The Hidden Labor Behind Every Meal
April 9, 2026
Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern studies labor across the food system, from farms to restaurants to waste management. Her recent book with Teresa Mares, Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food Chain, makes the case that the people who grow, prepare, and serve our food deserve far more attention than they get.
Much of that labor, she notes, is invisible. “Warehouse workers, meatpackers, and trash collectors” do essential work most people never see, and even more visible jobs like restaurant servers and grocery checkers offer low pay and few opportunities. Her point is simple: “All who work in the food system should be able to feed themselves through living wages and safe and stable workplace environments.”
Policy also shapes what ends up on our plates more than most people realize. From minimum wage and overtime laws at the state level to federal regulations on corporate consolidation and pesticides to international trade agreements and tariffs, food is deeply political at every scale.
"We cannot have a healthy food system without a refocus on society at large."
Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern
Lerner Center Research Affiliate
For Minkoff-Zern, that connection is important: “If you care about food being accessible, healthy, and produced in a just system, paying attention to our democracy, your political voice, and how you advocate for policy is essential.”
What gives her hope is how deeply people care about food. “It is inherently visceral, cultural, environmental, social, and political,” she says, and that universality is what drew her to food and agriculture as a space for social and environmental change in the first place. She sees a shift happening: people are starting to move past individualized ideas about health and food, recognizing that a healthy food system “means regulating pesticides and toxins as well as paying attention to food labor and access more broadly, not just buying your own organic vegetables.”