run his small business. Taxes, regulations, pandemics, and more contribute to the disappearance of faces like Mustafa’s from our food system. Let’s hope the tenacity of a few moms and pops, like the Hillers, will continue to remind us of the human connection beloved sellers and their faces bring to our food.

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The Lunch Lady, Austin Our affinity for seeing the same faces, like Natasha’s or Mustafa’s or the Hillers’, every time we enter our favorite restaurants or shops starts young for most of us. Grade school students eagerly await lunchtime every day.

With a wry smile, April calls herself a Lunch Lady, embracing the deprecative job title. She first claimed the name during one of her family’s fantasy football seasons. Now, she owns it. And this lunch lady has been showing her kitchen staff how to feed more than a thousand students in the cafeteria at a middle school near Austin, Texas. Not just lunch, but breakfast too.

Food preparation, not cooking or baking, has become the main activity of foodservice crews in schools these days, since much of what the students eat arrives at the school either partially made or already prepared, ready for foodservice to heat up.

The foodservice area is full of bright stainless steel workspaces, sinks, ovens, coolers, and proofing cabinets.

Stacks of trays bearing identical cups of sliced fruit slot into a mobile cabinet, one foodservice worker inspecting them before the lunch crowd arrives.

It’s clear April really loves her young customers. She tries to remember their names by repeating them as she thanks them when they go through her lunch line. And she relishes her unique opportunity to spend time with students outside of the classroom, which leads to a more relaxed conversation. She says that she watches them grow during their time at the school and kids them when they grow taller than her, scolding them for making her feel short.

meantime, she feels that there could be a way for her to teach a student club. Or maybe she could get the funds together to get certified. She’s not apt to let anything get in her way.

She smiles and laughs about the crazy times when the kitchen is under pressure, joyfully relating even the moments of sheer fear and chaos that she’s experienced in her job. Like the incessant beepers that continuously fill the kitchen as they signal her team to hustle to the oven to remove chocolate chip cookies, or to slide pizzas on to serving trays without slopping toppings onto the floor. She remembers the day she dropped a whole pan of orange chicken on her pants, covering herself in sauce from the knee down. And the day she dropped raw pizza on the floor. None of this rattles her, but she does momentarily lose composure as she describes her deep love for her job. She turns away as she tears up, a little embarrassed at how her love for this work reveals her vulnerable, human side.

As we move through the pandemic and the related school closures, restaurant closures, and mounting unemployment in foodservice and beyond, we may find faces like April’s hard to see. And when schools do open back up, perhaps both she and the students will wear masks in the cafeteria line. How will that change her relationships with students? The relationships between adults and children is ever more fragile, and the comforting smile ever more needed during a crisis. Can we learn to trust masked faces? Perhaps masked faces, just a little less human, will become the only trusted faces.

Alongside her enthusiasm for her current job, April’s sights are set on eventually being a pastry chef. In the

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Marcelo, Buenos Aires

Pop and Salik, London This traditional fish and chips restaurant has three stores in London: Camden, Spitalfields, and Soho. And still, they’re no exceptions to the Turkish-run fish and chips community. Pat, “Pop,” started the business in the 1980s along with his partner, Salik, a Turk. Most of their ingredients come from similar sources as Mustafa’s on Farringdon Street.

While tracking down the ingredients for choripán in Buenos Aires, I met this man, a baker and seller in a small shop in the middle of the city. He invited me in before he opened, lifting up the rickety and much-graffitied metal door to let us in his shop, which sells bread to street vendors and regular customers.

In his small office, just a table in the back room, he watched a security camera while shuffling paper invoices, cross checking them on his laptop. The space felt like a cobbled system of old and new technoology. He used stubby, dull pencils and an old cell phone but wore the latest sports watch and stylish shoes. He also seemed a bit distraught, the weight of running a small business in a city in a country that had the highest robbery rate in South America.

The tenacity and courage of these small food businesses is impressive, not entirely anticipated by consumers. And during the pandemic, we’ve witnessed that same courage and tenacity throughout our food system as grocery store workers have restocked our food, food pantries have delivered food to thousands of families, and restaurants have struggled to find a way to survive.

Pop and Salik operate as a team, and, at least in public, they appear the best of friends. Pop wears a white T-shirt to work, exposing his tattoos. Salik wears the typical foodservice uniform: a white coat. No gloves, hairnets, or masks for these two. Customers can see their smiles, the evidence of hard work on their hands. Today, their portraits would look less endearing.

As a result of the pandemic, their shops are now closed (temporarily, we hope) along with most of the restaurant community in London. The loss of these family-run shops, whether grocery stores or restaurants, leaves customers feeling especially adrift, not just from missing service, but from the loss of human relationships. However welcome it may be in this time, a quick, contactless pickup from a favorite restaurant just isn’t the same without the opportunity to share stories over the cash register.

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I lowered my driver’s side window and made eye contact with the person carrying my meal toward my car. He wore a black shirt and had long, slightly curly, black hair pulled into a tight ponytail. His black mask suggested a sinister Lone Ranger was loose in the parking lot outside one of my favorite restaurants here in Austin. This was a new food seller. One we met during the pandemic.

Once he spoke, he revealed his identity as the chef of the restaurant. He asked me to open the trunk of my car so he could deposit my dinner according to the new “contactless” protocol required of all human-to-human transactions in our city. His hands, wearing gloves, signaled when it was time for me to close the trunk and carry on.

At least he was still visible, partially. The sound of his voice was reassuring. And the idea that there might be at least a few more humans inside his restaurant was comforting, too. They must still be there. Inside.

Invisible. Contactless.

Eating with others, and eating outside our homes, has all but stopped since the onset of the pandemic. The restaurant dining rooms and outdoor patios where Austinites love to gather are deserted, empty but for the occasional customer picking up food or dog walker strolling past. Even as the economy recovers, these empty spaces are slow to fill. We humans hesitate, unsure of our freedom to move again, oddly guarding our new personal space. With restrictions having required humans to move, work, dine, and live apart from each other for months, the experience of eating together again will feel strange, at least until we adapt. While grocery stores have had to race to keep basic ingredients on their shelves, these now-empty restaurants have found themselves with a surplus of their own groceries, meant to be turned into hot meals for the hungry customers who are now stuck in their homes.

On the surface, it looks like restaurants need a new business model in the wake of this pandemic. As they are now, they’re in the wrong spaces: buildings that are too small or organized for intimate, physical connection. They have the wrong skills: preparing food to be served fresh, hot, and presented in a manner that enhances the connected dining experience. Décor, lighting, printed menus, and music are all designed for connected humans.

While many restaurants will likely have to close their doors permanently (some in Austin already have), those that remain will be different in ways that are difficult to imagine now.

These disconnects present an opportunity for a restaurant industry that has operated on fumes of survival, fear,

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and denial, not to mention miniscule margins. The restaurant industry—like much of the food supply chain—has been on the brink of change for ages. Now, that change is forced, and it’s accelerated. Those that survive will do so based on their ability to reconstruct and reimagine themselves. And for that, they deserve our patience.

This moment could be the time for restaurants to return to their roots.

In the seventeenth century, a restaurant was a French word for something eaten to restore one’s health. Typically, a restaurant was a bullion with medicinal characteristics, including ingredients such as chocolate and brandy, for invalids or the elderly.

Chefs prepared these restorative restaurant recipes for their masters, who were members of the aristocracy,

and it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century, after the French Revolution, that restaurants actually became places to eat.

In our modern times, we could argue that eating at a restaurant still plays a restorative role in our lives, connecting us to stories, friendships, and culinary traditions. And, we can see how restaurants have the potential to restore us and our humanity again.

We now see restaurateurs finding new ways to engage with their communities.

Here in Austin, I have participated in an online cheese tasting class with a local cheese shop, assembled tacos with the assistance of a video made by the chef of a local restaurant, and eaten meals delivered by an invisible or masked person who leaves them at the end of my driveway or in the trunk of my car. I also now feed a tub of

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sourdough starter delivered by a local baker and eagerly await his class on breadmaking next week.

These last few weeks, restaurants have provided us with food, these experimental, distanced connections, and the promise of something better coming our way. Restoring us in any way they can.

Our restaurants may not have the potential to meet revenue goals under their old models right now, but here’s what restaurants do have: followings, brands, and reputations. And personalities. Restaurants can help us find ways to tell new food stories, restoring our sense of history and of ourselves. Restaurants can move beyond the online cheese or pasta classes to offer in-home dining experiences accompanied by online visits with the chef who walks you through your meal, or a remote Q and A with the farmer who grew your salad ingredients. Or a virtual visit to the region of Italy that makes the cheese you taste. They can deliver matching cocktail ingredients and hors d’oeuvres to far-flung

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friends for virtual happy hours, bonding over a shared meal when we can’t share a table. Or dinner and a movie, virtual and in person. These ideas are low-hanging fruit. Many more abound inside our imaginations.

As we navigate through our post-pandemic lives, we will need all the patience we can muster so that we can pay attention to what’s in the near term. Perhaps this new world will pull us together in ways that will outlive social distancing.

After the masked server placed my dinner in the trunk of my car, I closed my car winow, ending our awkward, distance-perfect, mask-muffled conversation. I headed back to my home, not for a restorative experience yet, but at least for a palliative moment on the way to the full healing of ourselves and our food system. We’re seeing an industry and its humans recreate themselves much more quickly than they had planned. As we head into an era of accelerated change, we will be required to adapt in new ways, mostly unimaginable a year ago.

The novelist E.L. Doctorow once described his writing process in terms that resonante at this moment: “It’s like driving a car at night: You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

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During a time of crisis, whether a natural disaster or a health-related pandemic, science fiction can offer insight into what the world might look like in the future. When the 2020 pandemic arrived, I watched the 1956 film, Forbidden Planet, in which I met Robby the robot. A multilingual robot (it can speak 188 languages), it can create food through some sort of biochemical process hidden inside its chest. Its human accomplice, Dr. Morbius, demonstrates Robby’s uncanny talents by inserting a natural food item, an apple, into Robby’s intake portal, where Robby assesses the chemical nature of the apple so it can recreate it. The replicated apple appears, concocted out of the chemicals that Robby identified and designed to look and taste like the natural item.

While this scene seems too otherworldly, other science-fiction creations appear in line with our reality today. The 1960s animated cartoon family, the Jetsons, were the proud owners of a food replicator, a device that printed food. Machines like this appear now in theater lobbies, airports, and fast food restaurants, manufacturing meals and snacks on demand. And both The Jetsons and Forbidden Planet foreshadowed what we are experiencing now. In late 2019, we read how the foodservice industry experimented with robots and how food delivery companies ran tests with robotdelivered food. These experiments suggested a science fiction-worthy world might be just around the corner. But in 2020, we found that robots were still in the closet, after all.

Some were quietly being tested on a few sidewalks and airports, but they didn’t run to greet us when we most needed them to feed us during the pandemic.

Cafe X Robot, San Francisco

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Instead, what landed on our doorstep in March 2020 was a human, often wearing a mask, but a human nonetheless, walking toward us with our dinner. We saw humans in warehouses packing boxes of food and sanitizers for delivery

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to vulnerable humans in need. Humans found a way to redirect milk from restaurants to grocery stores and consumers’ refrigerators. It turns out that we need humans more than ever today. And we need them in new ways.

Humans can sometimes pivot faster than technology, as we saw during the peak moments of the pandemic. Humans delivered by using their ability to create, pivot, and reinvent.

Of course, they also found their traditional jobs disappearing as a result of government edicts combined with a resulting economic downturn. Humans in the food system didn’t lose their jobs due to automation as we’d once feared, but instead to quarantining and other efforts to limit infections that rippled throughout the food system and the general population.

During the pandemic, we witnessed a historic loss of jobs. In one week, layoffs due to the pandemic resulted in 6.6 million Americans who sought benefits. By May, overall unemployment in the United States reached its highest rate in history. Humans were out of work, but not because we no longer needed them. Many of these lost jobs were in the food system. According to a report issued by the Federal Reserve

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System in May 2020, 40 percent of the households with an annual income of $40,000 reported job losses. Foodservice workers fall into that category.

And it’s not yet clear what the new, post-pandemic food system will look like, or if humans will find work there. Understandably, the food and hospitality industry feel the pressure to automate humans out of the workplace for the health and safety of their workers and the general public. And yet, humans have proved their worth in providing the flexibility we need to feed each other during times of crisis.

Those science fiction writers may have gotten the future right, at least in part. Robots and other forms of automation may replace certain jobs in our food system, but they can’t satisfy our need for human connection, ingenuity, in-the-moment pivots, and adaptation.

I think this is good news. I was beginning to worry that lab meat, robot and drone delivery, and machinemade food would replace all of us and take away our purpose as storytellers.

Don’t get me wrong: We need both technology and humans. But we need to watch for that sweet spot where we can benefit from both, automating where we can while retaining a little humanity in our future.

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This book is the work of a team of humans: those in the photographs, whom I interviewed, and the many individuals who helped me to navigate the food systems across the globe. Fixers such as Samanta Helou in Los Angeles, Lauren Shields in Paris, Lucinda Wallbank in London, Makiko Segawa in Tokyo, Iris Anliatamer in Istanbul, Federico Molnar at San Telmo Productions in Buenos Aires, and Masha Uskova in Moscow. Without their knowledge of markets, language, and local culture, I would not have been able to hear the stories of the invisible humans in those food systems. Other than my own photography, Lucas Alvarado-Farrar, Matt Cosby, Michael James Murray, and Julia Metcalfe also contributed their wonderful images to the book.

As this book evolved, my editor, Sarah Welch, continued to shepherd this project to completion, smooth the rough edges, and create order out of a mess of essays and photographs.

Along the way, Kathrin Seitz held me accountable when the pandemic of 2020 tempted me to sideline this project.

Julie Savasky, a graphic designer extraordinaire, contributed her style and creativity to bring these stories and photos to life.