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FERN’S special issue on food and power, with High Country News · REAP/SOW

• Theodore Ross: This is REAP/SOW. I’m Theodore Ross, editor-in-chief of the Food & Environment Reporting Network, or FERN. This episode is about the people and the institutions that control the food system in the American West. The West is a big place. There’s about 80 million people living out there, and if they’re anything like me — I live in Brooklyn — they’re more concerned about food prices and maybe their waistlines than who owns the land and who’s doing the labor. But I think the reporters in this episode may do something to change that. Each one has a powerful story to tell about the West’s unwieldy and sometimes ugly food system. How it got to be the way it is and what the future may look like if we don’t do something to change it. There’s the immigration raids in the meatpacking industry that transform the food economy, why pecans may be making the Rio Grande run dry, and how the Chinese immigrants who built the Transcontinental Railroad saw food as a symbol of oppression and a tool of resistance. These stories and more are part of a collaboration with the folks at High Country News. Their September 2025 print edition is a FERN partnership from cover to cover, so settle in. Grab a snack. I recommend New Mexican beef jerky to go with the vibe. And let’s talk food and power. Ted Genoways writes and reports about the meatpacking industry for FERN. And with help from Esther Honig and Bryan Chou, he wrote “The Kill Floor: How America’s largest beef producer exploits refugees for profit” for our project with High Country News. December 12, 2006, is a mostly forgotten day in U.S. history, but it’s one that changed everything for the meatpacking industry. [news clip]: The Swift meatpacking plant is effectively shut down tonight. More than 250 workers were arrested at the Greeley plant as part of a nationwide operation at six different plants. Workers were lined up, searched, and marched down to buses Theodore: Coordinated nationwide immigration raids on plants owned by Swift and Company resulted in nearly 1,300 workers being taken into custody. It was the largest single worksite immigration enforcement action in U.S. history. Ted Genoways: My opinion, and the opinion of many people who have looked at this, is that there was a real change in not only the way that people were hired. What kind of workforce those meatpacking companies were looking for, what that did to the demographics of small towns across the middle of the country. And then how that affected politics, the way that people felt, the kind of predictable backlash to the sudden influx of people who didn’t look like they do, didn’t speak the same language, didn’t have the same religious background, ethnic background. Theodore: In today’s America, we think of immigration raids by ICE in workplaces as almost normal. It’s what they do. But in 2006, that wasn’t the case. Ted: It’s easy to forget, but Homeland Security and ICE were created in the aftermath of 9/11, coming out of the 9/11 Commission’s report recommending that we have a mechanism that better tracks people who are in the country, so that we have some sense of where they are and how they’re communicating with each other. Theodore: The Swift raids, as they were called, charted a new course for the federal government. Ted: All of this was presented as an anti-terrorism measure, and so the fact that the first time ICE undertook something that was a significant enforcement, it was at meatpacking plants and arresting undocumented workers. It was a real shift in what the justification for this agency had been. And so all of the raids that we’re seeing now and all of the talk that we’ve heard out of the Trump administration about, needing to go after people who are undocumented, and this idea of using ICE essentially as an internal police force that goes and arrests people that the administration has decided they don’t want in the country anymore. That goes back to this event. The biggest question for Swift after the raids was how are they going to replace all those workers? Because the raid focused on undocumented labor and ended up arresting probably about 30 percent of the people who worked in the plants. It had a major effect on Swift’s abilities to just keep the line running at these large plants that were the sort of the flagships of their operation. So they faced this immediate crisis of needing to find new workers just to try to keep their lines running. Swift’s answer to their problem was simple: refugees. They fit a lot of the same profile as an undocumented worker. You know, they don’t have deep roots in the community, and they also don’t have an easy way to complain to the union. And so this effort to bring in refugees, part of the idea was they have all the same vulnerabilities of undocumented workers, but they have legal immigration status. What you end up with is various forms of asylum seekers, people who are legally in the country but don’t yet have the protections of being refugees. And they are easier to exploit. One of those things that they will do is apply as full-time workers employed in an industry where there are not enough Americans who are willing to do those jobs. Meatpacking fits that description, so there’s actually an incentive for the people who are asylum seekers to not only take those jobs in meatpacking, but to not complain. Theodore: So after 2006, a new kind of status quo emerged. There was a new category of worker in these plants, people who were here legally, but who were still vulnerable. Many of them folks from places like Haiti, Venezuela, South Sudan, Somalia, and more had temporary protected status, which they got by executive order from the president. And then Donald Trump returned to office. Ted: What the Trump administration tested was their theory that if you can expand immigration by executive order, then you can also reduce it in that exact same way, and the Supreme Court agreed. So by doing that in a widespread, indiscriminate way and doing it without regard for people’s circumstances, it has made for a case where Trump is suddenly able to say, more than a million people are now without legal status, and they’re people who are in the system. So we know exactly where to find them, and we’ve dramatically increased the size of ICE to be able to go and arrest people, and also to be able to detain people. This is not good news for the meatpacking industry, because this has been their workforce for 20 years. Theodore: The ICE raids were a disaster for Swift and Company. It was the nation’s third-largest supplier of beef and pork at the time. Close to $10 billion in sales most years. In the weeks after the raids, the company announced it expected to lose $80 million. Then, four months later, Swift sold out to the world’s largest meat processor, JBS. Ted: I think it’s significant that JBS, through their subsidiary Pilgrim’s Pride, was the largest donor to Donald Trump’s inauguration. When they were questioned about that, they said, we’re an American food company that just loves celebrating the peaceful change of power. I would just like to note that they are Brazilian-owned, so it’s a bizarre statement on multiple levels. Clearly what they were trying to do is exert influence. My dark concern, if we want to be honest about this, is that if you have millions of people who are in a detention system, where the process is extremely slow, I fear that there will be an argument made that those people should be farmed out as prison labor, and that they may end up going back to work in the very plants that they were arrested in, except as free labor instead of as low-wage labor. Theodore: Who gets to write the history of food in the West? Who decides what’s included and what’s left out? Paisley Rekdal took on these questions in her essay “Eating bitterness.” It tells the story of the Chinese immigrants who built the Transcontinental Railroad and how, for the, food was a tool of both oppression and resistance. I want to start out by talking about what I sort of consider the primary theme of your essay, which is this expression from Mandarin that translates to “eating bitterness.” Let’s talk about that first. What is eating bitterness? Paisley Rekdal: So eating bitterness is something I think a lot of us would be familiar with just instinctively, which means you sort of suck it up, just to put it really bluntly. Which is that you don’t complain, put your head down. You work really, really hard. And in some ways, success depends on your ability to eat bitterness. And it’s a very common Chinese expression, and it’s one that I think a lot of Chinese immigrants, Chinese American families know about. Theodore: So I think that motif that you use, it’s interesting the way you’re able to connect that to the archaeology of Chinese American foodways in the West. And I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about some of the places you visited. You were the poet laureate of the state of Utah, and you were writing a poem about — what was the poem supposed to be about? Tell me about the poem. Paisley: Well, the poem was called “West: A Translation,” and it’s both a website as well as a book. And I was asked to write a poem that was going to commemorate the Transcontinental Railroad’s 150th anniversary of its completion, and I’m half Chinese on my mother’s side. And so I really wanted to forefront the stories of the Chinese. One of the first things I wanted to do was actually visit the Transcontinental Railroad, because it’s actually fairly close to my house. It runs through the Great Salt Lake and through the West Desert, and so these are areas that I can access very easily. So I went with the state historian, Chris Merritt, who took me to a lot of these ghost towns now. And through archaeological evidence, you can see where the Chinese had little camps, effectively, and they had been able to study what the Chinese ate actually based on their trash. So we talked a lot about that. And through these food pathways, you start to understand some of the stories of the workers who came over to work for the Transcontinental. And one of the reasons that’s important is that, to date, not a single written document by any of the Chinese Transcontinental workers has been found. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means they haven’t either been shared or preserved. And so you have to be really creative. You have to look at archaeological evidence — where did they trade, what did they eat, you know, what did they buy — to get a sense of what their day-to-day life was like. And maybe even a sense of what they thought about their own situation in America. Did they plan to stay or did they want to leave? One of the things that I found really fascinating through some of the food pathways, the archaeological evidence, is you see simultaneously some aspects potentially of trade, but mostly a real kind of Chinese cultural insularity, that they really wanted to stay put in a culturally Chinese space, and in fact, it both hurt and helped them. It helped them in the sense that they literally didn’t get sick, because they were boiling their water for tea. And so they were, you know, considered exceptional workers for that. And it hurt them in the sense that I think their cultural insularity also meant that they weren’t going to be working cross-culturally with people that they looked down upon. They didn’t like the Irish, for example. They were afraid of Indigenous people, it seemed. So I found that that story was really quite fascinating. Theodore: There were two things that you bring up in the essay that I think are pretty fascinating in that regard. One of them is the architectural shards of a particular design of rice bowl that would’ve been found all across the West among Chinese Americans, which a) shows that there was some trade because they were in different places, but also that they were not trading. They all had the very same bowl. They were in a cloistered, segregated community. So that’s one fact that I think is really interesting in that regard. And the other one is that when you go to these places, all the archaeological remnants of the presence of the Chinese Americans are in the garbage dump. What does that mean about Chinese Americans in that time period? Paisley: Well, a couple of things. First I should also say it’s interesting we’re using the term “Chinese Americans,” because the Chinese workers who came over didn’t ever think of themselves as Chinese Americans, right? Most of them saw themselves as, like, come to the United States to effectively eat bitterness for a while, work hard, get money, and go back to China. And so for a large percentage of them who stayed, I think that was probably actually a surprise. Going back to the rice bowls, the pattern we’re talking about is the Four Seasons pattern. It was a mass-produced item. You would’ve found it in a lot of Chinese dishware products that were sent to America. And so from that you can see that a lot of them were trading with Chinese merchants that kind of came over specifically, or built up businesses specifically, to serve Chinese workers. And that goes back to a really interesting, I guess, conversation about trade and culture and violence in the West, which is that a lot of these merchants and a lot of this trade was facilitated by or protected by the Chinese tongs. They were sort of benevolent societies that specifically benefited male workers. Very common that almost all male workers coming over would have a relationship with the tong because they’d set you up with work, and a lot of them funneled right into restaurant work, right into laundromat work, or right into merchant work. But these tongs would set up shop along the railroad route in order to protect trade, to make sure that Chinese money went right back into Chinese pockets. And this trade wasn’t innocent. It wasn’t simply, like, oh, we’re going to, you know, make sure that people can get soy sauce bottles and, you know, plum rice wine. It was also like the opium trade and the trade in sex trafficking. So young women were trafficked all throughout the West. Going back to this theme of eating bitterness, I mean, I was really fascinated by the ways in which eating bitterness, as a concept, is something that I think everyone would participate in. But when you break it down, some people eat bitterness more so than others. So, for instance, Chinese male workers were definitely eating a lot of bitterness because there was a lot of racism that they were experiencing. There was a lot of cultural segregation, there was a lot of animosity and violence. But they didn’t sort of then turn around and say, well, let’s make this a welcoming space for Chinese women. They ended up trafficking them, so Chinese American women were really, or Chinese women were really, eating bitterness, too. Theodore: The story of Chinese workers in this era, how they lived, what they thought of their lives here, what they ate, serves as a kind of parable about food and power in the West. What’s important in understanding those historical patterns is wrestling with the ways they persist today. Paisley: So, for example, a lot of the ways that we asexualize Asian American men, now you start to trace that out of the 19th century via these portraits of labor. And it’s hard to explain that to somebody who’s living right now, has never seen these images in the 19th century. But then when you put it all together and you’re, like, oh well, actually the ways that Chinese men dressed and they had the long queues and they had this feminine dress and they were working in domestic roles. Whether it was kitchen work, whether it was laundry work, whether it was house servant work, they got slotted into these feminized positions, and that got culturally translated over the years. I mean, can you really prove that? It’s a tough one, right? Because you’re always looking for a straight, one-shot answer. But in some ways, what you’re doing is gathering, you know, stories together and putting them up against each other. And I think that was both exciting to me as a reporter, but also makes me a little nervous, because it allows for interpretation that goes in a very different way. But that’s also exciting, too, when we only have fragments. How we create narratives out of those fragments tells us a lot about who we are right now. As much as who they were back in the past. Theodore: One of the things that’s pretty amazing about the story is how wide ranging it is within this specific subject. I mean, we’re talking about the origin of birthright citizenship. You talk about the tongs, the disappearance of certain kinds of Chinese food, how people’s remains made it back to Hong Kong. There’s a lot of things that go on, and you’re right, it is in juxtaposition. It doesn’t cohere into one irrefutable argument, but I think the one thing that is not refutable is the centrality of Chinese people and Chinese American people in the culture of food in this country. And I’m curious. How do you think that translates to today? Paisley: Honestly, I’m still thinking about that for a long time, and I think in general, we still have this idea of Chinese food in America as disposable food. You know, not the food of real high culture, this sort of passing stuff that everyone kind of eats in college, or something like that. Or if you’re, you know, drunk at two in the morning, like what you’re going to drink, there’s this way in which there’s this idea of that history and that culture being kind of in the background, but not necessarily taken seriously. And I think that that remains the case. You know, going back to my own family, so many of them came out of restaurant work. My own mother worked in a restaurant with Bruce Lee, actually, in high school. Yeah, I could talk about that, too. That’s a good story. Theodore: What’s the one thing you’d want somebody to take from your story? Paisley: I guess the one takeaway I got from working on this and from working on the Transcontinental project was just how much and how powerful it can be when we think about those cross-cultural connections. Whether they’re built on shared, radicalized experiences in America or a shared cultural affiliation or whatever, we’re always stronger when we think about what we have in common than what we don’t have in common. And I think that one of the things that has struck me over and over and over again is how much institutions rely upon and benefit from people seeing themselves as not more than one thing. To my mind, the thing that has always made me stronger as a person is being able to work across these cultural perspectives and see them as sometimes benefiting, sometimes speaking to, and sometimes speaking against each other. That juxtaposition is really powerful, and I think it’s one that’s very relevant to today. Theodore: The Rio Grande is one of America’s iconic natural landmarks. It’s also a river in decline facing the challenges of climate change in a region mired in a 25-year-long drought. In the pecan problem, Big Ag is threatening New Mexico’s water supply. Reporter Jeremy Miller looks at how large-scale growers of a crop that we don’t typically associate with the Southwest, the pecan, are threatening the Rio Grande’s very existence. Jeremy Miller: It’s an interesting sort of environmental story. This dry desert area, southern New Mexico, became a haven for pecans, and really what happened is the construction of Elephant Butte Dam in 1916. This huge hydroelectric irrigation project brought huge volumes of water to the desert, and with it brought this huge water-guzzling crop. Today it’s one of the largest pecan-producing states in the country. In fact, it has become the largest, supplanting Georgia in 2018, I believe. Theodore: One of the ironies of this water-hogging monocrop system in New Mexico is that it’s not really a major food source for people in the region. Jeremy: A lot of these pecans are shipped across the border to Mexico to shelling plants and then shipped to the United States, where they’re packaged and then distributed around the world. So it’s this huge industrial supply chain that sort of defies the logic, the ecological logic, and realities of the desert in which it’s being carried out. Theodore: And it’s not just crops that are flowing across borders in unexpected ways. Jeremy: There’s an interesting water-sharing agreement between the United States and Mexico where we send a certain amount of water from the Colorado River to Mexico, and in exchange they send water from their tributaries of the Rio Grande to Texas. Turns out we’ve been sending water to Mexico, but Mexico hasn’t been able to send its share of Rio Grande water to Texas. And so I was interested in that water war that was sort of developing. But what wasn’t being talked about was climate change and how, you know, climate change is decimating this entire river system. It’s not just this portion in Mexico. You’re seeing diminishing snowpack in Colorado. You know, the headwaters of the Rio Grande are drying up. You’re seeing diminishing returns from the tributaries in the middle stretch of the Rio Grande in New Mexico. The entire river system is embattled. Even though it’s not a big river, it is vitally important to the 12 to 13 million people that depend on it for drinking water, for agriculture, you know. So it’s a small river, but with a huge significance to its region. Theodore: The conflict with Mexico over water is just one example of the difficulties of managing natural resources in today’s complicated world. At times the systems we have in place just aren’t up to the task. Jeremy: You know, I’ve covered rivers for close to 20 years, Western rivers, and the thing that strikes me about the management of the Rio Grande, it’s not viewed in totality, really, by water managers as a single entity. It’s divided up into the upper, middle, and lower stretches, and each one of those entities that manages those sections of river are, you know, driven by self-interest. These eight management agencies see this as sort of input/output. You know, we get this much water this moment, and we have this much to use, and we distribute it in this way. And they’re not thinking about it as a river, as something that has a start and an end and that has some kind of fundamental right to flow. They see it as a means to an agricultural end. That kind of self-interest is bad for the river. When I went for my reporting, the river was bone dry, just complete sand. But those are just in the places where you can get to the river. In most places you can’t, because the pecan orchards have consumed the riverbed for, you know, a 100-mile stretch. You’ve got a pretty much unbroken wall of trees, a wall of these imported non-native trees that prevent you from being able to get to the river. And a huge part of this was writing about a river and it not really being there, you know, that this river has been sort of alchemically converted into the green of pecan trees and money for a small handful of farmers. Theodore: But there’s also a specific thing I think about pecan production as an agricultural industry — that it doesn’t require a lot of labor. So you’re creating this food that goes away, and you’re not creating jobs for the local population. So how do people — I don’t know if you’re in any part of the Mesilla Valley, which is where you went. How do they feel about all this? Jeremy: Well, it depends on if you’re a pecan farmer or not. I mean, I think the pecan farmers are pretty happy, pretty comfortable with the situation. But if you’re a farmworker looking for work, you’re not going to really find it in these farm fields. As mechanization has ramped up, agricultural jobs have dwindled. Another thing that I was told by a source, it was actually one of the pecan farmers, Rafael Rovirosa, who said — I asked, well, you know, what if I were interested in coming down here and opening up a new pecan farm? And he told me, point blank, there are no new pecan farmers. Just the economic barriers to entry between land price and water scarcity and just the scale that you need to grow these pecans at are just a huge impediment to new pecan farmers. It just doesn’t happen. Theodore: It’s not just new pecan farmers that are being pushed out. Even efforts to protect the river end up benefiting the big growers. Jeremy: The USDA and the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission are actually paying farmers in the area not to use their water, not to grow … Theodore: Including pecan farmers, or no? Jeremy: No. Well, so that’s the thing. That’s the key. You cannot fallow a pecan orchard. The trees have to have their water or else they’ll die. So this sort of fallowing scheme targets row crop growers. The folks growing your vegetables, your chilies, your onions, your lettuce, you know, these row crops that actually feed people. So as the water dwindles, it sort of perversely benefits the biggest water-guzzling crop of all, which is pecans. They are the economic driver of the region, and they command the lion’s share of the water resources. So it was very disconcerting to drive around and see all of these, you know, fallow fields. You could see remnants of onions or stalks of chilies just withered. And meanwhile, these pecan orchards, which are flood irrigated, are just bathing in luxurious pools of water. Theodore: The problems with the Rio Grande are relatively well understood, but it’s the big picture sources of those problems that aren’t always acknowledged. Jeremy: The pecans of New Mexico arrived there because of this sort of series of events in history. The conditions that led to the establishment of this crop don’t exist today. You know, we’re living in a time of climate change. We’re living in a time of growing populations and water scarcity and political turmoil. I think what we need to think about is that the conditions that led to the establishment of this paradigm of farming in this region doesn’t really apply today. This is a great river of the American West. This isn’t a small tributary. This is the main stem of the Rio Grande. Is it in our national best interest to allow a single monocrop, a politically connected segment of the farming community, to completely run this vitally important river completely dry? Or is this a crime against nature? Theodore: REAP/SOW is a production of the Food & Environment Reporting Network. FERNNews is our home on YouTube. Our executive producers are me, Theodore Ross, and Tom Laskawy. Special thanks to all the staff at High Country News for their collaboration on this project. Our sound engineer is Lauryn Newson. Katie Gardner and Brock Mahan are the producer and video producer for REAP/SOW. I’m your host, Theodore Ross. Find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent nonprofit reporting at www.thefern.org.