Is the Popeyes Chicken Sandwich even ethical?
Twitter lit up this week with people raving about the new Popeye’s Chicken Sandwich. Food media was abuzz with praise. Writer Helen Rosner even had a piece in the New Yorker titled “The Popeyes Chicken Sandwich Is Here To Save America.” Cool. Cool, cool, cool.
Except maybe not?
After all, wasn’t it only a few short weeks ago that Twitter was also abuzz, this time with condemnation for the ICE raids on Mississippi chicken processing plants that swept up hundreds of Latinx workers and left children crying and alone after the school day, wondering where their parents were? Weren’t many of the same food media folks up in arms about the inhumane treatment and hypocrisy of an immigration policy that targets workers over management?
Hold up, you say. You can’t possibly be tying the racist immigration policies of the Trump Administration to a chicken sandwich? That’s a bit of a stretch!
Again, except maybe it isn’t?
Raise your hand if you think that Popeyes gets its chicken from small family farms where they are processed by Farmer John and his kids out behind the barn. Right.
The reality is that national food chains like Popeyes source their proteins from other large corporations, businesses like Koch Foods, whose plants were the ones raided by ICE just a few short weeks ago. These businesses rely almost entirely on immigrant labor to do the dirty, often dangerous work of processing and packing the meat that winds up on the shelves at Wal-Mart and Albertson’s and in between the buns of those chicken sandwiches.
These businesses hire immigrants because they know they are cheap, replaceable labor. Legal status is of little concern to upper management — they are almost never held accountable when their plants get raided, and they know they can just hire new workers to replace the ones ICE hauls away.
In fact — Koch Foods contacted the Mississippi Department of Employment Security the day of the raids to request help with replacing detained employees and held a job fair shortly thereafter.
Of course, as of the time I write this, no one from Koch management has been implicated or arrested in connection with the hiring of undocumented immigrants.
I could go on and on about the racist hirings practices and dangerous workplace environments that are endemic to large-scale food processing plants, but others have stated it far more eloquently than I. Like this — https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/mississippi-ice-raids-trump-koch-foods-sexual-harassment-20190813.html .
Back to Popeyes, and that must-have chicken sandwich. The connection between immigrant labor and that piece of fried chicken is undeniable. The work of thousands of underpaid, mainly Latinx, men and women went into producing a product that can be sold cheaply and marketed to millions as the hot sandwich of the moment.
Which leads us back to the question — is the Popeyes Chicken Sandwich ethical? Can you decry the current climate of targeted racism against Latinx migrants in America in one breath and take a giant bite of a sandwich they helped produce in the next? Is that a fair question or does it open a Pandora’s box of “well, now we can’t eat THIS” that leads down a never-ending road of boycotts?
I don’t have the answer, but what I do know is that we need to have the discussion. We need to ask these questions. And we need to hold our thought leaders accountable, especially in food media. Evan Hanczor, of Brooklyn’s Egg Restaurant, put it best in Alicia Kennedy’s recent (wonderful) piece in Edible Brooklyn:
“I…don’t see any value in calling out or shaming anyone for really fucking enjoying that sandwich and telling the world about it — everyone deserves a joyful relationship to food. I just don’t see the value of food media getting in on the praise.”
This is a decision every person needs to make for themselves — ethics v. reality. And we should all certainly strive to have a joyful relationship to food, as Hanczor says. But at the end of the day we need to acknowledge the consequences of our decisions, embrace living in the grey area, and do our best to not be privileged hypocrites.
If that makes you uncomfortable or you’re unwilling to do that, then please, just put down the chicken sandwich and step away from Twitter for a bit.
