Last thursday, John Louie and I spent some time with the Proctor Dining Hall staff—the five folks who prepare the food for the hundreds of hungry students who eat in Proctor each day.

We began with a tour of the underbelly of the dining hall. For all the food being warmed for the students, the kitchen seemed oddly empty. As we walked past Proctor’s large refrigerators, Proctor’s executive chef informed us that only five people (at most) work to prepare the food that I eat every day. I had previously assumed that about 20 people or so worked to make our food. I am astounded that 5 people can serve 1500-2000 tasty meals a day.

I was also surprised to learn that this amount of work did not directly correlate to a worse working environment. On the contrary, the Proctor dining staff seemed to be extremely happy working at Middlebury. Many of them had worked at restaurants for years before they landed a job at Middlebury. As one of the chefs told me, “I have two boys at home—Middleburys got great benefits.” The common consensus was that restaurant work was much more stressful than cooking for mass consumption at Middlebury. While mass consumption leads me to think of repetition and boring, monotonous tasks, several of the Proctor employees expressed with pride that their meals are a result of their own “artistic expression”—limited as it is with their budget. Proctor even eases the woes of mass production.

According to Executive chef Richard, Proctor dining hall received a $1.2 million budget for the 2014-2015 school year. Splitting $1.2 million into everyday items such as eggs, garlic, turkeys, and gallons of milk seems nearly impossible without a reliable tracking system. Just this past year Proctor began using a tracking service to keep better data on all of their spending. They now have one full time employee tracking the life of all of Proctor’s food. The Proctor leadership is extremely excited about this, as a better tracking system will allow them to more efficiently mesh the micro with the macro, cutting out costly inefficiencies and giving them more funds to spend in the future.

Experiencing a couple hours on the other side of the serving island gave me a better understanding of the work that the dining hall staff puts in each day to feed hundreds of kids. It also gave me a better understanding of the relationship that Proctor’s consumers have with its chefs. Those working in Proctor see the same faces nearly every day, working to serve the Middlebury community. It came as no surprise to see how kid after kid would fill his or her plate with food without even acknowledging those who have dedicated their time to preparing those meals. Appreciation and love extend in both directions. Middlebury should strive for a culture of appreciation and mutual respect—especially to those who feed us every day.

Speaking with Proctor’s chefs cut through the false assumptions I had made about scale as a consumer of their product. I didn’t have an appropriate understanding of scale—magnified again when I realized how few people make such an enormous amount of food.

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle (1906). The Viking Press. 1946.

In 1905, Upton Sinclair released his book, The Jungle, to the American public. The Jungle hit mainstream America with a startling force, exposing the clandestine horrors of Chicago’s meatpacking industry. By following a fictional immigrant family’s life in the Chicago stockyards, Sinclair created a space to discuss the illusion of the American Dream and America’s relationship with slaughterhouses across space and scale. The Jungle is an incredibly illustrative piece for geographers to analyze, as it is a poignant reminder of the reality of the many fallacies of imaginative geography.

Imaginative geography is a perceived conception of space. It is this imaginative geography that prompts Jurgis Rudkus and his Lithuanian family to leave Lithuania and travel to Packingtown, Illinios, the Chicago stockyard. For Jurgis, America was a place where a man “might do as he pleased and count himself as good as any other man” (Sinclair 23). In his mind, America existed as a space where he could “be a rich man” and that if he could just pay the passage fair, “he could count his troubles at an end” (Sinclair 23). Jurgis came to believe in this idealized space because he had heard romanticized success stories from Lithuania’s diaspora. Jurgis and his family left their home and travelled thousands of miles to live in the stockyards of Chicago because of the hope of economic opportunity in a place “where a friend of his had gotten rich” (Sinclair 23).

As shown in The Jungle, romanticized stories from the diaspora create spatial concentrations of immigrants in communities within the receiving country. As Sinclair depicts in his book, Chicago was an extremely popular destination for newly arrived immigrants from Lithuania. As a node in a land of “opportunity and freedom,” the Lithuanian immigrant population created a strong pull factor, drawing other disheartened Lithuanians to their newly established community in Chicago (Sinclair 30).

This spatial concentration manifested itself further within Chicago. After one day of wandering the streets of Chicago, Jurgis and his family were taken in by the police. The next day the police found an interpreter, taught them the word ‘stockyard’ and put on a train to Packingtown. When the Chicago authorities figured out the immigrants were from Lithuania, they sent them straight to the stockyards to find work, aiding in the spatial concentration of these immigrants. Soon after arriving in Packingtown, Jurgis found housing amongst other Eastern Europeans in the “back of the yard” with Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks and Bohemians (Sinclair 29). This spatial distribution appeared because of the wave of Eastern European immigrants in the early 1900’s existed at the bottom of the economic hierarchy of Packingtown. Subsequently they were placed in extremely cheap housing together, further separating themselves from mainstream Chicago and into their own Eastern European community within Chicago’s meat packing industry. Imaginative geographies of the space of America pulled many immigrants, including Jurgis, to the stockyards in Chicago.

After only a couple days in the United States, Jurgis realized that his preconceived notion of America had been severely skewed. He saw that America was a “land of high prices, and that in it the poor man was almost as poor as in any other corner of the world” (Sinclair 26). Although Jurgis knew that his dreams of easy wealth had vanished, he still held on to the idea of the American Dream, the dream that hard work and strong morals could make him a successful man. He made this clear when he pondered his future with unbounded optimism, asserting, “Tomorrow I shall go and get a job!” (Sinclair 30)

In 1977, geographer Yi Fu Tuan wrote that “place is humanized space…made real through investment of emotion” (Jackson 199). Jurgis has invested an incredible amount of time, emotion, and money into his preconceived notion of America, and would not let it go easily. At the start of his life in Packingtown, America existed as Jurgis imagined it, not as the downtrodden or weak experienced it. He would not let his imagined geography of that space to vanish so quickly. However, as the book progresses it becomes apparent that Jurgis was fighting a losing battle. His belief in the American dream only served to cripple his dreams of success. After one long evening watching the extreme mistreatment of animals and seeing their unfit body parts enter America’s food product, Jurgis’ loyalty to his vision finally wavered, thinking “at last how those might be right who had laughed at him for his faith in America” (Sinclair 63).

The Jungle also provides an interesting depiction of the Rudkus family through the lens of human geography. The crushing forces of capitalism had significantly detrimental effects on Jurgis and his family. The extreme economic inequality and hardship of their new home tore the family apart, the same family that had migrated thousands of miles in hope of a better life together. In one instance the Rudkus family wasn’t even phased when a family member, Kristoforas, died. “Nobody was really sorry” when Kristoforas died because he was a consumer, and did not produce any money for the family (Sinclair 126). At other points throughout the book, Jurgis’s marriage falls apart, he goes to jail for attacking a man who forced his wife into becoming a mistress, and he becomes a struggling alcoholic. Changing locations from Lithuania to Packingtown had significant effects on the Rudkus family as their social fabric unraveled when they buckled under the economic inequalities they experienced in America.

In 2006, geographer Peter Jackson wrote about the concept of relational thinking in his article titled “Thinking Geographically.” Relational thinking refers to the way “we think about similarities and differences…by contrasting geographies of self and other” (Jackson). In The Jungle, Sinclair urges his audience to think in this way, guiding mainstream America to examine its own relationship with slaughterhouses.

Beginning in the 18^th century, Americans began to move the slaughtering of animals to increasingly discreet areas. As Americans began killing increasingly large numbers of animals, it was only natural for the process to be veiled, for “slaughter on the large scale is different. It is disturbing” (Fitzgerald). As time progressed these spaces designated for slaughter “were designed and sited to reduce contemplation and questioning of them by workers and consumers,” creating an institutionalized forgetfulness (Fitzgerald). The slaughterhouse has been pushed into invisible spaces, a “place that is no-place.” America has attempted to avoid a “collective cultural guilt” by separating the public from the industrialization of animal slaughter (Fitzgerald).

By unveiling the reality of industrialized meat production, The Jungle cut through years of socially constructed space. The Jungle brought the systematically hidden horrors of the slaughterhouse to mainstream America’s kitchen table. Sinclair’s audience responded with outrage when they found out that “there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit” (Sinclair 135). In the introduction to the 1946 publication of The Jungle, Sinclair notes that directly following its release in 1906, President Roosevelt reached out to him and began an immediate investigation of the stockyards. This was followed by the quick passage of “new meat-inspection laws,” such as the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) (Sinclair x).

Prominent geographer, Doreen Massey, makes the argument in her book, For Space, that space exists as “the sphere of possibility of the existence of multiplicity” (Massey). In this complex phrase, Massey asserts that the same space can exist as different places for different people. In this instance, The Jungle bridged the gap between the American public’s misguided understanding of its meat industry and the reality understood by those who work closely with the slaughterhouse industry.

At the time, Sinclair was disappointed that the public responded to his book with regulations for their food instead of regulations to limit the exploitation of workers. Sinclair is famously quoted saying, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach” (Sinclair x). Sinclair wanted to merge the public’s understanding of slaughterhouse labor with the slaughterhouse worker’s understanding of his/her own labor, shrinking the gap of possibility in Massey’s assessment. Throughout the book Sinclair pushes the reader to compare the immigrant labor force with the cattle in the slaughterhouse. Just as the animals are forced to suffer as they are led to their deaths, the laborer also suffers at the raw end of capitalism, impoverished and worked til exhaustion. By applying the concept of relational thinking, it is easy to see how The Jungle pushes its audience to empathize with the plight of immigrant workers, or all of those who have repeatedly suffered under the capitalist system and have been pushed into invisible spaces, just like the cattle.

Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, exposed the exploitation and horror of the meat packing industry in Chicago in the early 1900s. The book is significant to geographers because it revolves around several geographic concepts: imaginative geographies, humanized space, and relational thinking. Throughout the novel, Sinclair explains how meat companies consistently sold rotten cans of meat to the unknowing public. The can appears pretty on the outside, but is repulsive on the inside. The Jungle urges its readers to peel back the pretty packaging and expose whatever horrors exist on the inside. Without a desire to find truth and end exploitation, everybody will suffer.

Bibliography

Fitzgerald, A. (2010). “A social history of the slaughterhouse: From inception to contemporary implications” Human Ecology Review 17(1): 58-69.

Jackson, P. (2006) Thinking Geographically. Geography 91 (3).

Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: Sage Press. (9)

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. 1906. The Viking Press. 1946.

As former Secretary of State Colin Powell stated on behalf of the US Food Aid program, “America’s generosity goes beyond all political boundaries…for hunger knows no nationality.” As the United States donates about 50% of the world’s food aid each year, or about $2 billion of its taxpayer’s money annually, it is apparent that the American people deeply care about distributing food to some of the one billion hungry people in the world—a number estimated by the UN in 2009.

At first glance, the humanitarian inside most Americans will be satisfied when they see the numbers associated with the US Food-Aid program— a 50% share of the world’s food donations seems like a noble effort from United States. However, if we dig a little deeper and unpack the US Food-Aid program, it is apparent that its foundation is extremely flawed and riddled with contradictions that don’t allow it to effectively carry out its mission.

The US Food-Aid’s mission is to “provide food aid to save lives and promote self-reliance in some of the poorest, most isolated areas of the world.” In reality, the US Food-Aid program serves another purpose: to bolster America’s own economy.

The US government purchases 99% of its food-aid donations from US farmers. It is then mandated that 75% of that food has to be shipped on US shipping vessels. On top of these staggering numbers, the US government is buying its food aid at incredibly inflated prices. As scholar Christie Kneteman laments in her article “Tied Food Aid: Export Subsidy in the Guise of Charity,” the US government pays up to “70% more for corn” when compared to prices on the open market. Kneteman also notes that the cost of shipping on US vessels for food aid is “estimated to be inflated 76% over that of foreign competitors.” The US food and shipping industries are making a generous profit from the money that the American taxpayers have allocated to feed hungry people.

Furthermore, tying food aid to US business interests undermines the stated goal of the program “to promote self reliance.” It does this by undercutting local markets and subsequently making the recipient countries dependent on foreign imports.

When the US government dumps a large shipment of donated food in a country it severely undercuts the local farmers. With free, donated grain there is no market for which local farmers can sell their produce. Subsequently, the farmer is left with few options: to grow a crop that somebody will purchase, change occupations, or migrate to find work. With a shrinking market for domestic consumption, farmers are increasingly squeezed economically into growing food crops for export—crops that will be purchased by a large corporation and be sent into the global food market. How can a country become self-reliant if its farmers are no longer producing food for domestic consumption?

The United States government needs to untie food aid by reducing the amount of grain it purchases from US farmers. It could then purchase food from markets of the region it is donating to. According to California Representative Ed Royce, the US recently experimented with a food aid program that incorporated “local and regional purchase efforts.” The results of the pilot program were astonishing. It resulted in price reductions of 25-50% and a delivery time 11-14 weeks quicker than traditional food aid. Decreasing delivery time by 11-14 would drastically help starving people when every minute matters. By purchasing local food to donate, the US can accomplish the stated goals of its Food-Aid program to “save lives” and “promote self reliance.”

The main hindrances retarding any change in the Food-Aid program are the lobbyists for the US food and transportation industries, backed by millions of dollars. They do not want the laws to change, as they are making a handsome profit off the program. At first, one might think that they hold a decent argument—that the US government should support its own economy. Their argument falls apart when it becomes apparent that the distribution of this wealth is severely limited, as only a few companies can compete to bid for the US Food-Aid contracts. As Kneteman noted, in 2001 “84% of food aid shipments were carried by only four freight companies.” Massive corporations should not be allowed to profit from such artificially high prices, especially when that money was originally allocated to feed starving people.

The humanitarian inside American cannot be satisfied with the current state of the program. With US business interests intermingled with Food-Aid’s humanitarian efforts, the program cannot effectively achieve its goals of saving lives and promoting self-reliant economies. It is time for the Americans to demand that the US Food-Aid program separate US business interests from the taxpayer’s humanitarian interests.

Bibliography

Garst, Rachael and Barry, Tom. “Feeding the Crisis.” UNP – Nebraska Paperback. December 28, 1990.

Giménez, Eric Holt and Shattuck, Annie. “Food Crises, Food Regimes, and Food Movements: Rumblings of reform or Tides of Transformation?” The Journal of Peasant Studies. Vol. 38, Issue 1, 2011. Taylor & Francis Online. 13 Jan 2011. Web Accessed October 29, 2014. URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2010.538578#.VFKTqPTF83Q

Mowforth, Martin. “The Violence of Development: Resource Depletion, Environmental Crises and Human Rights Abuses in Central America.” Pluto Press. London, England. (15-32).

Royce, Ed and Engel, Eliot. “International Food Aid Needs Reform.” The Hill. July 18, 2013. Web Accessed October 27, 2014. URL: http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/306363-international-food-aid-needs-reform

Steves, Rick. “Guest: Protect US food Aid from the Shipping Industry.” The Seattle Times. June 3, 2014. Web Accessed Oct. 28, 2014. URL: http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2023759565_rickstevesopedfoodaid29xml.html

The Lugar Center for Strategic and International Studies Washington, DC. “Remarks by Administrator Rajiv Shah At the Center For Strategic and International Studies: The Future of Food Assistance.” USAID: From the American People. Apr. 10, 2013. Web Accessed: Oct. 26, 2014. URL: http://www.usaid.gov/news-information/speeches/remarks-administrator-rajiv-shah-center-strategic-and-international

US Food Aid and Security. Web Access Oct 28, 2014. URL www.foodaid.org/about

In the Bob Giraldi film titled, Dinner Rush, the restaurant is portrayed as an intense, cutthroat business. Dinner Rush provides its viewers with an inside glimpse of the reality of work and workers’ relationships within the work environment of a trending New York City restaurant. The film portrays the work environment in the restaurant to be tense, efficient, and sometimes hostile, a direct result of a strict hierarchical structure that intends to satisfy the customers’ imaginative geography (their preconceptions of the place) by offering them a pleasant dining experience while also maintaining the internal aspects of the restaurant and continually producing high quality food.

As geographer Massey points out, space is a sphere of possibility of the existence of multiplicity. In layman’s terms, this means that different people can experience the same place in different ways. Another geographer, Yi Fu Tuan, provides a similar explanation, claiming that space is humanized and interpreted by the individual.  Dinner Rush exemplifies the different ways in which different people experience the same place through the hierarchical nature of the restaurant business.

From the beginning of the film, it is clear that there is an established and well-defined hierarchy within the restaurant, extending from the customers, to the owner, to the head chef, and finally to the waiters.  This strict managerial structure is enacted in to maximize the business’s efficiency while still pleasing each individual customer. In the movie, this hierarchical structure is shown within minutes, when the head chef fires a secondary chef because he is chopping chives incorrectly with a dull knife. He makes an example out of the fired employee, telling the entire staff that his kitchen is no place for uneducated (foodwise) and unimpressive cooks or staff members.

Throughout the film, the hierarchical structure is emphasized through tensions between a multitude of characters: the head chef and the owner, the two main chefs, and internal quarrelling amongst the waiters. In one example, this tension is shown as a more established waitress takes a less established waitresses’ meal she is about to deliver in order to serve her own tables first. In another example, the head chef becomes increasingly frustrated as he feels like the owner’s management is stifling his ability to properly run the restaurant; the owner wants more wholesome food while the head chef wants to create elaborate, exotic dishes. Dinner Rush does an excellent job portraying the restaurant as a microcosm of capitalism, a business run through the power struggles of its employees. At one point in the dinner rush, a waitress felt so much pressure that she flippantly muttered, “I need a valium.”

With a magnifying glass focusing in on the intense human interactions behind the curtains of a restaurant that can drive its employees to exasperatingly say, “I need a valium,” one can more easily digest Prole’s graphic novel, Abolish Restaurants. The strict hierarchical structure that holds the restaurant together at peak dining hours can clearly create a hostile and cutthroat working environment for the business’s employees. A glance at the insides of this hierarchical system moves one to agree with Massey and Yi Fu Tuan’s views on differing spaces; the restaurant might be a lovely evening for a customer while simultaneously existing as a living hell for a back kitchen worker.

According to human geographer Yi Fu Tuan, place is humanized space. Place is an “abstract world made real through the investment of emotion and attribution of meaning” (Jackson 199). The 2011 movie “The Help,” embodies Tuan’s theory, showing that the same space can exist as completely different places for different people. By focusing in on the private lives and households of citizens living in 1960’s Jackson, Mississippi, “The Help” offers its audience a snapshot of domestic work as experienced by women during the Civil Rights movement in the American South.

The Jim Crow South provided very little work opportunities for women, white or black. For the privileged, men provided the money for the house while women were left to cook, clean, and tend to social events. This way of thinking pervaded the social norms of the wealthy and is exemplified at the household level. During the day, the man left the home and went to work, leaving the space he left to his wife, his children (if any) and a maid. The movie is shown at this scale because it provides a nice platform to view how racism affected the domestic work place in the 1960s. It allows its audience to see how racially driven power relations between the housewife and the maid existed in this microcosm of domestic work in the midst of a fundamentally divided, sexist world.

Southern white women of privilege in the 1960s were not supposed to work at all. As culture dictated, the main responsibility of these women was to supervise ‘the help,’ or their black maid. In several instances, different white women of privilege in the movie scoff at the idea that another white woman of privilege wanted to get a job. Twelve minutes into “The Help,” the main character, Skeeter, tells a fellow member on the Junior Board that she received a job offer from the newspaper, The Jackson Journal, and is met with the prickly remark, “last stop before marriage.” Twenty minutes into the film, Skeeter tells her mother of her new job. Her mother replies, “Your eggs are dying; Would it kill you to go on a date?” Even as a privileged white woman, Skeeter received zero support from the other privileged white women when she expressed her excitement to enter the workforce. “The Help” makes it clear that many women in this microcosm were content to perpetuate this socially constructed perception of what a woman’s relationship with the workplace should be.

Paradoxically, these same white women who were not supposed to work according to social custom were desperate for help. For this reason, these white women all had black maids to do the domestic work necessary for a family to survive. On average these maids earned less than a dollar per hour or around $180 per month and were required to do all of the housework. One of the maids who shared her story in the movie expressed how many maids felt trapped once they were hired by a family. Speaking of the societal understanding regarding maids, in minute 92 of the movie she claims “In everybody’s mind, the French family and Ms. Joleen owned me. Owned me.” As Tuan suggested, the living room of a suburban Jackson townhouse in the 60’s existed as completely different places for the housewife and the maid, split by a racially tainted workplace.

In addition to the regular cleaning and cooking, the maids also raised many of the families’ children. The main maid in the movie, Ms. Aibileen Clark, stated that she had raised 17 white babies in her lifetime. While working on less than a dollar an hour to raise those white babies, she was sacrificing the time she could have been spending with her own children. When Skeeter asked Ms. Clark what that feels like, the viewer is left with only a facial expression of a deep sadness. Her emotion slices through the sickening racial structure of the 1960’s South that allowed her to raise a white child but didn’t allow her to use the bathroom inside the house. “The Help” explores this aspect of human geography in the workplace in a little more detail when the leading racist character Hilly Holbrook claims with conviction that black people “carry different diseases than we do” but then finds it perfectly normal to trust the same women (with the same diseases) to raise the children, the most vulnerable and precious part of society.

The Junior Board depicted in “The Help” spent their time working to host the “Annual African Children’s Ball” in order to feed hungry African children. As Hilly Holbrook shares the success of their work, she claims that the group’s initiative to feed hungry Africans is a cause ‘dear to the hearts of the help.’  Her insensitive remark echoes geographer Danny Dorling’s work on social and spatial inequalities that demonstrates: “we can sometimes be stirred to care for distant strangers more readily than we can be to express concern for the inequalities that exist almost literally on our doorstep” (Jackson 200). According to “The Help,” the privileged women of Jackson in the 1960s.  would perpetuate workplace inequalities in their own homes while spending their time working to spend their money feeding people in a far off land.

It is hard not to see the paradox existing in domestic life of the American South in the 1960s. Inside the confines of the woman’s role in the family the attitude toward work was not one of respect but one of necessity, skewed and twisted by racist traditions. Furthermore, perceptions about social status created a vicious cycle for the Jim Crow South to exist. Unfortunately the South lived under this premise for nearly a hundred years after the Civil War for traditions become entrenched when perceptions about a space create a place. “The Help” depicts 1960s Jackson, MS with societal norms created out of a fundamentally flawed yet self perpetuating culture. Inside that microcosm of life in the privileged Southern household, the implications of a troubled domestic workplace trickled across regional social classes and through age gaps. All women in that time and place existed within a culturally dictated structure, urged to spend their time working in the house. “The Help” shows this domestic work and how the strong socially constructed frameworks in the 1960’s American South shaped and molded the domestic workplace environment for its women.

Jackson, Peter. Thinking Geographically. Volume 91 (3). Pages 199-200. Published in 2006.

The Help. Dir. Tate Taylor. Touchstone Home Entertainment, 2011.

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