Episode 29: Lives on the Line
Ever wondered how chicken nuggets are made? There’s the question of what’s actually in them — a continual source of jokes since the dawn of their existence — but the ingredients aren’t the only mystery. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, about half a million people work in meat-processing plants, slaughtering livestock and cutting carcasses into parts. In Arkansas, a kind of unofficial chicken capital, this work might also involve making a slurry of meat and skin and bones, then breading it and frying it, and finally freezing the little pieces and strips to become chicken fingers or nuggets. Most of these workers are immigrants; many are refugees. They are doing largely invisible work while being underpaid, overworked and mistreated. Recently, the federal government has begun to criminalize immigration, a development unfolding at the same time that the dirty and dangerous work done by immigrants has been deemed essential. After all, meat — the most American of foods — is something we are told we cannot live without.
In this episode we speak about these workers with Alice Driver, author of the 2024 book “Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company.”
Available wherever you listen to podcasts.
"In this political moment where we have in power, many in the Trump administration...who are talking about the carnivore diet and all the meat that they eat, and all these kinds of manly meat discourses that we're seeing right now, their food, their meat is being prepared by the immigrants that they are attempting to deport."
Episode guest:
Alice Driver
Dr. Alice Driver is a James Beard Award–winning investigative journalist and public speaker from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. She is the author of “Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company” (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2024). In 2024, the book won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize presented jointly by Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.
FoodPrint resources:
Additional articles:
- The Nation: “Eating Meat While Deporting Those Who Produce It”
- Teen Vogue: “Child Labor in the American Meatpacking Industry Is a Real Problem, Alice Driver Finds in New Book”
- Food and Environment Reporting Network: “Immigrant meatpacking workers are still under threat”
- Investigate Midwest: Threat of ICE raids shadows every shift in Chicago’s food warehouses
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Top photo by Evgeniy Kalinovskiy/Adobe Stock.