Fall activities like apple picking and leaf peeping are generally considered safe, but with record crowds and a COVID surge expected to collide this fall, locals are worried

In the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the outpouring of New York City residents to surrounding rural areas offered a boon to Twin Star Orchards. The U-pick apple farm and maker of Brooklyn Cider House cider sits just outside the small village of New Paltz, New York, about 80 miles north of New York City and halfway to Albany.

Susan Yi, who founded the business along with her brother Peter, says a wave of transplants buying new homes in the Hudson Valley gave business a bump during the usual off-season of April and May. Newly remote workers with flexible schedules have driven more business on Fridays, too, and the farm has added live music, usually reserved for holidays, to bring people out on Saturdays. There was even a socially distanced Fourth of July pig roast on its sprawling outdoor pavilion.

But as fall approaches at Twin Star Orchards, Yi worries that the farm’s high season could bring as much trouble as much-needed income. “Fall is always very busy with late September [to] early October as the peak, with apple-picking and leaf-peeping drawing a lot of people to the area,” she says. “We are typically packed each weekend, so we are a little concerned about keeping the crowds spaced out during that time.”

As spring turned to summer, the Northeast began to get a grip on the COVID-19 pandemic. New York state made a miraculous about-face from the nation’s hotbed to a model for how to contain the pandemic with aggressive lockdowns and testing. It made nearby places like New Paltz safer too. However, the popularity of fall activities could undermine those trends by coaxing people out of their homes just as experts predict a second wave of cases.

With what we know about the spread of COVID-19, outdoor escapes like apple picking seem relatively safe, making these fall getaways especially attractive for cooped-up city dwellers and parents desperate to distract their kids. The brilliant reds and oranges of fall foliage — shining in the face of everything this year — can still be admired from the isolated safety of a family car. The smell of “world-famous” apple pies will still be wafting across New England, and the treats are just as easily devoured at six-foot-spaced outdoor tables. Country farms are the stuff of quarantine cottagecore dreams, where animals offer themselves for therapeutic cuddles and no one needs to shuffle off the sidewalk to maintain social distancing.

James Kirkikis / Shutterstock

But as tempting as this autumnal fantasy and its perceived safety may seem, the crowds it’s expected to draw to rural areas are inspiring mixed feelings among local business owners. After six months of financial hardship, including a delayed start to summer travel, some hope a fall boom will compensate for lost business. Others, fearing the potential for super-spreaders to hide among the pie stands and farm rows, worry that travelers could bring a second wave of infections to their doorsteps.

In May 2019, Greenleaf opened in Milford, New Hampshire, a small town famous for its pumpkin festival and leaf-peeping. The restaurant was only a few months old for its first festival in October last year. “Seeing all the people from the surrounding communities and traveling from afar to take part in this festival in such a small town was great to see,” says chef-owner Chris Viaud. “We were like, ‘Next year, we’re going to do this big. We’ll make sure we’re ingrained in the community and take a bigger part in this.’” Now the restaurant is in limbo as the town decides whether or not to cancel this year’s pumpkin festival.

Like nearly all other restaurants across America, Greenleaf is struggling with reduced traffic due to COVID-19. While it has received financial assistance from government programs, that can only take the restaurant so far, Viaud says, and he’s relying on business to pick up in the fall. Even if the pumpkin festival does get canceled, he still expects people will want to travel, and that puts him in a tricky position. “It’s a tough conversation. We have to think of ourselves and the wellness of our staff, but then the flip side of that is the wellness of the business,” he says.

Even in areas of the Northeast traditionally known more for summer and winter activities, fall has become an unexpected fulcrum of seasonal tourism. In Stowe, Vermont, for instance, summer hiking and winter skiing drive most tourist traffic, but summer travel was dampened by the coronavirus’s first wave, and Vermont’s popular ski mountains may shut down this winter. Local businesses need customers to show up in the next few months.

That might be tricky for Plate, a popular Main Street restaurant in Stowe that’s balancing its responsibility to locals against its dependence on tourists. “Early when we very first opened [for outdoor dining in May], we saw a lot of locals coming back to support us,” says chef-owner Aaron Martin. “Once people started traveling more, we noticed that it was mostly tourists, and our locals were feeling safer to stay away.” Martin says locals have returned tentatively, but they prefer the restaurant’s small, 10-seat patio to the indoor dining room — even at the 40 percent capacity it’s implemented to maintain social distancing. Some customers refuse to dine altogether if they can’t be seated outside. The chef chalks up their hesitance in part to the fact that out-of-state visitors tend not to follow Vermont’s 14-day mandatory quarantine for travelers. As temperatures drop, the restaurant will eventually have to pack up the outdoor seating, sacrificing the valuable added revenue along with it.

Viaud and Martin agree the potential for a second wave makes it difficult to make plans for the next few months. “Everyone’s listening to the media. In the fall, there is a scare of another spike. What does that mean for the businesses around?” Viaud wonders. Martin has no doubt about what would happen in Vermont. “We have a great governor who’s done a wonderful job. If we have a second wave, he’ll shut us all down again,” he says.

Boston Globe via Getty Images

While some people might be stressing about the approaching autumn, apple trees and pumpkin vines are forging ahead at full speed. “The farm doesn’t know a pandemic from a regular year. The fruit’s going to grow either way,” says farm operations manager Jay Mofenson of Lookout Farm in South Natick, Massachusetts. “We have certain fixed expenses of equipment needs and labor needs that, regardless of the pandemic, have to continue.”

Lookout was founded in 1651, making it one of the nation’s oldest continually operating farms. Today the 180-acre orchard is home to 55,000 trees, drawing around 50,000 eager amateur apple pickers each year. While the farm does sell some apples to wholesale distributors, Mofenson says, “Agritourism is really our primary focus.”

Luckily for the farm, summer peach season is typically much slower than the fall, only attracting an average of 5,000 visitors in a normal year. Not only does this mean Lookout didn’t sacrifice much U-pick business during the initial wave of the pandemic, but it also gave Mofenson and his team a chance to reconfigure the entire operation ahead of the anticipated fall crowds. They re-envisioned the customer experience from the moment a guest gets out of their car to the moment they return to the parking lot. They nixed the trains that usually ferry people to the fruit trees, established a one-way path through the rows, and set up a reservation system with caps on the number of pickers per hour.

Across the country, in Camarillo, California, home of the Abundant Table, the leaves aren’t much of a draw, but the farm still offers a classic fall experience. Programming extends well beyond U-pick to include a produce shop, educational programs for kids and adults, open community farming initiatives, and other BIPOC-focused nonprofit efforts.

All of these programs were paused in the initial days of the pandemic, but Linda Quiquivix, institutional sales partnerships and CSA manager, says the team is planning their return in the coming months, with strict social-distancing measures in place. “The really cool thing about us is we’re a collective. We’re a democratic workplace,” she says. “We get to decide what conditions we work under. We always keep abreast of the [COVID-19] situation, so we don’t have any problems codifying plans according to new realities.”

Quiquivix explains that after the highly publicized breakdown of the food system early in the pandemic, community farming, U-pick, and the produce stand give people a chance to support local farming, which many customers are recognizing as increasingly important. The Abundant Table is also collaborating with the Rodale Institute, a nonprofit focused on organic farming, to set up a U-pick, no-till pumpkin patch. As kids shift to remote learning in the fall, Quiquivix is hoping the school district will allow a class of sixth graders to come help analyze the pumpkin patch once a week, not only to discuss maintaining soil carbon by avoiding tilling, but also the pre-colonial farming practices of the Chumash people on that land.

Lookout Farm

Farther north, at R. Kelley Farms in Sacramento, owner Ron Kelley committed to his summer crops back in April, planting his seeds when rumors still indicated the pandemic would clear up soon. U-pick typically accounts for 60 percent of business for the 28-year-old farm, and the summer high season has been going well. Kelley has implemented social distancing and a reservation system, allowing him to host visitors from as far as 100 miles away to pick crowder, purple hull, and black-eye beans.

But that’s all changing in the fall, which doesn’t drive nearly as much business for him. The potential costs outweigh any potential gains for offering his usual winter greens for U-pick. “My business is the least of my concerns. I’m worried about my health,” he says. “I’m 72 years old and do not want to take any chances of getting ill from working outdoors in the fall and winter.”

While most restaurants and farms plan to do everything they can to stay in business, Kelley is more open about the potential of closing up shop. “I’m at the age that this may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.” he says. “Once I finish this year, then I’ll take a hard look at it, decide whether I want to gamble again next year or what exactly I want to do.”

“It’s going to be a challenging year. I can’t say where we’re going to end up, financially speaking,” Mofenson says bluntly. But there’s always an upside to working through the crisis. “The farm is a very special place to us, to a lot of people. The benefit is tons of comments all the time from people about how grateful they are to have an opportunity to be outdoors, to see the kids smiling. It’s really been a silver lining to this whole situation.” He adds, “Hopefully everyone has a better 2021.”

Mutual aid networks swelled during the pandemic. How will they continue to grow and serve once it’s over?

In the early days of the pandemic, storied community activists and those newly unemployed, or working from home for the first time, came together to join or form mutual aid networks across the country. These groups have spent months building volunteer rolls, creating community connections, and perfecting the use of Slack as a virtual dispatcher. And with states opening back up despite the pandemic wearing on, some are trying to shift the resources and energy to fight a mounting challenge: food insecurity, which will outlast the pandemic.

Some projects aim to rewrite entire lanes of our food system: seeds and gardening advice distributed to hubs around the country, a quickly growing network of free fridges to store fresh food, and fleets of cyclist couriers ready to fill in the gaps. The new movement is also centered around food dignity: letting people eat according to their preferences, rather than subsist on whatever donations are available at a food bank that week.

“Distribution is the number-one reason why food injustice happens,” says Sasha Verma, a member of the operations team of Corona Courier, a mutual aid group that serves most of New York City. “We are helping all these people who can’t leave their homes. Who was helping them before? I don’t fucking know.”

After months managing dozens of daily dispatches across the city, in June, the group decided to pivot to a longer-term strategy it hopes will establish a groundwork for food security, without relying so much on central dispatching or coordination. It set up “pods” of about 50 families and buildings across the city, matching them with couriers who could address their needs more directly, which helps form community bonds. Basically, the plan is a slightly formalized way of matching folks in need of food with neighbors who can help them get it.

The pandemic, and its wave of unemployment, attracted tons of first-timers to mutual aid groups; folks who had the privilege of never experiencing food insecurity saw first-hand how hard it is just to get groceries to hungry people. Verma says she joined her group, a citywide grocery and supply delivery effort that attracted more than 500 volunteers, because she had a hunch no government or charity agency was up for the challenge ahead. That sunk in when she found out the state unemployment office was sending people to the newly formed Corona Courier instead of a more established service.

“I’m not surprised, because they can’t even do something as simple as what we were doing, which is just buying someone else groceries,” she says.

Corona Courier groceries are usually paid for through donations from Abolition Action Grocery Fund (which you can donate to here), an offshoot of the NYC Democratic Socialists of America’s COVID-19 Relief Fund. It’s raised nearly $80,000 so far, mostly from donations of about $25. That kind of small fundraising is key to the future of the efforts, organizers say. Mutual aid groups often have a distaste for some of the traditional nonprofits, which they say are bogged down by bureaucracy and red tape, and that they believe exclude people who don’t fit their specific requirements for aid. One of the guiding missions of this new era of support is to trust in people to take what they need.

“When we think about institutionalized food aid — for instance, CalFresh or food stamps or other means of distributing food to people — there’s a lot of means testing,” Gabriela Alemán of the Mission Meals Coalition, a San Francisco mutual aid organization that started in March, told the Extra Spicy podcast recently. “There’s a lot of questioning of, ‘Do these people deserve it? By what parameters do they deserve it? And how do we give it to them by however much we decide that they need?’”

Mission Meals Collective, she said, wants to instill trust in its members so there are no roadblocks to people seeking food through its resources, and eliminate the “savior complex” of other institutions that think they know best what a community needs. The group has set up a Patreon membership program to keep donations flowing every month.

“We’re not here to police people in what they do or don’t need,” she told the podcast. “I think also people fundamentally don’t understand that under-resourced communities, just because one family or one household might be under-resourced, that doesn’t mean that they completely forget their own sense of humanity for their neighbor.”

Liz Baldwin, the founder of Corona Courier, says her group hopes to expand its pod system to more families in the future (they’re still accepting volunteers, too), but keeping the agility of a loosely organized mutual aid group is crucial.

“I worked for [a nonprofit], and I just see how bureaucracy can really scramble missions,” she says. “There’s no part of me that’s like, ‘I should take this project and form it into a nonprofit.’ I think you lose the ability to really interact with individuals and try to help them in a way that makes sense for them. A lot of times what happens in nonprofits is that money gets kind of weird.”

Food insecurity is not just a pandemic problem: About 11 percent of Americans, or or 35 million people, were food insecure in 2018, meaning they didn’t have enough food to meet the nutritional needs of all members of their households due to money or access, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Advocates have little hope the federal government will help, while state and local governments are strapped for cash and food pantries are being strained. About 40 percent of people visiting food banks during the pandemic are first-time visitors, according to NBC News.

Mutual aid as a concept is not new, but it’s never been activated on this scale before, with the entire country on lockdown and so many able-bodied people out of work with nothing to do but help. It doesn’t hurt that this is the first crisis of the digital workflow era, when Slack, Zoom, and Airtable make complex coordination easy. Picking up an aid request can fit between gossip with coworkers on another Slack channel.

“We don’t want this to just be a fad. We want this to be a movement where we can be sustainable over the winter,” says Ash Godfrey, one of the people behind Chicago’s Love Fridge project. “This is something that 10 years from now could be a thing. We want people to do it right.”

The group was recently contacted by a city alderman to talk about adding a fridge outside of his office. Godfrey wasn’t expecting help from the government, but this connection fits its plans for serving the community for years to come.

“We believe that this relationship will give us more credibility as a movement,” Godfrey says. “While we are a community and people’s movement first and foremost, the more support we can get from those with resources and power, the stronger we will be. We are here to stay and having the alderman’s support is affirmation.”

The Love Fridge is now working to solve a major roadblock to its longevity: surviving brutal Chicago winters. The group is setting up a volunteer management program (which you can get involved with here) to make sure the fridges are maintained daily, working on blueprints for shelters around the machines, and talking with a community fridge group in Canada about how to survive a bitter January and February.

“If there’s a fridge everywhere, can you imagine the lives that would change?” Godfrey says.

Free fridges are not a panacea to food insecurity, says Sam Pawliger, who is heading up a community fridge project out of the Clinton Hill Fort Greene Mutual Aid group in Brooklyn. But they do help break down a barrier: Even a person who might feel embarrassed to call a mutual aid group for help could walk down the street to grab a sandwich from a fridge.

The fridge has been adding some elements to fill the gaps where food pantries fall short: When organizers found out residents of a nearby shelter were not allowed to bring food inside, they attached a can opener to the fridge and added disposable cutlery to an attached shelf.

“I saw this as something that we could stand up quickly to help build solidarity with our neighbors,” Pawliger says, “and as a resource to both combat food waste and food insecurity, both of which are major issues in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill in terms of food security.”

Of course, being able to produce your own food with consistency is the most secure thing. This is what Nate Kleinman hopes to inspire with the Cooperative Gardens Commission, which he helped start in March to collect and send seeds to hubs across the country. Kleinman learned the potential of mutual aid when working with Occupy Sandy in New Jersey in 2012, which was key to helping dig out homes and provide supplies to people deeply affected by the hurricane.

“In a lot of ways, Occupy Sandy changed the way that the official powers that be in disaster relief do their work,” he says, citing a 2013 report from the Department of Homeland Security that praised the work of the all-volunteer group and its non-hierarchical structure. “There’s a much bigger recognition and importance of mutual aid organizations in disaster relief.”

In the start of the pandemic, Kleinman saw a seed shortage coming: Many commercial companies were dealing with a huge surge in demand; others were shutting down entirely. The commission is providing donated seeds and advice for folks with home plots, community farms, and tribal gardens. The project started at the outset of the pandemic, but its goals are targeted at getting people to rethink how they eat.

“Seeds are at the root of all food security. This is a ‘teach a person to fish’ kind of issue,” he says. “If we’re giving people what they need to actually grow food themselves, that’s going to be much more sustainable in the long term at addressing food security.”

The group is working with local partners across the country to get seeds to disadvantaged or marginalized communities, places that were dealing with food insecurity before the coronavirus hit. Unlike other mutual aid groups, which tend to be located in population centers, the seeds can reach people in rural areas, with hubs in Mississippi, Texas, western North Carolina, and more. So far, they’ve set up 217 hubs across the country and reached an estimated 10,000 gardens, Kleinman says. And they’re accepting more resource donations on their website.

Donated seeds are sent in bulk to the group’s Philadelphia base, where they are then repackaged and distributed to the hubs. Some are sent to people through the mail, others have set up distribution hubs in neighborhood libraries and other public areas. Now, the group is focusing on fall seeds: cabbage, leafy greens, root vegetables, radishes, and cover crops, to keep the soil healthy for years to come.

“People have taken for granted that there will always be farm workers and farms producing food, and with the clamp down that also happened before the pandemic at the border, the challenges for migrant workers are very real,” Kleinman says. “I think it would be surprising if there weren’t more food shortages in the immediate future.”

The idea of exorcising capitalism from food access is an ambitious one. But organizers say the pandemic has shown that community-based mutual aid may be the only way forward.

“When I sparked this up, I never thought about, ‘What’s the government going to do for me?’” says Ramon Norwood, the founder of the Love Fridge. “That’s what we’re learning with the pandemic. It’s not enough. It shouldn’t just be the bare minimum.”

Tim Donnelly is a Brooklyn-based freelance reporter and editor. Follow him on Twitter.

Plus, once again everyone’s laughing at the president’s soup gaffe, and more news to start your day

Oatly is facing backlash for its ties to the Blackstone Group

Oatly, the Swedish oat milk brand whose popularity ushered in a new wave of vegan dairy alternatives, is facing a boycott by climate-minded fans and activists in light of a belated public realization that Oatly sold a 10-percent, $200 million stake to an investment group led by controversial private-equity firm Blackstone Group in July.

Blackstone, whose chairman and CEO is noted Trump donor Stephen A. Schwarzman, has invested in Hidrovias do Brasil, a Brazilian company that has been accused of contributing to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest through deforestation and the development of a highway to facilitate the farming and export of grain and soybeans. (The company refuted these allegations in a statement last fall.)

To protesters, Oatly’s link to Blackstone betrays the vegan company’s halo of environmental sustainability. Oat milk is seen as a more eco-friendly alternative to traditional cow’s milk, as well as non-dairy milks such as almond, the production of which involves heavy water and pesticide usage.

Oatly, meanwhile, has been replying non-stop to people’s objections on Twitter, writing that the company is still committed to doing “anything in our power to make the systems in which we operate more sustainable,” including global investments. “If we can bring about a change in this process as a driving force in the financial world to channel more capital flows into sustainability, then this is a first step in the right direction,” the company wrote in another tweet.

As Bettina Makalintal writes for Vice, “the situation highlights the challenges in ‘ethical’ and conscious shopping.” In order for sustainable companies to scale and take a bigger share of the mainstream market, they need capital, which usually comes from sources that are more interested in money than in the environment (“there is no ethical consumption under capitalism,” etc.).

And in other news…

• The National Restaurant Association has launched a “Restaurant Revival” campaign to entice customers back to restaurants in a time when dining out still carries risks, especially to servers. [Restaurant Hospitality]
• Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney has apologized for dining indoors at a restaurant in Maryland while restaurants in his own city aren’t open for indoor dining. [CNN]
• In case you’re wondering why so many people on Twitter were joking about soup last night… [Heavy]
• Champion and General Mills have collaborated to release a line of cereal-inspired clothing, which in my sartorial opinion could have used a bit more streetwear-influenced design than just sticking the Lucky Charms leprechaun on a T-shirt. [WWD]
• 2020 in a butter sculpture. [Syracuse.com]

• All AM Intel Coverage [E]

Steven Wong sources the highest quality lobster for some of NYC’s best restaurants at his family-run business, Aqua Best Seafood Market

“Selling lobsters is definitely a complicated process,” says Steven Wong, owner of Aqua Best Seafood Market in New York City. “I’ve eaten so much lobster in my life I can actually taste the difference in where they caught it.” Wong and his family have been selling and shipping diverse seafood to customers, many of whom are restaurateurs for some of NYC’s best restaurants, for over 30 years. In that time, Wong has become known for his sourcing of high-grade lobster, so much so that he earned the nickname “the lobster ‘sourcerer’”

“A lobster’s not just a lobster. A lobster is just like a diamond,” says Wong of the many different types of lobsters he sources from all over the country. “There are different cuts, different grades, different sizes, there are different areas from where you catch lobster that have different qualities.”

Before COVID-19, the shop went through an average 60 to 80 thousand pounds of lobster per week, and during the holidays that number could be up to 150 thousand pounds. Wong’s company sells lobster and other fish to 175 restaurants in the northeast, and they ship anywhere in the world in under 24 hours; “even in Singapore,” he notes, “which has the longest flight, like 19 hours.”

Eater followed Wong throughout his typical day. His first task, which begins around around 6:00 a.m., is to fulfill special fish orders for specific restaurants. At 9:00 a.m. he receives an order of fish from Fulton Fish Market from his brother, and together he and his team sort the fish by type, weight, and region. At 11 a.m., Wong hand delivers lobsters to some of his restaurant clientele, like Le District in Battery Park where they make fresh lobster rolls, and Saigon Social in the Lower East Side. And at 1:30 p.m. Wong awaits another 5,000 pound lobster order at his distribution center, which has specialty tanks that keep the lobster alive, fresh, and ready for the next delivery.

“I think one of the key ingredients in cooking is fresh ingredients — what kind of ingredients you get, when you get it — so you can create the best dish,” says Wong. “And that’s something we try to do for every restaurant and every chef.”

Restaurants by David Chang, Danny Meyer, Keith McNally, and others remain lightly staffed as operators await guidance on indoor dining

The pandemic has decimated the restaurant industry as we know it — will it be rebuilt to be more equitable, or will it stay broken?

The pandemic has decimated the restaurant industry as we know it, exposing its fault lines and inequities…

Now What?

America’s Restaurants Are Worth Saving. Here’s How.

The Restaurant of the Future Puts Workers First

What Is an Anti-Gentrification Restaurant?

Fake Meat Alone Won’t Save the World

Gratuity (Still) Not Included

What If Nothing but Chain Restaurants Survive?

Credits

Editorial lead: Erin DeJesus
Creative director: Brittany Holloway-Brown
Development: Vince Dixon
Editor: Matt Buchanan
Contributors: Kathryn Campo Bowen, Monica Burton, Brenna Houck, Nick Mancall-Bitel, Rebecca Flint Marx, Meghan McCarron, Jaya Saxena, Elazar Sontag, Lesley Suter, Jenny G. Zhang
Illustrator: Simone Noronha
Photographers: Michelle K. Min, Clay Williams
Copy editors: Emma Alpern, Rachel Kreiter
Engagement: Milly McGuinness, Adam Moussa
Project manager: Ellie Krupnick
Special thanks to: Sonia Chopra, Madeleine Davies, Amanda Kludt

The coffee industry can be a hotbed of exploitation and exclusion. Red Bay Coffee is pushing for change

One of the walls at Red Bay Coffee headquarters is taken up by a huge living sculpture of Africa, all sorts of plants dangling from the continent’s outline. The space, on a quiet block in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland, California, is both cafe and coffee roastery. The hum of machines joins with the buzz of conversation as the space fills up and a line winds out the door. This is a community hub for the neighborhood. That’s fitting, since Red Bay isn’t an ordinary coffee company.

Started in 2014 by Oakland artist and entrepreneur Keba Konte, Red Bay is in many ways a response to the failings of third-wave coffee culture, which saw an increased emphasis on the quality of coffee and its sourcing, but resulted in mostly white-owned cafes and often-underpaid employees. Konte’s mission is to adjust how coffee is treated every step of the way. He wants more demand for high-quality coffee in the countries where it’s produced, so farmers depend less on exploitative overseas markets. He wants customers who haven’t felt comfortable dipping their toes into the world of fancy coffee to have a place to ask questions and sip in peace. He wants to create a home behind the counter, where queer folk, people of color, and those who have been incarcerated can learn a skill and make a meaningful income.

If that sounds like a lot for one coffee company to tackle, that’s because it is. But as Red Bay quickly grows, Konte is well on his way to realizing this vision, setting a new standard for the coffee industry. Red Bay is the product of Konte’s ideas about how the world of coffee could be. So when I started thinking about the future of food, and of the restaurant industry, Konte was the first person I called.

Eater: What are the weaknesses and the biggest issues that you’re seeing right now in your industry?

Keba Konte: The industry still lacks Black leadership at the highest levels. At a Peet’s, at a Starbucks, and even some of these other third-wave roasteries and companies, you’ll see more and more Black and brown baristas: The front line almost feels like it’s getting a little bit more integrated. And we’re still talking about integration. But when you look past the veil at the leadership roles at most of these coffee companies, we’re still looking at mostly white men who are the decision-makers, who are driving the culture at these places. That’s a problem.

There’s still a lot of exploitation that happens at the farm level. That’s probably the single biggest challenge and weakness of this entire industry. The people who are doing by far the most labor-intensive portion of the entire supply chain are at origin, and they’re getting the smallest piece of the pie in terms of compensation and how the dollar is divided up. The level of exploitation and poverty that exists for the farmers and producers is a tragedy.

When you look at these issues from the origin through production to the baristas, where and how do you see Red Bay and yourself intervening?

It doesn’t stop at the barista. It starts, obviously, at the farm and all the way through the value stream, from the importer to the exporter to the local trading houses to the individual roasters to the QC [quality control] and production and the marketing and then, the barista. After that, it is the spaces: From the coffeehouses to the streets and the consumer. I make that distinction because a couple of years back in a Starbucks in Philadelphia, they called the police on these two [Black] guys who were just there for a meeting.

Where we intervene — starting at the very end — is creating spaces that are flipping the script by making our spaces unapologetically welcoming to Black and brown people: By putting Africa on the wall, by not exploiting our farmers with pictures of them smiling with sweat and dirty hands that they’re not directly benefiting from. We are hiring some of these underrepresented and underestimated communities at every level of production. That includes roasters.

And we’re not just talking about race. Race is definitely one major component, but we’re talking about gender, we’re talking about LGBTQ people, we’re talking about disabled folks, we’re talking about the formerly incarcerated. We are very intentional about creating opportunities for folks with unnecessary barriers to entry into the industry. Sometimes, those barriers are people not getting promoted from barista to a trainer to a manager. Sometimes, those barriers are not getting hired in the first place. They might be in a wheelchair or have a police record and have to check that box on the application: Have you been convicted of a felony? Sometimes, the barrier is none of those things; it’s just that when they walk into these spaces, it doesn’t feel welcoming.

Us breaking down these barriers is incentivizing our farmers for quality and paying them even more than fair-trade rates. It’s meeting people where they are with their coffee education. We use our platform to let Black people know, to let African Americans know that coffee came from Africa and that this is our heritage. That is our inheritance. Since we’ve been under the Red Bay brand for 6 ½ years, we’ve seen an emergence of a Black coffee movement. There are coffee shops opening up that are not just owned by Black people, but are also unapologetic about claiming their culture and flexing it within the coffee space.

So what should the coffee industry look like in 2025? And what would it actually take to get there?

Well, it is going to take a struggle. These things don’t just happen by themselves. Let me first address our crystal ball and [the idea of] looking into the future: We’re going to have to think about wages. We’ve been paying a minimum of $15 per hour as our starting wage for our employees, baristas, and production-line crew, ever since the minimum wage was $10. Now that the minimum wage has caught up to what we have been paying for the last six years — and we’ve made incremental increases there — we’re trying to raise the bar again. We would like to continue to push the envelope in terms of wages.

I would like to think that in five years’ time, there will be a growth in the consumption of coffee in origin countries around the world: That means more coffee shops, coffee culture, and coffee business in countries like Kenya, Colombia, Mexico, and Guatemala. What that does is drive the price up, and it makes those coffee producers less dependent on exporting to Europe, America, and Japan. We really have to get that right.

Right now, farmers are being paid at almost an all-time low. The commodity price is under $1 for one pound of coffee. It’s hard to explain how much work goes into processing one pound of coffee, and the farmer, the producer, and the collective has to share that dollar.

The Black Lives Matter movement has hit a chord that is reverberating globally. This is not just a blip; this will continue. Those changes are starting to impact corporate movements, decisions, and structures. The first layer is more surface-level talk and brown-washing, if you will. [Corporations are] reaching out to companies like Red Bay to become the face of a campaign or an ad. We’re participating in some of these campaigns. There are also other initiatives where they’re actually starting to really consider Black businesses as vendors. So now, we’re getting opportunities from [some of the traditional gatekeepers] to become coffee providers — Good Eggs, Thrive, Target. I think if they’re reaching out to us, they’re reaching out to others, as well.

Even before this last wave, Starbucks hired a chief operating officer who is a Black woman. You’re seeing more infiltration on the upper corporate level. That’s the more critical part of the diversity piece. I think that will continue to happen, and it will happen because people are pushing for it — not just Black people, but the mainstream of America are pushing for some of these changes.

Do you see space for there to be a major change in how a wider swath of people is interacting with coffee?

What comes to mind is whenever you have Black people taking over in an industry, or really influencing that industry, Black people have this certain sort of swag, a certain way of doing things and including different flavors. So many things in this industry — for example, tasting notes on a coffee or a wine — are so subjective and they’re so culturally based.

When you’re trying to taste and identify a flavor, all you have is the references from your own personal experience. We’ve had experiences in the cupping lab when we’re tasting coffee and — one example, we had this Navajo brother, Kelvin, and when we were talking about tasting notes, he started talking about saddle leather and the morning smell of riding a horse through a forest, and roasted yams. People will bring their life experience and it’s what you’re missing when you don’t have that diversity of culture and cultural references.

But who knows? We’ve been trying to do the best we can — we introduced a candied yam latte a couple of years ago that Jessica helped create. We are working on a cocoa butter product right now. We’ve been doing a charcoal black latte. We’ve got a couple more things in the pipeline with traditional African spices. I’m not sure what everyone else is planning, but I know they’re going to bring it.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Michelle Min is a food and travel photographer based in San Francisco.

The pandemic has decimated the restaurant industry as we know it, exposing its fault lines and inequities…

Editorial lead: Erin DeJesus

Creative director: Brittany Holloway-Brown

Development: Vince Dixon

Editor: Matt Buchanan

Contributors: Kathryn Campo Bowen, Monica Burton, Brenna Houck, Nick Mancall-Bitel, Rebecca Flint Marx, Meghan McCarron, Jaya Saxena, Elazar Sontag, Lesley Suter,
Jenny G. Zhang

Illustrator: Simone Noronha

Photographers: Michelle K. Min, Clay Williams

Copy editors: Emma Alpern, Rachel P. Kreiter

Engagement: Milly McGuinness, Adam Moussa

Project manager: Ellie Krupnick

Special thanks to: Sonia Chopra, Madeleine Davies, Amanda Kludt

Plus, McDonald’s is hit with another lawsuit, and more news to start your day

Portions of the profits will go to assisting Black children and the elderly

As brands like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben’s have come under fire for using racist stereotypes to sell their products, rapper Master P has decided to enter the pancake and rice market to offer an alternative. His “Uncle P’s” line of products includes rice, pancake mix, syrup, and oatmeal, and profits will go to charity to serve Black communities. “If they made billions of dollars off Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, imagine how much we’ll make to give back to our own community. It’ll be us helping us without having to wait for the government. We can actually change the world,” he told CNN.

The brand actually launched in March, but after brands like Aunt Jemima began changing their logos in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests around the country, Uncle P’s started getting more attention. It shouldn’t be so shocking to have a Black face of a brand who isn’t a caricature, but here we are.

And in other news...

• The McDonald’s mess continues: 52 Black ex-franchisees are suing the company for $1 billion, alleging racial discrimination. [BI]
• Two students had to use WiFi at a local Taco Bell to go to school. [CNN]
• Look upon this 3-D printed steak and despair. [BI]
• After people stopped receiving additional money in unemployment checks, grocery store spending went down, as people couldn’t afford groceries. And Congress is still sitting on the next stimulus package! [WSJ]
• USDA is now allowing all kids, regardless of enrollment or income, to eat free meals at school through the end of 2020. [The Counter]
• All our frugal eating habits have curbed food waste. But will we keep it up after the pandemic? [WaPo]
• From the dystopian world of the gig economy, Whole Foods drivers in Chicago are trying to get a jump on orders by hanging their phones in trees outside the order centers. [Bloomberg]
• Whole Foods opened its first online-only store. [USA Today]

• All AM Intel Coverage [E]

By building decolonized food systems, the Sioux Chef and Indigenous Food Lab co-founder hopes to create more food security in communities across the United States

A chef and educator, Sean Sherman is one of North America’s loudest voices speaking to the challenges and opportunities within Indigenous food systems. Sherman and partner Dana Thompson co-founded the Sioux Chef, an organization that highlights Native American cuisine while documenting a “decolonized” diet, as Sherman, along with co-author Beth Dooley, did in the James Beard Award-winning cookbook The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen.

Sherman, who belongs to the Oglala Lakota tribe, grew up on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, where he learned firsthand the food security challenges Indigenous communities face in the United States. As he told the New York Times in 2019, his family’s Pine Ridge pantry was often stocked with government-issued rations that they sometimes supplemented with food foraged on the reservation. When he was a teenager, Sherman left Pine Ridge to take a kitchen job in a Minneapolis restaurant. Over the years, his vision evolved to focus on researching and introducing contemporary cuisine made with pre-colonial ingredients to diners around the country, and creating pathways to more nutritious and culturally appropriate foods to Indigenous communities across the U.S.

Sherman and his partners also operate the nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS), which is working to establish a network of leaders in Indigenous farming and culinary communities. Prior to the pandemic, NATIFS and the Sioux Chef were in the process of opening a restaurant, education center, and commercial kitchen focused on providing healthy food to the community. The current health crisis has made that path more difficult, but it’s also made clear the need for a more resilient, accessible food system that helps prevent the types of preexisting conditions that make BIPOC communities more susceptible to diseases like COVID-19. “We want to help support more young Indigenous entrepreneurs as we grow,” Sherman says, “especially once we get past COVID, helping to see more Indigenous chefs to come out of the woodwork and follow their dreams.”

Eater spoke with Sherman about his vision for the future of food and how it fits within the larger context of a global health crisis and social uprisings in Minneapolis and beyond.

Eater: What do you see as the future of food, especially coming from an Indigenous communities and foodways perspective?

Sean Sherman: A lot of our work in the beginning was just raising awareness to what Indigenous foods are and why that’s important and relevant information to understand. Showcasing the amazing bounty of the diversity that we have, both culturally and culinarily, across North America in particular, is our main focus. So for us, it’s been quite a few years of networking, researching, and visiting all these different regions and seeing the amazing food culture that exists everywhere.

What’s really come to light, because of COVID, is our vulnerability and over-reliance on over-processed and commercial foods. And it really strengthens our argument: The understanding of Indigenous food systems is the understanding of how regional food systems work, and I really believe that’s where we need to be moving toward in the future.

We need community-based food systems. We need a lot more local community-based farming systems. We need better usage of our land. Our work is focused on the culinary aspect and developing a lot of education around that. So we’ll be using our commercial kitchen as a showcase for utilizing these healthy and regionally produced foods, and doing it for us, in a cultural way — focused on Indigenous cultures of where we are. But anybody can be learning from these systems.

What sorts of real, concrete change do you see happening in Indigenous communities looking forward five years? Do you have any vision for what could actually take place?

With Indigenous Food Lab, it’s the whole vision. We were originally going to open up the first unit of Indigenous Food Lab this year, with a restaurant, a commissary production kitchen, and a classroom area to teach Indigenous curriculum. Since COVID hit, we decided that we can’t really invest in a dine-in restaurant at this moment, but we’re moving ahead and opening up the educational and production side.

Here in Minneapolis, we’ve been the epicenter of all this social uprising; our community member George Floyd was murdered just a few blocks from our kitchen. Our kitchen is on the main street; all the buildings around us are completely razed to the ground. So there was a lot of community food insecurity happening, which is why we mobilized and started pushing out free meals every day. We’ve been pumping out two to 400 meals every single day this entire summer, and we’re looking at doing it through the whole winter, because who knows what’s going to happen.

But the original vision was setting up the production kitchen so it could be a training center. People would come, and we would show them how to process Indigenous foods for 400 people a day.

Our goal is to work directly with tribal communities. We’re helping them to develop their own focused Indigenous kitchen for their community: menus and recipes that are relevant to that tribe with their language and their environment in mind. Hopefully, once we get those systems set up, we can give them the tools they need to grow better community gardens [with] Indigenous seeds, utilizing some of our partners that are focused on that.

If they have surplus of foods, that they could trade or sell. We’ll have a demand that we’re creating and be able to plug it into our system. So they can sell through us if they want to, or trade with some of the other tribal communities that are going to be doing the same kind of programming.

Our goal is to open up Indigenous Food Labs in cities around the nation. But each Indigenous Food Lab would do the same work of becoming a regional training center, education and support center for creating Indigenous food systems. And we can eventually cross borders.

The globe had been swallowed up by colonialist and capitalistic efforts for so long that we’ve lost touch with a lot of these really amazing foodways that still survive in many regions around the world. It’s going to be really important to understand that cultural diversity and that knowledge base that sits out there. We’re just trying to create something where we can become a center point to save that knowledge for this next generation.

With the pandemic, more people are seeing the cracks in the system that created so many issues for food insecurity. Do you see any opportunity to convince people that this is a model that’s more sustainable than the current one that we have?

We’re not super concerned with what other people are going to think. We see a very clear path for ourselves. We’ve been problem solving [this] even before COVID. It strengthens the work that we’re doing by showcasing [the fact that] if we did have better community-based and regionally based food systems set up, that we could be more food secure.

This is going to be a weird winter. We’re still surging with pandemic cases right now. There’s going to be a lot more unemployment, because restaurants are going to continuously be shut down, and we have no idea what kind of support we’re getting from our own government to get through this. What’s going to happen when flu season hits again?

I think it’s a great time to reset. It’s a great time to reflect, for people to think about something that they could be doing differently. Where are they getting their food? How are they writing their menus? They shouldn’t be relying on these big-box trucks bringing foods in from all over the place. We should be really focused on supporting our local growers, no matter where they are, and developing menus around that.

It doesn’t have to be ego projects. It should be not about the chef in charge. It should really be about, “How can we do this because it’s just beneficial for our own community?” We made the conscious decision ourselves to only serve healthy Indigenous food, and regional Indigenous food on top of that. You have to be socially conscious and aware of the food that you’re serving; it directly impacts your customers, your clients, and their health. So why not make people healthy and happy, and get people used to having this healthy food out there?

You’ve been planning this for a long time, and it seems like there’s been a long coming movement toward more Indigenous food sovereignty in this country. But do you feel more hopeful now than you were before, or do you feel cautious?

We feel absolutely hopeful. This has been a long time building, but our vision keeps expanding and we keep seeing how we can integrate with other communities and other leaders in the food sovereignty movement.

We see a very bright future, and we’re basically stealing some parts of franchise models. If a Five Guys Burgers and Fries can open up 200 units in a few years, why can’t we use a similar system, but do it for good and push healthy food out there? We want people to be aware of the special history of the land that they’re standing on, the true histories of the Indigenous peoples from there, how it differs from other regions, and all the plant diversity that’s around them. We hope we can be really positive role models. We feel like tribal Indigenous communities can be great role models to showcase how they can turn something around.

We have this vision of one day being able to drive across the country stopping at Indigenous-run businesses that are particular to the land that they’re on, from people that are still there, and showcasing the immense amount of diversity that you would see. Every few hundred miles, you’d be in a new region with different foods, with different language, with different cultures and histories. That’s something really to think about, celebrate, and preserve for future generations to see, instead of trying to whitewash everything and say, “American food is hamburgers” or “Canadian food is poutine.” There’s so much more we could be doing that is relevant to where we are, and weaving the Indigenous histories into the fabric of who we are. It’s going to be really important to not ignore those histories.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The Sol Sips owner wants to see healthier, more mindful workplaces throughout the restaurant industry

Who gets to be well? Francesca Chaney tries to answer that question every day at Sol Sips, her vegan cafe in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. Through accessible, feel-good food, the 2019 Eater Young Gun shows how a successful business can uplift everyone, specifically the Black and brown people often excluded from wellness conversations. The cafe serves not just plant-based nutrition, but also free cooking classes to engage the community and provide inspiration to restaurant owners across the city.

Chaney pushes for wellness on the other side of the counter, too. “[A restaurant] doesn’t have to inherently be exploitive,” she says, suggesting owners think about “upholding the actual people that are [working] in these spaces regardless of the job description — upholding them and saying, ‘I support you and I see what you’re doing. I’m going to make sure that you feel supported, that you feel safe.’”

As many owners re-examine toxic workplaces, Chaney urges a total re-imagining of the relationship between boss and employee, and between cook and customer, suggesting a holistic alternative in which leaders value workers and chefs seek to provide nourishment over profit. “I’m always doing that work to evaluate because I’m not a person who’s completely 100 percent free of accountability,” she adds. “It’s a process of figuring out and navigating the service industry.” As she helps Eater conceptualize the ideal future of restaurants, Chaney shares her own evolution and her vision of wellness for all.

Eater: What do you think is going to happen in the next five years?

Francesca Chaney: I’m interested to see how the culture of dining and breaking bread with each other changes or transforms, and if there’s going to be more room for transforming the service industry. We already know the way that the service industry can be exploited.

I’m hoping that servers’ wage [the tipped minimum wage] is something we reassess: figuring out [how we] can support individuals who are working in the service industry and are banking on these tips. And being a little bit more holistic in thinking about how tedious, physical, and mentally draining it is to be in kitchen and restaurant culture, sometimes for seven days straight for some people. I’m looking forward to seeing a care-based approach that supports people working in this industry from the ground up.

Other than that, I would really hope that we’re moving away from valuing nourishing people based on the numbers, the amount of orders we can put out per hour. Can we actually consider the human experience in consuming this food? I would really like to see more reverence toward the human body in the everyday work of nourishing human beings.

What does a healthy workplace culture look like in the restaurant industry?

Definitely getting rid of servers’ wage. And then, for me, not creating a hierarchy — so we’re not thinking about the dishwasher as someone just washing the dishes. We’re valuing the fact that these dishes are being done so that we can get more work done; it’s a vital part of the flow of work. We’re not just looking at it like, “this is a dishwasher, this is a porter.” We are looking at the work culture from the team-based perspective. Everyone is a key player.

Something that I would also like to see within healthy work culture is tending to people’s needs a little more. I’ve noticed in a rush, or on a Saturday, if it’s just a lot of work, everyone is in it until we get the work done. I’ve been working on being more mindful of [things like] more breaks for water for everyone, more nourishment, and making sure people feel supported.

And then maybe not upholding the seven-day-a-week practice that I feel is such a route to burnout within the restaurant industry. Is there a real need to be open six or seven days a week? Can this industry function on five days? I’m not saying I’m advocating for everyone just shortening their hours. I don’t know everyone’s situation; I don’t know what their needs are or what they’re looking to get in return on their investment. But I’ve had conversations with restaurateurs who are like, “We don’t even need employees to make the food. We can just have this machine that’s making this food or taking the orders. People just come up to the iPad and put their order in.”

I would like the general culture to value each human being, so that it can transfer back into valuing human interaction in the actual service of the food between customers and the workspace environment.

What responsibilities will future restaurants have toward their customers and their neighborhoods?

We’re thinking about the culture of the space. This is a conversation I’ve had with other restaurateurs in Bushwick, and I’ve had to call them in on this because we work to say, “I’m a restaurateur and I’m not racist” or “I’m a restaurateur and I’m hiring locally.” And that’s enough. But also, what culture are you upholding in the environment? I’ve been to restaurants and bars in Bushwick where I’m cool with the owner, but when I go in there on a regular Saturday night, I’m the only Black person in there. That’s not to say that the owners don’t have interactions with Black people. It’s just they’re upholding a space that’s contributing toward gentrification, where people in the neighborhood feel very comfortable with being lax about the topic, or just being exclusive, even in how they interact with each other on a regular Friday or Saturday night.

We’re using these jargony terms like “being inclusive” or “being mindful of people that are coming in” or “mindful consumption,” but I think it’s just like, “value the human being.” Value every person that comes inside your space. [We need to] start moving from: how much we can make based on how we design the space, who’s going to think it’s hip, or how much money they have in their pockets, or what trust fund babies are going to be supporting this space. [And start] saying, “Wherever you’re opening your restaurant, can anyone just come in here and feel comfortable to get a meal?” ... I value the human experience in my space over the aesthetic of “Is this Instagrammable?” or “Is this going to be the it place in food?” It’s really not about that. It’s food. We have to be mindful.

What’s going to drive these changes? Does it come from customers, education from chefs, an industrywide push?

That’s hard to tell. I would hope that it’s a collective conversation where everyone’s input is involved. We value feedback from all ends of the spectrum and we uphold it. We might not have a choice to say, “These people will drive the conversation.” It might be that the conversation is here and it’s happening and it’s now. We have to address the need to be more responsible with food and more responsible with access.

I’m looking forward to seeing more visibility in the food world that isn’t based on who’s going to drive numbers or influence or profit for a restaurant concept or a media company that’s amplifying the voices of people in the food world. I would love to just see a range of different people, whether it’s one of my homegirls that has a food business that she’s running out of her home kitchen that is nourishing to the folks around her. Different things that don’t have to exist within the structure of Michelin or even Eater saying, “This is the creme de la creme of food.” I would like to see the narrative go different places. Everyone has their own connection with food because everyone has to interact with it. People are doing different things that may be so unknown to us; it’s important to share because it’s their story. I would love to see that visibility in the community and in the restaurant of the future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Restaurants cannot continue if the workers who run them are left the most vulnerable, “The Ethnic Restaurateur” author Krishnendu Ray argues

When it comes to the intersection of food, dining, and society, there are few better scholars than Krishnendu Ray, an associate professor and chair of the department of food studies at New York University. Ray’s seminal book The Ethnic Restaurateur, published in 2016, reveals the changing tastes of the American diner, as seen through the cuisines they eat and the livelihoods of the immigrant restaurateurs that make those dishes. Particularly illuminating is his articulation of the “global hierarchy of taste,” explaining why some cuisines — for example, French — are considered esteemed and command higher prices, while others — say, Chinese — still bear the label of “ethnic” and are often constrained by expectations of cheapness. (It has to do with nations’ capital and military power.)

“I’m optimistic about certain things, about our ability to change. But I’m pessimistic about others,” Ray said in a 2016 interview with the Washington Post. Four years later, amid the greatest upheaval the restaurant industry has seen in modern history, not to mention the worst economic disruption since the Great Depression, does his view of the future remain optimistic? Eater asked Ray to share what changes could — or should — take place in an idealized vision of what comes next for the restaurant industry. In the following interview, Ray discusses socialized health care, the resiliency of immigrant-owned mom-and-pop restaurants, and the opportunity within the crisis:

Eater: What worries you most about what the restaurant industry is facing right now?

Krishnendu Ray: The crisis is twofold: It’s a public health crisis and an economic crisis. In some ways, the economic crisis is expressing itself primarily through rent and lease questions. That was always a problem before COVID-19, and that’s what was driving small businesses out of business. American states and cities don’t generally have a useful point of view on how to protect small businesses from excessive rent increases, because in most cities, there is no control over commercial rent.

In the medium and long run, we will have to have some initiatives in terms of rent control or rent management, and health care coverage. In the long-term future, we have to think about socializing the cost of health care. That is, we cannot run [the restaurant industry] on the backs of people who are most vulnerable politically, vulnerable socially, and vulnerable as people to health care risks, including COVID-19.

Restaurant owners can no longer be sitting on the sidelines and arguing against the health care burden. They have to be arguing for socialized health care. I think we have to move in the progressive direction of a socialized health cost. It will be good for people, good for Americans, and good for the restaurant industry.

Why is it that the industry as a whole has lagged behind in pushing for these policy changes that could only benefit the workers and the public at large? Is the industry ready and prepared to make that push forward?

I don’t think it’s ready, but my argument is it has to be ready. This is a crisis that is also an opportunity.

This is a business of thin, narrow margins, and an undercapitalized business. Almost any other added burden is very difficult to bear. Some studies are showing that if you internalize all of the costs of a $2 burger, you end up with almost a $200 burger in terms of risk of health care and other hidden costs. We know, for instance, that many of the people who work in the food industry also have to depend on things like food stamps, on subsidies that are, in fact, not internalized in the cost. That has been the way of doing business.

So, it is basically an economic problem and a political problem that has to rethink how to do business in terms of socializing and internalizing the cost: What is the right price for a burger? If you are paying $15 to $21, that looks like the range of a livable wage. We have to rethink that side of it. On the other side of it, some of these costs cannot be absorbed into the burger to make it reasonable for most people. That is the part that needs to be socialized: health care.

Do you have any thoughts about the potential future of these independent, mom-and-pop, immigrant-run restaurants, many of which have closed? Is there any potentially optimistic future for these restaurants that have been in such danger and continue to be in such danger in the medium- and long-term?

It’s a big challenge, but I think what is also clear is this is also a resilient domain of the restaurant industry. A lot of these restaurants are going to come back, but most will probably be under new ownership because people will go under and people will file for bankruptcy.

These are resilient businesses. They work in a domain in which they will put in a lot of family labor to come back into play, which is why they survive in a highly competitive field. Some of them will do well, most of them will survive, and some of them will do modestly as they have always done.

So, I see them coming back, but [only] with a good, streamlined process for filing for bankruptcy and then coming back into the business. But for that to happen, we really have to show them a pathway. We cannot force them to close again or to restrict massively. There’s no way, in the long run, to make this business run if you have to close every three months, six months, or nine months.

I think the public health question is totally entangled with the economic question, which is totally entangled with the small immigrant-entrepreneur enterprise question. It’s not a conflict between the two, as some people are making it out to be. Solving the public health problem can level the playing field for the small entrepreneurs to come back into business. That is the only way we can help, other than the short-term help: business aid in terms of rent and leases, and in terms of the flexibility of a paycheck protection plan to pay toward your longer fixed costs like the lease, like the rent, like the waste disposal, like recycling, electricity costs, gas, etc.

These are resilient people. They work very hard, 12-hour days, and do family labor that is often unpaid, but they pool labor costs and they pool profits. They’ll be able to come back. They’ll be ready to go. But we have to promise them in the medium-term, at least, a public health solution so that they can stay in business.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Clay Williams is a Brooklyn-based photographer.