Fast Food Women
Fast Food Women
Or, Labor Pains in the Before And After Times
Hi Class,
Hope you had a great week! In case you missed it, I had a super busy week. When I wasn’t watching college basketball, I spent some times talking about an array of news topics. I chatted about reparation for slavery and recent efforts in Evanston, Illinois on WNYC’s “The Takeaway” with Tanzina Vega. I talked to a design writer about McDonald’s and Burger King, and their recent decisions to redesign their packaging for AIGA’s Eye on Design. I also offered some thoughts for Milwaukee Magazine’s profile of Valerie Daniels-Carter, the ‘Burger Queen’ of the Midwest. And, I chatted with my kindred spirit Adam Chandler, author of Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America's Fast-Food Kingdom about all things fast food for a two-part episode of the Special Sauce podcast with Ed Levine, of Serious Eats. Adam wrote a piece this week about Taco Bell for Marker for all you vegetarians and vegans out there. And, I got some very good news: My book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America was the co-winner of the 2021 Hagley Prize in Business History and The Little Book About McDonald’s That Could was longlisted for the 2021 Art of Eating Prize. Consider ordering one of the fabulous books on the finalists list for both awards from your local bookstore! Want more newsletters delivered to your inbox on Fridays? Consider a paid subscription to YOUR FAVORITE PROF.
As we round out Women’s History Month, let’s talk about the women who keep the fast food industry going. As it stands, the majority of food preparation workers identify as women, and as we often see in other fields, when there are mostly women in an industry, low wages, sexual harassment, and a reinforced glass ceiling become commonplace. I talked about this issue with the ACLU for their At Liberty Podcast last year, and this month, McDonald’s workers spoke to CBS Sunday News about lawsuits filed against the company. The women claimed McDonald’s didn’t do anything about rampant sexual harassment at their franchise locations. From demanding sexual favors in exchange for promotions to physical assault, worker abuses coupled with low wages has rendered fast food work some of the most dangerous in the United States. Organizations like #MeToo, The Fight for Fifteen, and the National Black Workers Center are among the many groups organizing fast food workers to imagine and fight for safer workplaces.
In the spirit of honoring the women who labor so hard to feed scores of people, I want to recommend you watch (or revisit) the 1991 film, “Fast Food Women,” directed by Anne Lewis. This short film captures the experiences of workers in Eastern Kentucky. Although the women don’t speak about harassment per se, this sensitive portrait of the working poor delves into the survival strategies of fast food workers raising families on little pay and no benefits.
Watching “Fast Food Women” 30 years after its release is fascinating for several reasons, especially considering that images from the 1990s feels like the 1980s. The women in the film are at the center of a series of global and local shifts, including the closing of coal mines in the late 1980s which led to massive unemployment of male heads of households, a $3.80 federal minimum wage, and a fast food industry moving toward greater automation and prepackaged foods. In the film, you see Kentucky Fried Chicken cooks making biscuits by hand and Pizza Hut employees weighing individual pan pizza dough with a kitchen scale. You also get a few talking head interviews from fast food executives and managers about what it takes to be successful in fast food, which juxtaposes against the long shots of exhausted workers arriving before the morning breakfast rush and sleepwalking through double shifts.
Around the time that “Fast Food Women” was debuting at film festivals and on PBS’s POV, a group of poets and writers gathered to form Affrilachia, a collective of Black poets from Appalachia. Convened by former Kentucky State Poet Laureate Frank X Walker, Affrilachian creatives, including poet Nikky Finney, have worked hard to fight one-dimensional renderings of Appalachia as all-white and only rural. After you watch the film, spend some more time learning about the nuances of Appalachia and explore African-American history in the region. Trust me, you don’t need the hot takes of a Yale Law School-educated venture capitalist/aspiring politician to appreciate the many stories of Appalachia (yes, I’m talking about the elegy guy). Check out this article from YES! Magazine about race and coal country and the PBS documentary Black in Appalachia. Happy Women’s History Month!
Tonight I got the email that I’ve been waiting to read since March of 2020, when my students scattered in a million directions due to COVID-19. My employer, Georgetown University, will be reopening in the fall. For many of my colleagues in higher education and the K-12 world, they haven’t had the privilege of working from home, like I have, because of financial and state pressures to remain open or adopt a hybrid model. Whether you’ve been working at Zoom’s satellite campus or managing in person and online since the past spring, the return to what we call ‘normal’ can be scary. Over the past 12 months, I’ve adjusted from flying 30-40 times a year, to never stepping foot in an airport. I used to live at work. No, seriously, I lived on campus as a faculty-in-resident, and after months of living in an abandoned hall, I moved into a house on the other side of town in the fall. And, after years of connecting with students over cups of coffee on my balcony or at the library cafe, I now meet with students via occasional Google Voice calls. When school reopens in the fall, I won’t miss the Zooming and not being able to travel to archives or not being able to host students for pre-Thanksgiving Break gatherings at my house. But, I still dread reopening because of all the beautiful things I have discovered over these sometimes impossible and devastating 12 months. I don’t want to return to too much travel and not enough rest. I’ve learned how to be at home after years on the road: I notice the subtle changes in what surrounds me (oh, that plant is growing) and trying a new recipe can happen on a weeknight now, instead of being an addition to my Winter Break plans. I don’t stay up late prepping for class because I don’t feel like each class period has to provide every idea and lesson imaginable. Now, I give my students a break and we may just talk about one short essay and call it a day.
I have five months to sort out my complicated feelings about reopening and return, so in the meantime, I think I’m going to ask my students how THEY feel about it. What are you looking forward to? What is hard to imagine? What changes have you experienced this past year that you think are valuable for this upcoming school year? Have you developed any new practices that you want to make part of the return? Asking yourself and your students these questions can go a long way in acknowledging that we’ve all been through a lot, and we are different as a result. That is just how life works. Fortunately, we have the ability in our communities, among our friends, and in our classrooms, to live our changes together. These questions, and similar prompts, may make for a nice way to end our virtual year and prepare for what comes next.
Until next time,
Your Favorite Prof