From the Editor: Everything you missed in food news last week

This post originally appeared on February 27, 2020 in Amanda Kludt’s newsletter “From the Editor,” a roundup of the most vital news and stories in the food world each week. Read the archives and subscribe now.

This week, I’d love to highlight a collaboration we just published with the Museum of Food and Drink, a collection of stories we’re calling The African/American Table.

Last March, the museum was on the verge of debuting its latest exhibition, African/American: The Making of the Nation’s Table at the Africa Center in Harlem when the pandemic hit. We started talking to them this past summer about publishing a package tied to the themes and ideas of the exhibit when they were finally ready to open. As it became clear this fall that we’d be waiting a long time for that day, we decided to publish this collaboration timed to the museum’s virtual celebration of Black History Month.

The museum’s curator shared the full text of the exhibit, which includes a impressively deep exploration of African migrations and foodways and Black influences on the culinary arts, beer, barbecue, and more. Our editor Monica Burton chose five pieces to pursue inspired by this work: A report on discrimination against Black farmers; a look at the pop-ups celebrating Blackness in food; an exploration of Black-led efforts to feed underserved communities; a piece examining the narrative of Black brewing; and an interview between Osayi Endolyn and Toni Tipton-Martin on the legacy of cookbook author Malinda Russell, all tied together with an introduction from Jessica B. Harris.

We hope you enjoy these stories and get to experience the exhibit that inspired them when the world opens back up again. In the meantime, consider donating to MOFAD’s efforts.

On Eater

— San Francisco will reopen for indoor dining on March 3 at 25 percent capacity. Meanwhile Boston is removing all capacity restrictions for dining starting Monday.

— The latest round of the Paycheck Protection Program will only be available to businesses with fewer than 20 employees for the next couple of weeks. And solo proprietors can now access larger loans.

— As if the pandemic weren’t enough, now restaurateurs are battling with fraudulant chargebacks from credit card companies and outdoor heater thieves.

— Relatedly, beloved little LA Korean restauarant Spoon By H announced it would close after falling victim to a chargeback scam but now has over $50,000 in GoFundMe money so ... maybe not?

— Salesforce, San Francisco’s largest private employer, announced employees can work from home well beyond the pandemic, a shift that will have a massive impact on the food businesses that catered to its 10,000 workers.

— Famous Brooklyn steakhouse Peter Luger is borrowing wax celeb statues from Madam Tussaud’s to fill its empty tables.

— Down in Texas, mutual aid networks sprang into action when the government didn’t, AOC volunteered at the food bank and raised millions for those in need, and the owners of Olamaie in Austin connected struggling farmers with hungry residents at warming centers.

— Seattle is considering loosening the rules for at-home food businesses.

Rey Lopez/Eater D.C.

— I’m very jealous of everyone who lives in San Francisco and has access to these pastry boxes. Meanwhile, people living everywhere else should be jealous I have access to these breakfast burritos.

— D.C. in enjoying a yeasted doughnut boom.

— LA’s 83-year-old Firestone Tire building, a former car service station, has been fully overhauled as a do-it-all space for tacos, beer, and more.

— A guide to 20 pandemic pivots and pop-ups in Chicago.

— Watch: The guy responsible for bringing the best avocados to New York restaurants and residents.

— Listen: This week our Chicago editor Ashok Selvam hosted a panel with Tejal Rao, Korsha Wilson, and Devra First about the future of restaurant criticism.

Without widespread vaccination, single-digit case numbers, and proper contact tracing, they say it’s just too risky

Upton’s Breakroom in Chicago uses banana blossoms for its version of the classic Lent dish

Following a heated debate on Twitter, the site has been replaced with an apology

Over the weekend, product manager and engineer Tom Redman announced on Twitter that he and two friends were launching Recipeasly, a website for those looking to collect online recipes without having to read the many words of the recipe’s creator. The site, he advertises, is “your favourite recipes except without the ads or life stories.”

Within three hours of his announcement, Redman tweeted that the new site “struck a chord,” though not the chord he and his co-creators were likely hoping for. The trope of cooking bloggers launching into long-winded, often personal introductions before sharing a recipe is enough of a widespread pet peeve that they surely thought their new tool would be useful and welcome. However, Redman was met by instant pushback from critics who immediately pointed out that Recipeasly, as described, was stealing other people’s work. As Food and Wine senior editor Kat Kinsman tweeted, “Wait, so you are just stealing content, eliminating context and creator revenue, and diminishing the labor that is the only way these recipes exist in the first place because you have decided the humans behind them are annoying?”

Recipeasly, Redman argued, had been mischaracterized, largely by its own marketing. He tweeted that the site functioned less by republishing recipe writers’ work and more as an online recipe box, with saved recipes “only visible to the user who imported them — similar to if a user had printed the recipe or copied it into a doc.” Twitter users quickly debunked this about-face, showing screenshots of links being advertised to them as newly uploaded on Recipeasly. Redman also claimed that the company’s goal was to provide recipe bloggers with a new way to generate income outside of ads, qualifying that “we just need get our foot in the door & believe beginning with end users is the way,” i.e. providing free content, and then possibly evolving into a subscription model later. It’s a strategy with a historically murky success rate, and one that begins with demonetizing bloggers’ platforms.

As of now, Recipeasly’s content has been replaced with an apology. “We have nothing but respect and admiration for the time, money, and effort that go into creating great recipes & websites. We don’t want to minimize the results for all that hard work,” it says. “We realize we’re not demonstrating the huge respect we have for recipe creators. We missed the mark big time today and we’re sorry.” The site has been taken down as the creators “re-examine our impact.”

Lawyers also noted that the site could run into copyright issues in some countries. UK lawyer Mark Blunden told BBC that “If someone has created a recipe and put it into writing, then like any other literary work it will automatically attract copyright protection.” In the U.S. copyright law doesn’t protect “a mere listing of ingredients,” but “where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions... there may be a basis for copyright protection.” There is also the issue of reproducing photography or illustrations, which some bloggers say Recipeasly did without permission.

Eater has reached out to the creators of Recipeasly for more detail about how the site was going to work, and their thoughts on the future of the brand.

But as frustrating as the founders’ goals were, it’s also the logical conclusion of an internet culture that has long whined about having to scroll through essays, stories, and paragraphs-long headnotes to get to a free recipe. When labor is devalued for that long, some tech bro is going to come around to “fix” it.

One supporter responded to Redman, saying they often felt “held hostage by the blogger’s life story,” as if they couldn’t scroll through or move on to the next tab at will. The complaint is familiar enough — here’s a person spending hundreds of words telling a story about their dog or a hike they took, when all I wanted was to know how to make lemon bars. These complaints ignore how headnotes and stories usually give context and understanding to a recipe, especially if it’s from a culture the user isn’t familiar with. And of course, the person writing the recipe is most often a woman, giving the complaint a tinge of misogyny — it’s still an uphill battle to get domestic labor like cooking and recipe development to be considered work worthy of compensation.

Yes, sometimes the preceding essay on a recipe is tedious musings on the writer’s marriage. Yes, sometimes you don’t actually care about the aunt who inspired a vegan goulash. But even then, this was never actually a problem. Most blogs feature either a “jump to recipe” link at the top, or there’s the handy ctrl+F = “recipe” shortcut to get you where you want to be. Essays meanwhile allow bloggers to make money off search engine optimization (or SEO, which scans the essays for keywords and relevant search terms) and ads allow the blog to remain free for readers.

Fortunately, the backlash against Recipeasly shows that more people are thinking about recipe development and online content creation from freelance or self-employed bloggers in terms of valued labor. Whatever recipe you’re using, someone took time to create it, which means they’re deserving of credit and compensation, both of which Recipeasly — inadvertently or not — tried to to sidestep.

Massachusetts is still just weeks removed from the pandemic’s peak, when its healthcare infrastructure was stretched to its outer limits for a second time in under a year.

Workers allege lewd comments, groping, and retaliation for speaking out

In the past several years, former and current McDonald’s employees have increasingly come forward to share stories of the sexual harassment they allegedly experienced while working in the chain’s restaurants, In a new CBS Sunday Morning segment, four women shared their personal accounts with correspondent Erin Moriarty.

Emily Anibal, who was 17 when she started working at McDonald’s in 2016, said a male shift manager “would make comments on my body, and other workers’ bodies, saying, like, ‘I would have sex with you, I wouldn’t have sex with her.’” Anibal added that the shift manager would comment on or touch employees “pretty much every shift, for most of the shift.”

Another McDonald’s employee, Jamelia Fairley, recounted her experience of being harassed by a new coworker in 2018. Fairley reported the behavior, which she said took place in front of others and was experienced by other women, to a supervisor and the general manager. But, according to Fairley, the harassment only intensified — a retaliatory response that unfortunately appears not to be out of the norm, as Bryce Covert reported for Eater in 2020. It got to the point where Fairley’s coworker “grabbed [her] into his groin area,” she said.

She told Moriarty that the coworker was only transferred to another store after Fairley reported another incident of harassment from a different coworker. That other employee allegedly asked Fairley how much it would cost to have sex with her daughter, who was just one year old at the time. “This particular comment … really made me really upset,” Fairley said. The coworker who made that comment was fired. Fairley continued working at McDonald’s to provide for her daughter.

The women who shared their stories with CBS are among a larger number of employees who have filed discrimination charges or sexual harassment lawsuits against McDonald’s. In recent years, suits were filed in January, last April, in November 2019, and in May 2018. Per CNBC, at least 50 workers have filed sexual harassment complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or in state courts in the last four years. A union-commissioned poll in 2020 found that 76 percent of the 782 female workers surveyed said they have experienced at least one form of harassment at McDonald’s, and 71 percent said they faced punishment after reporting misconduct. (A company spokesperson disputed those numbers, telling CBS that the survey sample size is too small.)

The fast-food chain, which on February 18 announced a goal to achieve gender parity among its leadership by the end of 2030, responded to the CBS segment with the promise that every allegation be “fully and thoroughly investigated.”

“I want to recognize these individuals and acknowledge their courage. Any person who steps forward to report concerns or issues deserves our utmost respect,” CEO Chris Kempczinski wrote in a statement issued Sunday night. “Let me say plainly: every single person working under the Arches must have a safe and respectful work environment. Sexual harassment in the workplace is an affront to everything we stand for as a System. It has no place in any McDonald’s restaurant, and it will not be tolerated.”

The food service industry is notoriously rife with sexual harassment. A 2014 report from the Restaurant Opportunities Center United found that 90 percent of women in the industry have experienced sexual harassment while on the job. In fast food, the workers are often poor, often minorities, and often young — and they typically have even less recourse when it comes to sexual misconduct, compared to the celebrities or white-collar professionals whose experiences have frequently been centered in the #MeToo movement. Service workers’ stories matter, too. It shouldn’t have to take a famous name or a televised exposé to remember that.

• Female McDonald’s employees accuse fast-food chain of abuse, harassment in workplace [CBS News]
• McDonald’s CEO promises investigation after report alleges sexual harassment among workers [CNN]

While the fermented foods industry evangelizes products rooted in global, often East Asian, traditions, its most visible faces are predominantly white

The first time I tasted kombucha was in 2010, at a Whole Foods in San Francisco. As I drank the ice-cold bottle of GT’s Multi-Green, I was surprised by how familiar it was: Its sharpness reminded me of long-fermented Taiwanese fruit vinegars and suan cai, while its funk called to mind the diverse array of ferments, such as furu, tempe, belachan, and doubanjiang, that flavored my ’80s Malaysian childhood.

After I immigrated to Australia in the ’90s, my white friends mocked these ferments as “smelly,” “gross,” and “weird.” But 20 years later, the large refrigerated probiotic beverage section at Whole Foods was dominated by a funky drink, covered with psychedelic labels and buzzwords like “rejuvenate,” “restore,” and “regenerate.” And just as I’ve seen the popularity of kombucha continue to grow, I’ve watched as many of the once-ridiculed ferments of my childhood have been declared not just acceptable, but trendy by white people eager to festishize and commoditize them.

Over the last several years, it has become big business for white-owned companies to “discover” “new” ferments from BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) cultures and bring them to Western markets. Kombucha may have been the gateway, but other traditional ferments, such as kimchi, miso, tempe, and tibicos, are increasingly popular with white producers and consumers. It’s a trend I’ve observed as both a consumer and a member of what I would call the fermentation community, a loose collective of fermentation enthusiasts and experts, mainly from the West, who celebrate and teach fermentation, as well as those who research fermented foods and sell fermented products.

The community is grounded in reconnecting people to traditional food systems, lost tastes, and microbial heritages. The nuances and complexities of sharing cultures — one’s own and those of others — are something I’ve thought a lot about since joining the community in 2013, when my partner and I started one of Australia’s first tibicos companies. We called our product by its Mexican name to recognize its pre-Columbian Aztec origins, researched its complicated history extensively, and did our best to present it to the public. Because I am Chinese-Malaysian (then a rarity in the industry), many customers assumed our product was of Asian origin, and I endured racist comments about its price point, taste, and provenance; many retailers and customers found tibicos hard to pronounce and asked why we didn’t call it by its more commonly used name, water kefir. We struggled with access to financial and social capital, and were soon overshadowed by white entrepreneurs selling similar ferments. After five years, we closed the business and I went on to study the potential health benefits of fermented foods as a Ph.D. student.

As I have continued to promote the study of diverse ferments with clear recognition of their histories and sociocultural importance, I’ve watched the small Western market for fermented goods gradually turn into a booming industry, one that by at least one projection could be worth $690 billion by 2023. As my own experience showed me, the accompanying shift in profit margins and exposure has revealed an uncomfortable truth: The fermentation industry, like any other, has a whiteness problem.

To understand what this means, you could start with Kombucha Brewers International (KBI), an international trade association that claims to represent 90 percent of all bottled kombucha on store shelves and on tap today. Nearly two-thirds of KBI’s members are white, based on a survey KBI conducted in June. You don’t have to look far to find illustrations of this statistic. Take, for example, Kombucha Kamp, which bills itself as the “#1 place online” to learn about and buy kombucha; the smiling white woman on its site is founder Hannah “Kombucha Mamma” Crum, who is also the co-founder of KBI. Or look at GT’s Living Foods, started by George Thomas Dave. The so-called king of kombucha, who owns 40 percent of the nearly-$500-million U.S. kombucha market, rose to success upon his claims that he was introduced to kombucha by a “Himalayan Mother” SCOBY (or symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, the gelatinous culture used to make kombucha) gifted to his family by a friend who claimed to have gotten it from a Buddhist nun, and that it cured his mother’s aggressive breast cancer.

Beyond kombucha, there are plenty of other examples of the fermenting industry’s whiteness. On Julie Feickert’s Cultures for Health, you’ll find various starter cultures, including trendy koji and tempeh spores, but scant acknowledgement of their origins, history, or cultural context. Chris de Bono, owner of Meru Miso in Tasmania, Australia, calls himself a “Miso Master” despite first making miso commercially in 2015; he also claims to be “Australia’s premier producer” of “authentic, traditional” miso. Peace, Love and Vegetables, established in 2011, claims to sell “Australia’s Number 1 Sauerkraut”; its “untraditional” “kim-chi” Superkraut (vegan, of course) bears such little resemblance to actual kimchi that it seems mislabeled. Many white-owned businesses that produce fermented vegetables have at least one kimchi product, cashing in on its popularity with varying degrees of kimchi-ness: Madge’s Food Company, Gaga’s Gut Loving Ferments, Eden Foods. Tepache, a pre-Columbian Mexican fermented beverage made with pineapple rinds and spices like cinnamon and cloves, has been co-opted by Western healthy drink companies, cider, and spirit makers alike, with varying degrees of similarities to its namesake.

Wherever you look, you’ll see that the fermentation industry in the West (meaning North America, the U.K., Europe, and Australasia) is dominated by mostly white fermenters, who often sell whitewashed BIPOC ferments and associated white-gaze narratives about these foods to mainly white consumers. This dearth of diversity is problematic in and of itself, but it’s worsened by the fact that white fermenters are commoditizing ferments that are ingrained in the cultural identities of BIPOC, whose centuries-long labor developed and refined the microbial relationships required to produce them.

Even the idea of sharing cultures (so to speak) can be problematic, as Feby, a fermenter reclaiming Indonesian food identity via her tempe subscription business Reculture Kitchen, pointed out on Instagram. “‘Sharing cultures’ benefits white people and Western nations, not countries that have been entrenched in colonial violence,” she wrote. “It’s easy for [Westerners] to reap the benefits of shared cultures and then claim a specific fermentation process as their own because of their literacy in capitalism … whereas people from a colonized nation are asked to acculturate to whiteness and their time and resources are spent on surviving.”

While it is exciting that the Western market for ferments such as kimchi, miso, and kombucha is growing at an explosive rate, BIPOC fermenters are frequently rendered invisible in the fermentation industry through a lack of access, representation, and voice, only to have their traditions and cultures at turns stolen, appropriated, or erased altogether. At almost every level, success is determined by white gatekeepers, from which companies gain access to capital, to who organizes festivals and teaches workshops, to who gets spotlighted by the food media or given book contracts or space on grocery store shelves.

Nearly every culture on this planet ferments. An ancient culinary technology that reaches back around 10,000 years, fermentation is the controlled transformation of food by bacteria and fungi. Humans have long depended on this transmission of microbial cultures to produce ferments for flavor, nutrition, and survival.

The growing mainstream popularity of ferments in the West has its roots in the Western agrarian movement of the ’60s and ’70s, when members of the white counterculture became enamored with and capitalized on the ferments of “the Orient” and old Europe. Inherently antithetical to industrialized foods, these ferments appealed to the segment of the white middle class choosing to swim outside the mainstream. Miso, kombucha, sauerkraut, and tempe were particularly popular, though their popularity was largely limited to countercultural circles. Zen philosophy, which was espoused by numerous poets and artists at the time, further fueled the interest in East Asian ferments, as did the macrobiotic boom. Their purveyors often alluded to their ancient origins and purported healing properties to lure those hoping to attain health nirvana through their alimentary tract — a strategy that effectively kicked off the appropriation of (primarily) East Asian ferments, a picking and choosing of narratives and flavor profiles to suit white tastes.

The mid-’90s saw a growing mainstream interest in fermented foods, thanks in large part to Sandor Katz, an irrepressible self-described fermentation fetishist who traveled the U.S. giving fermentation lectures and demonstrations. Meanwhile, Sally Fallon Morell’s Nourishing Traditions blog and popular book and the raw food trend also helped popularize the practice, bringing foods that had been part of the hippie mainstream in the ’60s and ’70s, such as sauerkraut, water kefir, rejuvelac, and miso, to the forefront of the health-focused natural food movement. Although they still appealed mainly to radical lefties and health-conscious coastal liberal elites, a small American artisanal cottage industry began to bubble, beginning with companies like GT’s Living Foods and the revered Cultured Pickle Shop, which both started in 1995.

When the artisanal foods movement began gaining steam a decade later, this quiet bubbling got noisy. Ferments were the perfect product for many would-be artisans, with their old-timey, back-to-nature appeal and purported health benefits. House-made pickles, wild sauerkraut, and small-batch kombucha flourished in gentrified neighborhoods and restaurants everywhere, culminating in a period of peak pickle that was skewered on Portlandia in 2012. Other ferments soon gained traction, including kvass and milk kefir, and by 2014, they had ascended to fine dining status. That was the year that both David Chang and René Redzepi started their own fermentation labs; Chang, who is Korean American, aimed to revolutionize the use of edible microbes — especially Japan’s beloved Aspergillus oryzae, or koji, mold, which produces miso, soya sauce, and grain-based alcoholic beverages like sake.

Fermented foods were given an additional boost by ongoing scientific research into the role of the gut microbiome in human health. Many popular ferments contain live probiotic bacteria and yeasts, shown to have potential beneficial effects on gut health and associated modern diseases such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. Thanks in part to wellness juggernauts like Goop, the white worried well became convinced that optimal gut health was a panacea for their chronic malaise. Where better to spend one’s dollars than on those natural, healthy fermented foods teeming with beneficial probiotic bacteria? Multinational food corporations, weakened by growing disdain for their obesity-inducing sugary drinks in the West, began swallowing up artisanal fermentation businesses. In the last few years, companies making low-alcohol, low-sugar kombucha and water kefir have attracted investment from the likes of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, while General Mills has put its substantial dollars into Farmhouse Culture’s sauerkraut and other probiotic products.

In the process, fermented foods finally made their way out of the health food aisle and into the mainstream, where East Asian ferments like kimchi, miso, and gochujang have found particular popularity. Orientalism and gastrodiplomacy certainly have a hand in the continued love affair with Japanese ferments, as well as kimchi’s current popularity among Western palates. And more recently, ferments from other regions, such as Nigerian iru, Indonesian tempe, Ethiopian injera, Mexican tepache and pozol, and Indian dosas, have attracted the attention of white fermenters, recipe writers, and consumers.

Regardless of whether white interest in these cultural ferments is rooted in social justice or a way to virtue signal white worldliness, BIPOC fermenters are still getting lost in the brine of the industry’s overwhelmingly white narrative. Although it’s not as if only Japanese people can make Japanese ferments or white people cannot gain expertise or profit from their hard work, there needs to be a stark recognition of the inequities at play and a collaborative effort to correct them, even when it is uncomfortable for white fermenters.

One way to start is by looking more closely at the problems within our community: namely, cultural appropriation, the tailoring of certain ferments to suit white tastes, and the gatekeeping that disproportionately benefits (and is exercised by) white members of the industry. All of this falls under the overarching issue of whitewashing, which results in the colonialist muddling of the cultures and histories of BIPOC people.

“I think that [fermentation] knowledge needs to be shared and needs to be spread, but it ignores the fallout of colonial thought and that kind of behavior,” says Mara King, the co-founder of Ozuké, a fermented foods company, and the co-host of the YouTube show The People’s Republic of Fermentation. “People are not even aware of the subtle ways they embody racism,” she points out. That’s one reason why recognizing “that you are in a precarious position when you try to represent someone else’s culture” is key, King says, as is “always being open to learning and being submissive to somebody else’s understanding.” In other words, she adds, don’t be like Alison Roman: “She was not giving due, she was not offering any scholarship, and she was saying her version was the version.”

Fermented products are often marketed to appeal to white audiences, by both BIPOC and white producers. “Overall I think BIPOC fermented foods are either exoticized and touted as the ‘next big thing,’ or they come with a disclaimer,” says an Asian-Australian fermenter I’ll call Sarah (like some other fermenters I approached for an interview, she feared potential negative repercussions for speaking out, which is why I’ve given her a pseudonym).

The common emphasis on health benefits in decontextualized sales narratives further exoticizes these foods. “Sometimes because they can’t add health claims, I think [the] marketing will delve into the traditions almost to validate the ‘Asian wisdom’ or something,” Sarah adds. “Like ‘brewed in Ancient China’ or ‘eaten widely to strengthen the immune system in Korea.’ It feels like they cherrypick and glean which cultural information to show off.”

This romanticization of BIPOC traditions — and the accompanying failure to provide historical or sociocultural context that centers BIPOC and their relationship with these ferments — is rife in the health and wellness space: Modern life made me (or my kids) very sick, doctors didn’t know what to do, and then I discovered the magical healing powers of ancient, traditional fermented foods. Last February, the onset of COVID-19 led to a 952 percent surge, year over year, in kimchi sales. (More recently, the national medical director of England’s National Health Service publicly rebuked Gwyneth Paltrow for suggesting that long COVID could be treated with — among other things — kimchi and kombucha.)

The tendency to exoticize and romanticize fermented foods in order to sell them leads us to another abiding problem in the fermentation community: the editing of flavor profiles so that certain ferments will appeal to white audiences. While nuance, surprise, and pungency are welcome in traditionally made, at-home ferments, white-focused commercial enterprise requires predictable and approachable products. The vinegary tang of kombucha, for example, is diluted with artificial sweeteners, fruit juice, and forced carbonation for consistency; “smelly” fish sauce is left out of kimchi — see, for example, all of those vegan kimchis; and “mild” and “sweet” misos, which are fermented for shorter periods of time, are easier to sell in Western markets that have yet to embrace funkier ferments like natto, furu, and belachan.

BIPOC fermenters are hardly immune to the pressure to appeal to white consumers. In playing up one’s cultural background to sell a product, King points out, “you create an illusion of culture, a curated flavor profile that you know will be accepted and enjoyed. The chaotic, stinky, and messy are edited out of this scenario for the benefit of both the performer and the consumer.”

This need to satisfy perceived white tastes is pervasive enough that it has led to an attempt by Korean researchers to engineer the smell out of kimchi, a food that comes in hundreds of varieties and is so deeply ingrained in Korean culture that the South Korean Ministry of Culture stated it was gaining “a worldwide reputation as a representative food of Korea.” Such accessibility to white audiences is the top priority for many fermentation businesses in terms of both their financial and cultural bottom lines.

The past several years have nonetheless seen a new generation of Korean-American-owned companies whose owners have defiantly stuck to their traditional recipes. Companies like Mama O’s Premium Kimchi, Mother-in-Law’s Kimchi, Choi’s Kimchi Co., and Sinto Gourmet have expanded the variety of kimchi available on store shelves, building in turn upon the quiet multi-decade success of unsung heroes and kimchi diplomats Sunja’s and Cosmos Food Co. While older kimchi businesses catered mainly to Korean Americans and adventurous consumers outside of the Korean community, the proliferation of these new companies reflects kimchi’s growing commoditization in the West over the last decade — a shift arguably due to its “discovery” and glorification by white producers, chefs, and wellness influencers.

The inclination of white people to place greater trust in an unfamiliar food when it is being promoted by other white people means, unsurprisingly, that white people are often the face of the fermentation community. “Whenever a media outlet wants to fill a pickling or fermenting space in print, online, and on social media,” they go with white fermenters, Sarah says. “The recipes are often called ‘easy,’ ‘quick,’ or ‘foolproof,’” instead of embracing the complexity of carefully developed traditional techniques. This is why, for example, Bon Appétit has someone like Brad Leone presenting a context-free kimchi making video — one that was so wrong it inspired a gentle scolding from actual Koreans — instead of featuring an experienced kimchi maker like Maangchi, the Korean food expert. This kind of implicit endorsement of white expertise may be one reason why BIPOC are often expected to sell their traditionally made products for less than, say, a watered-down version made by a white chef or producer.

This highlights another problem perpetuated by the white gaze: The market encourages BIPOC fermenters to only make and present ferments from their own cultures, and to not stray too far from what is perceived by white consumers as authentic and traditionally made. This is particularly true when it comes to ferments tied to specific cultures, such as kimchi and koji-derived products (although kombucha is thought to originally be from China, it has been widely marketed as a beverage without cultural context, save for some vague notion of the “mythical” East). In food media especially, Sarah observes, white fermenters “seem to just ferment across all cultures whereas BIPOC fermenters are often just brought up in special cuisine-specific ways.” White fermenters, free from such cultural constraints, can forage microbes, ferments, and techniques from BIPOC cultures, claiming creative innovation while promoting increasingly meaningless concepts like “tradition” and “authenticity” when it suits them.

White fermenters often also have more access to social, political, and financial capital, allowing them to run workshops and events, which further centers them as experts — and creates more potential for whitewashing. “I have attended several online workshops where white women who identify as European demo or share an often Asian recipe,” Sarah says. “Most of them do talk about the origins, but almost always they talk about putting it in a toastie.” When others share the recipe, she continues, “more and more history is lost.” Recent global online events, organized by white fermenters, have included many BIPOC fermenters, which is a step toward alleviating whitewashing of ferments, but still brings into question who makes the most social and capital gains in these situations.

The question of who gets to be the expert is central to the larger problem of gatekeeping in the fermentation community. While a new generation of BIPOC fermenters is eager to educate students and consumers about different fermenting traditions — in Australia, for example, Saeko Iida, Yoko Nakazawa, Tomoko Onuki, Kaori Takahashi, and Hiroshi Sugihara, a.k.a. @foodritual, all lead workshops or sell products to share their enduring love of koji, and the Korean-born chef Chae Jeong-Eun uses her Melbourne-based private dining business and Instagram to demonstrate how ferments are an intimate, integral part of culture and cuisine — they are still working to disrupt deeply entrenched patterns and norms.

Yoko Inoue, the founder and chef of Shoku Iku, a raw food cafe in Melbourne, thinks that a contributing factor is the differing cultural attitudes to expertise. “White people tend to study for two years and think they understand,” she says. “And because it’s a niche market and they don’t have many competitors in that area, they feel they deserve that [expertise]. If you go to Japan, real masters never call themselves masters.”

Many of the fermenters I spoke to, especially second-generation migrants to the West, shared my experience of learning about fermentation from white sources. As thankful as I am for the work of many white fermenters, I now recognize the white saviorism at play. The white expert has more capital and thus more exposure; their work saving these foods — as the story goes — helps BIPOC reclaim their fermenting cultures, which in turn validates the white expert’s position, obscuring the inequities that led to BIPOC losing these skills in the first place.

When Jessica Wang, a fermentation educator who runs community-focused Picklé workshops in Los Angeles, learned how to make kimchi in her early 20s, it was from David Lebovitz’s blog. “I am grateful for that recipe,” Wang says, “but I now see this is a valid example of this issue.” Because white fermenters don’t have to contend with the disadvantages faced by their BIPOC counterparts, specifically that of coming from cultures that have been “othered,” Wang explains, “when people of influence in mainstream food culture discovered how delicious and wonderful the fermentation practices of BIPOC cultures are and made their techniques widely known, they were already viewed as authorities on cooking in general, so of course they were trusted as legitimate sources of knowledge on fermentation.”

While Inoue is glad that so many people are talking about Japanese fermentation — “it’s not like we own the spores,” she says — she adds that “it’s easier for Western media to talk to Western people because it’s more accessible; they have more status in the society, [and] that makes it more accessible.”

When BIPOC fermenters are given access to Western audiences, such as when they’re invited to attend fermentation events, they are often tokenized and compartmentalized, used as authenticity props to center white experts. Aviaja Lyberth Hauptmann, a Kalaaleq Inuk microbial geneticist who studies Greenlandic ferments, is “very conscious about this dynamic,” she says. “It can be difficult to weigh an opportunity against its potential implications. My experience is most often with outsiders trying to get access to our food culture through me, using me as a stepping stone or research assistant rather than a collaborator.”

All the BIPOC fermenters I spoke to respect and appreciate many of their white fellow fermenters and their work. But they identify the need for white fermenters to do their part in providing equal footing for BIPOC in the fermentation community. It is not easy to tease out the practical realities of how this should be navigated. Even among the 14 fermenters I interviewed, ideas about how to tackle these issues fell across the spectrum: to engage in inclusive collaborations that focus on social justice; to do proper research and give attribution for BIPOC fermentation recipes; even for white producers of ferments from BIPOC cultures to step aside entirely.

King, who is writing a book about oft-ignored Chinese fermentation practices, would like to see “more emphasis on context, more celebration of our differences,” and for more opportunities to go to women and people of color. On Instagram, Feby has called for collaborative conscious reciprocity when navigating the complicated and at times painful sociocultural dynamics of sharing ferments, writing that “Sharing a culture is only equitable once communities initiating the sharing are uplifted, empowered, fairly compensated, and healed.” Hauptmann asks for “more patience from the non-BIPOC community. Just because there is no one in a certain community doing what you dream of doing, does not mean you can go ahead and take that space. That space can never be untaken, and you will have made the barrier for becoming a name in that space higher than it was before.”

Despite these frustrations and challenges, the reach of BIPOC fermenters continues to grow. From East London to Melbourne, from Bengaluru to Bangkok, and from New York to Florida, they’re using their social media platforms to build their businesses and amplify their own voices. Collaborative BIPOC fermenters uphold their cultural fermenting traditions, working alongside conscientious white fermenters to delve — with respect and sensitivity — into other fermenting cultures, staying curious and innovative.

All biological systems benefit from diversity, from the microbes in our gut to the makeup of human societies. By creating equal footing for BIPOC, the fermenting community has an opportunity to be a model for promoting social justice in our food systems. “Imagine the diversity of ideas and perspectives that could be in the world of fermentation if the fermented foods we see around the world are represented by people who are gastronomically skilled and grew up with a grandmother who made this food for them and who have a close emotional tie to the taste and texture of that food,” says Hauptmann. “Someone for whom the food is not a curiosity or an ingredient.”

Dr. Miin Chan is an MD, Ph.D. nutrition researcher, and food and science literacy advocate. She communicates evidence-based nutrition, fermentation, and gut microbiome science at @dr.chans.

Dingding Hu is a New York-based illustrator who has has worked on projects for Google, MIT Media Lab, and DOT NYC, and whose work has appeared in HuffPost, the New York Times, and TED.

Fact-checked by Rowan Walrath.

In the mid 2000s, the Chinese government began declaring street stalls “backward” and “uncivilized.” COVID-19 changed their tune.

Walk the streets of Chengdu, the capital of China’s southwestern Sichuan province, at dusk and you’ll encounter a pandemonium of smells. On one corner, an older woman tosses just-fried potatoes with scallions, garlic, salt, and sugar for a line of hungry customers; across the street, a man portions out single servings of cold noodles slicked in black vinegar and a dash of chile oil. In a booth wedged between two clothing shops, a middle-aged couple fries up guokui, a crispy meat-filled pancake topped with fermented vegetables and a sprinkling of Sichuan peppercorn. Down the street a bit, the next generation of street vendors hawks third-wave coffee to young people in cups with splashy logos.

Street food has a long history in Chengdu, a city where the weather never gets too cold, and the locals — known for their leisurely lifestyle and supreme cooking — are used to spending time out of doors, drinking tea, playing mahjong, and relaxing in the open air. Anita Shiwen Lai, founder of the gastronomic travel company Chengdu Food Tours, points out that almost all of the most iconic Chengdu foods were born from the street: dandan mian (noodles in spicy sauce), tang you guo zi (a chewy rice balls glazed with sugar and sesame seeds), dan hong gao (an egg cake), and chuan chuan (a style of hot pot with ingredients served on sticks) are just a few.

“Street food has always been an essential and irreplaceable part of the food culture here,” says Lai.

But the scene taking place on the streets of Chengdu today is, in many ways, a throwback. While street food in Chengdu does indeed have a long lineage, this thread of city life was nearly broken when, starting in the 2000s, the Chinese government began declaring street stalls “backward” and “uncivilized,” pushing them off the streets as shiny large-scale planning and development changed the face of the city. Those that dared to stay lived in perpetual fear of the chengguan (municipal patrols) and had to be ready to pack up and run at first sight of the authorities.

When the novel coronavirus hit China last January, some worried it would be the finishing blow for Chengdu street food. Stringent lockdowns, under which citizens were unable to leave their apartment complexes, meant that street food operations had no way to stay afloat. The vendors — often migrant workers from the rural provinces — would go back to their home villages, never to return.

But when the COVID lockdowns lifted in May, the Chengdu government did something surprising. In a dramatic reversal of the state policy over the past two decades, the local government started actively encouraging small vendors to set up their own stalls on the streets of the city. The hope was that the move would be a jumpstart to the stalled economy, serving as a stopgap measure to alleviate unemployment and boost spending. It worked: The policy created a new stream of income for more than 100,000 people overnight, and was such a success that Premier Li Keqiang eventually enacted policy for all of China.

What followed that summer was open season for Chengdu street food. The veteran vendors returned, alongside thousands of first-time entrepreneurs both young and old. Some, who were less prepared for the amount of work involved, set out their ditan (street stall) for only one night before calling it quits; others managed to stick with it. During the daytime, it was suddenly common to see the sidewalks dotted with stools placed there by vendors who had “claimed” their spot hours before evening service. Come nightfall, popular pedestrian areas near Chunxi Lu, Jianshe Road, and Yulin were jammed with brightly lit stalls and awash in enticing smells and dishes so varied it would be impossible to try them all in a month.

“It is amazing to see the street stall economy happening and the government actually encouraging street vendors back on the streets again,” says Lai of Chengdu Food Tours. Moreover, now that small food businesses are freed from the Catch-22 of choosing between expensive rent for a brick-and-mortar or constant persecution by the municipal authorities, they can, Lai says, get back to the work of passing on culinary tradition.

“It enables the flavors of the street to be preserved,” Lai says. “This allows Chengdu to go back to its roots and character.”

Wang Xue, 43, sells bobo chicken — a classic dish of cold spicy chicken offal on skewers — from her stall on Jianshe road, near Sichuan University. Wang says that before the coronavirus hit China, she had been planning to start selling her bobo chicken spice mixture online. But when she heard about the new street food economy, she decided to open up a stall so that customers could try her seasonings in person. These days, the stall functions as both a restaurant and a vehicle of promotion for her online business.

“While I’m selling bo bo chicken for people to eat, I can also sell the bo bo ji seasonings for people to take home and prepare a meal that is simple but tastes authentic,” says Xue.

But not all of the street food you’ll find today is classic Chengdu; newer vendors are branching out and offering famous dishes from regional cuisines all over the country. Not far from Wang Xue’s stall, Xiao Li sells snacks in the style of Yunnan, a province southwest of Sichuan known for its mild climate and bright, fresh cuisine that resembles that of its southeast Asian neighbors, Laos and Vietnam. On a typical day, Xiao Li sells spring rolls, fried tofu, and Yunnan rice noodles.

Xiao Li, who worked in the hotel business before COVID, says her street stall has been a way to keep busy and earn a living, though she recently found work at a hotel again and thinks she won’t be selling Yunnan snacks for much longer. Still, Li says her brief foray into running her own food business has left her with a strong sense of achievement.

Right alongside these conventional street food snacks, it is now common to see splashy outfits catering to young Chinese tastes for coffee and cocktails. These businesses tend to emphasize design, branding, and a sense of community. One popular new coffee stall encourages artists to leave behind stickers with their logo and information — the proprietors will in turn adhere the sticker to takeaway coffee cups, a boon to the artists hoping to reach a wider audience and a free bit of graphic design for the shop.

In Yulin, an old Chengdu neighborhood popular with young people and food seekers, the second-wave street stall phenomenon is at its apotheosis. At the center of it all is Uncle Lan, a stalwart of the Chengdu underground art and nightlife scene who can be found most nights at the Cocktail Bus, his mobile street bar. Uncle Lan pours colorful cocktails like the Sleepwalker and the Raging Teenager, as well as mojitos and gin and tonics, for clusters of patrons who sit on stools while they drink and chat.

Lan, whose previous business ventures have included pop-up art exhibitions, a rave bus, and an underground night market, says that he decided to start his mobile bar to stay afloat after an art exhibition fell through due to the pandemic. But he’s since grown passionate about the street stall as a medium for cultural dissemination and community building. He noticed that people of all backgrounds who came to his mobile bar to drink would also strike up conversations with one another.

“At the street stall, anyone can come together,” Lan says. “People break through normal social barriers.” For this reason, Uncle Lan differs from street bars that offer takeaway cocktails. He refuses — preferring that his customers come hang out at the bus so they can watch him as he works and interact with fellow drinkers. “There is a lot of space to expand Chengdu culture,” he reflects.

As he pours a Raging Teenager — a mix of vodka, ginger beer, lime juice, and Sichuan peppercorn — Uncle Lan remembers the 1990s, the pinnacle of the street stall economy in Chengdu, when, as a teenager, he ran a stall of his own selling iced jelly — a period he’d all but forgotten prior to this summer. “They used to call me the street stall king,” he says. “And I think I’m going back to that now.”

Lauren Teixeira is a writer formerly based in Chengdu; she now lives in Washington, DC.

MIa Zhang is a photographer based in Chengdu.

The debut of Nusr-Et Steakhouse has been pushed back countless times

Meal kits were a means of survival for London restaurants in 2020. If restaurants reopen in summer 2021, they could take on new meaning — or fade away as fast as they arrived

One year into the pandemic, grocery store workers still face major resistance to getting the hazard pay they deserve

This story was originally published on Civil Eats.

Nearly a year into the pandemic, a new battle is brewing over grocery workers’ right to hazard pay.

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to give grocery workers a short-term $5 per hour pay increase, following the city of Long Beach’s approval in January of an ordinance that would require grocery stores with at least 300 employees nationally to provide their employees with an extra $4 an hour on top of their established hourly wages for a minimum of 120 days.

The same day Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia signed the city ordinance into law, the California Grocers Association (GCA), a trade group representing the industry, filed for a preliminary injunction against the city of Long Beach. The group’s complaint claims that the ordinance preempts federal labor and equal protection laws, and violates both the U.S. and California constitutions. Arguments were heard in court yesterday and a decision is expected soon.

The lawsuit is likely the first of several to make its way to court. After the Long Beach city council amended the municipal code with their ordinance, other California cities and counties including Santa Clara, Montebello, Oakland, San Leandro, and West Hollywood passed their own “hero pay” ordinances. Each was immediately sued by CGA, and the Los Angeles measure will also likely be challenged in court.

In Washington State, leaders in Seattle and the neighboring city of Burien have also passed hazard pay ordinances, and both have been sued by industry groups there.

“A disproportionate number of people of color are essential workers, and Seattle must continue to lead the way to provide relief and respect to those that have served our community throughout this pandemic,” Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan said in a press release prior to that city’s law going into effect.

These ordinances are shining one more spotlight on long-standing inequities exposed by the pandemic. While a number of companies provided their employees — who have faced unprecedented risks at work — with hazard pay last spring, most took it away a few months later, despite record breaking profits.

Other tensions between the food industry and labor have also recently made the news. For instance, Albertsons (which owns Safeway, Vons, and other grocery stores) announced that it would eliminate in-house delivery and personal shopper positions in favor of third-party gig workers in California at the end of February. And fast food workers across the country went on strike last week to demand a hike to the minimum wage.

This week’s trial could set an important precedent. If the ordinance stands, the practice of giving workers hazard pay could spread, and possibly fuel a widespread push for higher wages and better working conditions. But a decision against the Long Beach ordinance could put a stop to the practice.

“These policies are critical,” says Sylvana Uribe, a communications specialist with the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE). The organization works alongside community and labor groups to protect workers’ rights and dignity, in an area hard hit by COVID. “[W]ith new variants of the virus emerging, we need some sort of policy, and some sort of financial compensation for workers who are risking their health every single day.”

Although rates of COVID infections are falling and vaccinations are picking up, Uribe doesn’t think that the hazard pay ordinances have come too late. “This virus is here to stay for a bit longer. There’s some uncertainty around that, but having some sort of safety net is something that these workers and communities can count on.”

Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

Windfall Company Profits, Beleaguered Workforce

The hazard pay ordinances vary slightly from place to place. In addition to the Long Beach ordinance, one in Oakland would offer a bonus of $5 an hour, applicable to employees at stores larger than 15 thousand square feet owned by companies with at least 500 employees nationally. That ordinance will remain in place until Oakland drops into the lowest “yellow tier” of California’s COVID-19 risk assessment.

The Oakland ordinance also includes a waiver for collective bargaining agreements. However, the CGA lawsuits specifically cite federal labor laws as evidence that these local ordinances are illegal.

While the ordinances differ, proponents see them as necessary and justified. Large supermarket chains have profited handsomely during the pandemic. According to a November 2020 report analyzing top national grocery and retail companies released by the Brookings Institution, the big three grocery chains — Walmart, Kroger, and Albertsons — took in $6.8 billion more during the first three quarters of 2020 than the year previous.

But those profits haven’t gone to frontline staff. The report also found that the big three grocery chains averaged only $.76 an hour in bonus payments to their employees.

Regardless of their pay, grocery store clerks are working in high-risk environments. According to the United Food and Commercial Workers International (UFCW), a union representing some 835,000 grocery store employees in the U.S. and Canada, 109 of their members died, and more than 17,400 were infected with COVID by the end of 2020.

When he was photographed while signing the Long Beach ordinance into law, Mayor Garcia tweeted support to grocery store workers: “You have earned this hero pay. Thank you for your hard work.”

Many national grocery chains voluntarily paid hourly hazard wages early in the pandemic. But the trend began to lose steam in the late spring and early-summer as company after company quietly eliminated their bonuses. Grocery store employees continued showing up to work in increasingly dangerous and challenging work environments as cases surged across the country during the devastating fall and winter months. Their paychecks didn’t reflect the new reality of widespread infections and deaths.

Local UFCW chapters have been leading protests, drawing politicians to their cause up and down the west coast. UFCW Local 324 is named in the lawsuit filed against Long Beach.

The chapters have also worked to paint a picture of profitable corporations capitalizing on a beleaguered workforce. And the bonus pay ordinances are a sign that local governments are slowly responding to the political pressure.

“[W]e are urging CEOs of major food and retail companies to finally accept their responsibility and provide hazard pay for these brave workers,” UFCW president Marc Perrone said in a statement. “The pandemic has created windfall profits for these companies and those profits were earned by these brave workers. Now is the time for these companies and our elected leaders to act and do what is right.” (The UFCW did not respond to requests for comment.)

Industry Pushback

The CGA lawsuits aren’t the only sign of opposition to the union’s push for hazard pay.

In a statement, Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce CEO Jeremy Harris said, “While we applaud and appreciate all efforts by Long Beach grocery workers throughout the coronavirus pandemic, the premium pay for grocery workers ordinance has been rushed and inadequately studied.”

A Los Angeles Times editorial called bonus pay ordinances unfair for favoring grocery store workers at large chains who are more likely to be unionized, excluding those at smaller stores, and essential workers in other industries.

In a letter to Long Beach Mayor Garcia after mandated hazard pay was first recommended by the city council, CGA Director Tim James questioned the value of mandating bonuses only for grocery workers. He wrote, “The recommendation limits its scope to only a small subset of essential critical infrastructure workers and ignores all other workers interacting regularly with the public in the same manner. As we all sadly know, COVID-19 impacts do not discriminate in any way.”

The day the Northwest Grocery Association (NWGA) jointly filed a lawsuit against Seattle’s bonus pay ordinance, the organization issued a press release. In it, President Amanda Dalton took a similar approach, suggesting that the ordinance was unfairly leaving out some workers. She said: “[O]ur expectation was a well-earned priority position for all essential workers when vaccines became available. Instead, the city council singled out some grocery workers for an increase in pay, while ignoring all other essential workers.”

Opponents have also argued that mandatory bonuses would ultimately hurt grocery workers, and their home communities. In a statement CGA President Ron Fong said, “[T]here will be significant potential negative consequences and would likely result in higher costs for groceries and increased food insecurity that disproportionately hurts low-income families, seniors, and disadvantaged communities already struggling financially. These proposals could also harm grocery workers themselves if stores are forced to reduce jobs or hours for employees due to higher costs.”

A study funded by CGA and conducted by Capitol Matrix Consulting supports that statement. It found that following a profit spike in the middle of 2020, grocery industry profits began trending downward. Researchers claimed a $5 hourly bonus would increase an average family of four’s grocery bill by $400. Alternately, if the increase in wages were not passed onto consumers, the study said that a 22 percent cut to staffing would be required to offset the new costs.

Uribe of LAANE doesn’t buy the argument that grocery store companies can’t afford to cover hazard pay bonuses themselves. “It comes down to corporate greed, putting profits over people,” she says. These companies have brought in enormous profits throughout the pandemic and they have the means to pay their workers a $5 hazard pay.”

The fight over compulsory bonus wages took a dramatic turn on February 1, when Kroger announced the April 17 closures of one Ralph’s location and one Food 4 Less location in Long Beach in response to the local ordinance. According to the company, some 200 employees will be reassigned or laid off between the two stores.

Long Beach Councilwoman Mary Zendejas, who proposed her city’s ordinance, saw the move as a political ploy. “Our Long Beach grocery workers are disproportionately low-income residents of color and oftentimes immigrants like my family and I,” she posted on Facebook. “[The fact] that corporations, who are making record profits, would rather use their health and livelihoods to make a point than pay them is just despicable and destructive.”

In an emailed statement from Kroger indicated that the two stores were “underperforming,” and that the anticipated 20-30 percent increase in operating costs could not be sustained. Six other Kroger-owned markets will remain open for business in Long Beach, however.

“These shutdowns place the blame on the cities passing hazard pay, place the blame on workers who want a few dollars’ increase for their labor during a pandemic,” says Uribe. “Companies aren’t willing to take responsibility for being able to actually provide this pay. They’re just placing the blame and using this as intimidation for asks that are quite warranted.”

“To be clear, we’re not opposed to wage increases,” a Kroger spokesperson told Civil Eats. “We’ll continue to operate stores in both cities, and our associates will receive the additional pay as mandated by the local government.”

Andrea Zinder, president of the UFCW Local 324, is quoted in the Long Beach Post as saying, “Sales at both these stores increased 30 percent during the pandemic.” She goes on to accuse Kroger of closing the stores to send a message to other cities considering similar ordinances.

Kroger recently announced that they will also be closing two “underperforming” QFC locations in Seattle, noting that the average hourly wage for Seattle QFC employees is already roughly $20, and that Kroger is offering $100 incentives for employees to get vaccinated as well as a $50 million rewards package of store credits and points.

The Battle in Seattle

The Seattle ordinance was signed into law on February 3 by Mayor Jenny Durkan. Employees of grocery stores employing 500 worldwide and larger than 10,000 square feet, or retailers over 85,000 square feet with at least 30 percent of space set aside for groceries, are now entitled to an additional $4 per hour until the city ends its COVID state of emergency.

That same day, Seattle and neighboring Burien, which is mandating a $5 hourly bonus, were hit with lawsuits by the NWGA and the Washington Food Industry Association (WFIA). In a press release, WFIA President Tammie Hetrick said, “If the City Council had requested input from grocers, they would have seen real data that almost all the individual stores in Seattle experienced significantly decreased sales and profits compared to the year before.”

The lawsuit mirrors those being filed throughout California — it claims the law is unconstitutional and supersedes federal labor laws. But this is not the first time that Seattle has legislated wages, which began an incremental increase back in 2014 after a successful Fight for $15 battle.

The ordinances target large-scale national chains which are more likely able to absorb increased labor costs. But in Seattle local co-op PCC Community Markets, a 15-store chain spread throughout the metro region, also falls under the mandate. Just before the ordinance was to go into effect, company CEO Suzy Monford wrote the mayor asking that the ordinance be revised or stricken altogether, claiming that PCC would be unable to offset bonuses, citing that the company incurred almost double their 2019 net income in COVID expenses.

But, in an about face illustrating the tricky politics of local business, PCC announced that it was negotiating with its workers representative with UFCW Local 21 over extending the bonus pay to roughly 700 hourly staff employed outside Seattle city limits. A deal was struck February 10, with the union agreeing to consider implementing curbside pickup.

Not all national supermarket chains have responded to the increasing demand for compulsory hazard pay bonuses with store closures or political pressure. For instance, Trader Joe’s hasn’t stopped paying the $2 hourly bonus it implemented early in the pandemic. On February 1, the company doubled its existing “thank you” premium, paying an extra $4 an hour to all non-management workers.

“[I]t’s clear that some companies are stepping up to do the right thing for these essential workers,” UFCW president Marc Perrone said in a statement.

But it is not yet clear whether other companies will step up if local hero pay ordinances are defeated in court. If they do pass these first legal hurdles, pressure will grow on the private sector to act of their own accord.

Although not mentioned publicly, a letter to staff obtained by The Seattle Times, and purportedly signed by Trader Joe’s executives, cites the local ordinances passed in California and Seattle as reasons for the increased bonus. The company concluded that not providing raises where ordinances go into effect would be unfair to employees working in those cities.

But even if the Long Beach court rules that hazard pay bonuses are illegal, Uribe believes that there’s still a lot of energy and support behind them. “Communities have stood by workers, so I still anticipate some sort of push back to in some way bring dignity to these jobs,” she says. “I don’t know that the fight would be over.”

• Grocery Stores Continue to Push Back Against Hazard Pay for Workers [Civil Eats]