In January, a New York Times article about the National Restaurant Association (also known as “the other NRA”) made waves in the food service world. Their investigation into the NRA revealed that the organization had been using funds from ServSafe food safety training classes to lobby against minimum wage increases. ServSafe, the most popular food safety certification in the United States, is required in many restaurants and food service settings.

At the Food Institute, we wondered whether there were any alternatives to the ServSafe certification. To learn more, graduate intern Elissa Booras interviewed Jen Watkins, a Geography PhD candidate and Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH) affiliate. Jen’s current research focuses on restaurant structures and is especially pertinent to issues of labor in restaurants. Read on to learn about her research, her thoughts on this situation and its context within the broader history of restaurants and food service labor in America.

Q: Tell us about your dissertation research you’re currently working on.

A: I haven’t actually started my fieldwork yet. I’ve done a lot of preliminary research in Louisville and I’ve been bouncing back and forth between here and Bloomington for the last six months, but I’ll actually go out in the field this summer. Right now, I’m just putting together my plan and my funding.

My current research looks broadly at restaurants and at restaurant labor. I specifically came to grad school to study that. I was actually working in the service industry for over a decade before I decided to come back to school. In that time, I saw a lot of things that were not functioning properly that I thought were broken or unjust, and I wanted to find solutions to that. I wanted to start thinking about how I might think about those problems differently and how to fix them, having been a restaurant worker for so many years.

One of the biggest things that I’m asking in my research is: who is actually profiting off the restaurant industry? A lot of the scholar activism surrounding restaurants focuses on the restaurant owner, but individual restaurant owners are not the people that are extracting value from the restaurant industry as a whole. It’s pretty well-known that restaurants have extraordinarily thin profit margins. So, chain restaurants do make a lot of money potentially because of the economies of scale, but individual restaurant owners are not the people who are profiting. I’m just trying to think about who is profiting. How does the restaurant industry function as a national labor valve? How are restaurants used to create cultural capital and revitalization and urban tourism efforts? How do companies that surround the restaurant industry (for example, food distribution companies like Sysco or people who make restaurant equipment) profit off this industry?

The big driving thing here that I really want to show people is that, when we say the restaurant industry is broken, it’s actually not broken for everybody, right? For some actors, it’s functioning exactly the way that they want it to. Those are the people who have a lot of money and power in this industry, and that’s why so much policy does not get made surrounding restaurant workers. That takes us to this article about ServSafe and the National Restaurant Association.

Q: Yeah, I’m interested to talk about that, because this article reveals that ServSafe classes are funding NRA lobbying. Do you see this as a unique case or as part of a larger trend?

A: Before I read this article, I did not know that ServSafe functioned under the NRA. I’m not super surprised. By no means is it the only way you can get certified, but it’s the cheapest and most ubiquitous. People don’t say “I have to get certified,” they say “I have to get ServSafe certified.” It also varies from state to state. I don’t know if this is still the case, but when I was working as a server in Indiana, there only had to be one person in the building at any given time who was certified. In the case of the restaurant where I worked, it was only the managers who were required to become certified, and the restaurant just paid for us to do it. But, as we see in that article, some states are asking that everyone in the restaurant have that certification.

Until the 1990s, the NRA was a pretty inactive organization. It was not very politically involved. Then in the 1990s, Herman Cain, who was the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, became the president of the NRA, and he was the person who really turned the NRA into a big lobbyist group. He specifically was the driving force behind the tipped minimum wage getting decoupled from the federal minimum wage. Between 1938 and 1996, the tipped minimum wage always had to be 50% of the federal minimum wage – which is still problematic, because essentially the tipped minimum wage was a way for employers to bring new pools of labor into the restaurant industry but get around paying them. In 1996, $2.15 was exactly 50% of the federal minimum wage. In that same year, Clinton was still president but they had a newly conservative House, so Herman Cain was able to push and lobby for that legislation to get introduced. It passed and the two wages have been decoupled ever since.

So, this exposé about ServSafe and that particular linkage is something that I think was relatively unknown to people, but the NRA since the 1990s has never been an organization that was intended to support restaurant workers, ever. Between the 1990s and now, they have actively worked against restaurant workers’ interests. Honestly, I don’t know that I would even say they work for individual restaurant owners’ interests. They are primarily benefiting big chain restaurants like the one Herman Cain himself ran during that period.

Q: That makes me think of the current fight for the $15/hour minimum wage. Do you see any other obstacles to getting to that? Also, at this point $15/hour is not adequate for many places in the US.

A: Yeah, one, $15 is not a living wage anymore. Also, like I said, if the people who are making money off the restaurant industry are not the restaurant owners, and their profit margins are that thin, then that is a very real concern we have to think about if we abolish the tipped minimum wage – which I think we should. There’s no reason to have it, but there are a lot of individual restaurant owners who can’t afford to pay it. I think that the question needs to stop being about individual restaurant owners’ ethics and morality and it needs to start being about where the money in the restaurant industry is going and who we need to put pressure on to make those changes if it can’t be the individual restaurant owner.

One of the goals of eliminating the tipped minimum wage is to promote equality in wages between the front and back of house. But it’s not just a simple redistribution; it’s not like servers are going to make a little bit less and the back of house is going to make more. It’s just going to be a situation where everybody doesn’t paid enough. That’s one of the concerns.

Another concern – and this is my personal opinion – is that, with every meal in American dining culture, no matter where we go, we expect dinner and a show. That involves a lot of emotional labor. Servers expect to be paid for that, so it also becomes a question of: can you expect someone to perform that level of service for $15/hour? I think the answer is no. I mean, I certainly wouldn’t.

I also think that eliminating the tipped minimum wage has to include everybody or nobody. Restaurant groups have tried this in New York and in other places, and what happens is that the servers who have the most mobility and the most social capital will just move to another restaurant that still does tipping. There’s always going to be servers who would rather just make $80k a year and not have health insurance or job security. But, that leaves a lot of servers behind who don’t have that ability to switch back and forth – maybe they have kids, maybe they have health problems, maybe they’re older.

Q: What first made you notice this issue of power distribution in the restaurant industry?

A: I mean, I saw inequality and inequity, being a woman who is not white. I was very frustrated with a job where the money I would make in an hour really depended on my ability to absorb racism, sexism, or just general unpleasant behavior. But, I think what led me here is that these jobs have the potential to be really, really good jobs. They’re creative, there’s a lot of physical movement, they’re incredibly social spaces, you get to do a lot of ad hoc on-the-fly thinking and problem solving – which honestly, I enjoy. There are many things that would make it a career that a lot of people would like or be drawn to – but there’s no career ladder for it, and you have to deal with a lot of injustice. I think what drew me to studying this was figuring out a way to draw out the good qualities of the job and make it a more sustainable career. What do the bad things about this job say about American labor in general? What is endemic to the restaurant industry and what is part of our bigger problem surrounding labor and power in this country right now?

In a lot of ways, the restaurant industry was the first gig labor job. Even in the 19^th century, it was a highly mobile, seasonal workforce. A lot of servers in Europe would move from town to town along with the tourism seasons. We actually have a scholar of the restaurant in the history department named Rebecca Spang who wrote a really excellent book on the invention of the restaurant.

Q: That history says a lot about the culture of labor and food service, specifically in America.

A: Americans borrowed this elite dining model from Europe, but since then we’ve made it so that every economic class eats out all the time, but we’ve still held on to some of these cultural models that came from haute cuisine. They don’t work the same way as in a Denny’s, for example.

Q: What do you mean by cultural models?

A: In the 19^th century, mostly rich people ate out. There were taverns and stands, but the model of the sit-down restaurant that we have now came out of the hotel model. That was something wealthy people did. Then, in the 1920s, all of a sudden we have this rising professional class – doctors, lawyers, people who have a lot of disposable income and a lot of disposable free time – who were resentful of the fact that this kind of dining was for the elite only. So, they started to create some of these dining spaces for themselves in the US, and they borrowed a lot of those same models – the Escoffier model of how the kitchen is organized, how courses are served, styles of service, things like that. This model started with the wealthy elite in Europe, then moved over to the wealthy elite in the US, and then slowly trickled down through the professional classes. There’s still vestiges of it in our casual sit-down dining restaurants today. I think that’s where we have this expectation with servers of dinner and a show, no matter what kind of restaurant you’re eating at. At some of the restaurants in East Asia, if you want your server, you hit a button. They don’t come unless you actually need something, whereas servers in the US have an expectation to be so present that they anticipate things before people need them.

Q: How do you approach this topic through the lens of a geographer?

A: We’re always trying to think spatially. How are space and place interacting? How are our environments affecting us and vice versa? When I think of the restaurant, one thing I think about is the layers of community, for example. How are restaurant workers physically and emotionally interacting with each other in this space that is a restaurant, and how does that community fit into the community that the restaurant owner is trying to create with the clientele he draws in? How is that relationship working? How is that community fitting into the actual physical neighborhood where the restaurant sits – are they even the same communities? I think that how these imaginary spaces interact with the physical spaces in places like the restaurant can be incredibly important.

So, for my project, right now I’m thinking about this idea of the plate in the restaurant and how it’s essentially working as a perfect fetish object if we think about it in Marxian terms – and I usually think about things in Marxian terms because I’m a geographer. Basically, this plate, culturally or ideologically, is obscuring all of the processes and all of the sets of relations that create it. So, within my project, I’m trying to look at some of the main processes and sets of relations that are hidden from us when we sit down and eat that plate of food.

Q: Any final thoughts you want to share?

A: We’re in a moment right now. Union membership is spiking, people are generally very unhappy with work life in the United States right now, and I think that the restaurant industry is a really, really important player in that. Before the pandemic, it employed 10% of the US workforce. So, we have to think about what these big industries are doing and what their function is in the larger US economy as we move forward. Why has the restaurant industry been allowed to function in this way for so long? We’re hitting a crisis point and more and more types of academic research are going to have to fundamentally deal with labor in the coming years.

Are you a food service worker in Indiana looking to get certified? Learn about the Indiana Department of Health’s approved alternative certifications to ServSafe here: https://www.in.gov/health/food-protection/food-protection-manager-certification/

Jen was recently interviewed on WFIU’s Earth Eats about her research – listen here: https://indianapublicmedia.org/eartheats/rethinking-the-restaurant-industry.php

Guest written by Kaeley Geschke.

Providing access to food for a large community such as Indiana University is a sizable feat with a plethora of challenges. You must make sure that menus across campus are diverse enough to meet everyone’s dietary needs and preferences. You must ensure everyone has access to food no matter their income level – as well as managing the waste they are creating.

This year is the beginning of the All-you-care-to-eat (AYCTE) meal plan. While this plan is becoming increasingly popular across Big 10 schools, this serving model is designed to allow for students to come and go as they please without needing to worry about running out of points or money on their cards. Out of all the things to worry about in college, access to food should not be one. This meal plan, with its many benefits, does still have limitations. Right now, IU Dining is not set up to allow students to take food with them from the dining halls. This means that any food not consumed on the premises must be thrown out as food waste.

This aspect of food waste is not so easily controlled by Dining themselves. Instead it is up to the students to practice more food waste conscious practices – a task that is easier said than done as students have a lot on their plates (both literally and figuratively). To calculate how much waste is happening with this method of food service, I, along with Dining staff and volunteers from the Food Studies master’s program and Sustain IU, intercepted the waste between when students finished eating and the dishes being washed. We then scraped food and napkin waste into trash cans and weighed them. We did this for two dinner meals, both on Monday nights, one at Forest dining hall and the other at McNutt. We also conducted a survey of students to get a sense of their perceptions of waste.

Results

What we found was an average solid waste of 3.2 oz per person. This does not sound like much, but when you consider that the dining halls are open for 3 meals a day, 7 days a week, and serve thousands of people per meal, 3.2 ounces each adds up quickly. All of the food that comes back on these plates are unusable for any purpose. Even the items that are compostable have been mixed with products that are not, and even if they were, the sorting process that would be needed for it to be possible is going to be time consuming and expensive. This food must simply be thrown away.

The food being thrown away was, for the most part: food scraps, a bit of left-over rice and beans, pizza crust, a few fries, etc. It was seldom that full or nearly full portions of food came back. It is not reasonable to think about this in meals wasted. However, this is still weight that is just going into the landfill to sit and collect.

Discussion

When you compare IU to other schools in the Big 10, you will find that we are average in waste. This is not just an IU problem; this stretched across campuses.

The problem is not each individual student’s eating habits. It’s a cultural problem where we take more than we need because it is there, and we want to consume in the most time efficient and least energy expensive way possible. By changing the way we consume food in AYCTE dining halls or buffet style eating in general, we can reduce the general amount of waste coming back each day.

As consumers students could:

• Check NetNutrition® for your favorites across campus – you are less likely to throw away food you like and can take advantage of menu hacks to make a unique meal you will enjoy.
• Plan enough time to eat so you don’t have to rush and can make more trips to the concepts as needed. The eateries are open all day. You can stop by for as long as you need.
• Eat smaller meals more often. This gives you a better understanding of how hungry you are before you see all the delicious looking food and you overload your plate and gives you a chance to experience good food of all varieties.
• Take smaller amounts of food per trip.
• Take more trips as needed to feel content.

The food is prepared to be eaten. The solution is not to eat less food or to overeat just to clean your plate – we need to change the way we are thinking about eating and giving more time thought to the activity to allow for more conscious eating habits.

On the back-of-house side of operations, Dining has been taking steps to ensure that students have access to foods they are going to like and to encourage students to eat in a less wasteful manner.

Dining has done the following to try and limit the amount of consumer waste in their AYCTE facilities:

• Reusable dishes and removing trays.
• Small servings and dishes.
• Taking care with food rotation and use by:
  • Creating chef specials that feature excess unprepared items from other meals.
  • Making sure that the product received is correctly labeled and rotated dining staff can make fresh food and avoid unnecessary food spoilage.
• Avoiding over production – by paying attention to trends, Dining can take better care to not overproduce. Trends are adjusted by the day so they can watch how much food should be made.
• Revamping menus to feature favorites by:
  • Trying to avoid making foods that are undesirable by the students.
  • Keeping favorites and removing avoided items – the chef team evaluates their menus often, so this means they aren’t throwing out food nobody liked by just trying to make the same recipes.

Dining wants students to be comfortable in their facilities, and to be able to enjoy their food. While you are here IU is your home. Students spend more time here on a yearly basis than they do in their homes. Going into a Dining hall should be as comfortable and reliable as going into your own kitchen at home. Because of this the limits on consumer waste must come from consumers themselves.

There is so much possibility for change here. From the survey handed out at the Weigh the Waste events, we found that students have no perception of how much waste they were throwing out. We hope that by increasing awareness of the waste and by continuing to keep tabs on the waste habits of students we can see a decrease in the amount being wasted. It is up to the students themselves to care.

Kaeley Geschke is a recent graduate of the IU Food Studies master’s program. Their interests are in restaurant production and consumption. The Weigh the Waste project came out of a recent internship completed at IU Dining.

Italy…known for food, wine, olive oil and many other cultural treasures, it is the site where IU Food Institute and Geography researchers are working to better understand the Geographical Indication labels and how they may be applied in the US and Indiana. GI labels let consumers know that their parmesan cheese, for example, was raised and processed in the region of Parma, Italy, for global export. They are regulated by an authority and are only given when a food product accurately represents a specific region’s history, culture, soils, climate, quality, and other attributes.

Drs. Angela Babb and Dan Knudsen are working on the ‘Sicily Project‘ and we took some time to learn more about Angela and her work. [Original script written by Claire Frohman.]

Angela Babb is an Assistant Research Scientist with the Ostrom Workshop and Director of the Critical Food Studies Lab the IU food Institute. She is also a member of the Sustainable Food Systems Science group and an alumna of IU’s Geography Department.  

Q: Please tell us a bit about your primary focus areas of research. 

A: A lot of my work has to do with food justice and equitable pathways to a sustainable food system. I do a lot of work on food assistance program evaluation, particularly the SNAP program, and a lot of work on the politics of hunger and the political economy of hunger. 

Q: I understand you’ll be traveling to Sicily this June for fieldwork. Can you tell us a bit about that project and what your plans are? 

A: This is a project that precedes me. I joined in 2018, and it’s a team of geographers looking at the Geographical Indication (GI) schemes that are used in Europe. Specifically, we’ve been looking in Sicily at how GI labels are used to protect traditional agricultural crops and methods and cultural foodways. 

GIs are labels that are put on commodities to signify that they are exceptional because they are from a particular region – that the geography of that region makes it ideal for growing that particular crop or producing a particular value added good because of the soil, the climate, the local knowledge, the cultural celebration around that particular commodity, etc. The team I joined was already looking at the green pistachio of Bronte, and in 2019 we started looking at the lemon of Siracusa and the new carrot of Ispica. The green pistachios of the Bronte region are grown in the lava rock soils around Mount Etna. For the people here, this factors a lot into their identity. Their culture really wraps around the pistachio. It’s difficult to grow in their unusual geography, so they’ve come up with a way to graft these pistachio trees and grow this incredible plant. Part of the magic is that there aren’t many other options, but they’ve found a way to grow these beautiful purple and green pistachios. 

This year we will be spending more time on the lemon of Siracusa and the new carrot of Ispica, and we’re also going to look into the tomato of Pachino. This is another interesting case study because the GI label for the Pachino tomato requires that they are grown in greenhouses, which sounds a little ironic to us, so we’re curious to research that. 

Q: What would you say is your primary role in the research team? 

A: As the only female team member, one of my roles has been to interview women throughout the supply and value chains we are researching to try to get an understanding of the differences in experience that might exist along gender lines in the growing or processing of these different GI labeled crops. 

We’re examining how their jobs might differ, how their wages differ, how land ownership differs across lines of gender. Something I found in the process is that there are a lot of interesting questions around race, ethnicity, and citizenship status to be explored as well.  

When looking at these different value chains, it’s interesting to ask what equity or inequity might be maintained by these GI labels. They are meant to protect a traditional way of doing things, and the traditional way oftentimes involves the exploitation of different populations categorized by gender, race, ethnicity, and citizenship status. We are digging into that. 

Q: Is this your first time to Sicily? 

A: In 2019 we went for a few weeks and interviewed the leaders of the different coalitions representing these different GI labels. Typically, a group of producers and processors will form a sort of coalition to sell their commodities with this label to standardize production, the marketing of it, etc. There is strength in numbers. We met with a lot of administrators and a few farmers and processors. 

This time I’m hoping we can talk to more people with different positions throughout the value chain. I really would like to talk to more farmers and farm workers, and people doing different types of labor throughout these processing facilities, not just the managers and administrators. 

Q: Do you foresee any barriers to reaching the people or asking the questions that you’re wanting to ask this time around? 

A: The biggest barrier is always language. The people who are working throughout a lot of these different value chains are immigrants to Sicily and don’t necessarily speak Italian. There’s also the question of Sicilian which is already a barrier to start with. Some laborers don’t speak Italian or Sicilian, so it’s going to be really hard for us to find ways to speak with or to understand the experiences of those individuals. 

It seems easy enough for me to pull aside a group of just women and talk about gender issues but, at the same time, there were moments on the last visit where I felt as though there wasn’t enough trust between us for folks to be really honest with me about their experiences. At the very least there was a little bit of disconnect in my cultural understanding of what constituted a gender issue for Sicilian or immigrant women versus what I would consider discrimination or gender discrimination from where I’m situated in my culture. I’m hoping to better understand that this time around and to not pass on my thoughts and cultural biases around what equity looks like. 

Q: Who are your community partners there in Sicily and on the project in general? 

A: Our colleague Gianni Petino from the University of Catania is already there and getting things all set up so we can hit the ground running. Donata Napoli is also in Sicily and helps me interpret and conduct interviews with women. Then we work with Jeffrey Wilson who’s in Geography at IUPUI, and Carl Ipsen in the History Department here at IU brings the language fluency and the cultural competency. Last but not least, Dan Knudsen is professor emeritus of the IU geography department and has been our visionary leader on the project.  

Q: What is the trajectory of the project from here?  

A: After we go there this June, Gianni and Donata are coming here in August and we’re going to look at some value chains here in the US. The ultimate goal is to understand the GI scheme’s potential for building sustainable and equitable food systems. Essentially, we are curious what lessons we can learn from this mechanism working in Sicily and in Europe more broadly and bring to the US to apply in places like the Indiana Uplands Region.  

For instance, there is a lot of cattle raising here. Is there potential for a GI labeling system of some sort there? Could that help with meeting production here, protect some of our cultural foodways, increase consumer demand for Uplands beef? 

Q: So, the main question seems to be how this labeling system could be applied in the US and potentially even improved upon. For instance, if equity is not actually a part of how it’s currently functioning in Sicily, how could measures that support equity be woven into a new framework here?   

A: Yes. Or combined with something like Fair Trade labels for something more comprehensive – something that takes into consideration more than just tradition or physical geography and ultimately concerns how we protect the laborers. Still considering things like physical geography and climate change, GI labels could tell us about where different types of food should be produced – what would be the most sustainable way to grow pistachios or lemons for instance. There are all these different strategies that are being threatened by climate change, so we have to figure out, in terms of sustainable food systems, where the best place is for us to be producing some of the foods that we rely on. 

Q: If someone were shopping at a grocery store like Kroger or Fresh Thyme, what might they find with one of the labels that we’re talking about? 

I’ve been seeing a lot of olive oils with a PDO labels (Protected Designation of Origin), though that’s a different industry – Carl Ipsen could say much more about Italian olive oil. It is more often the shelf stable products that make it here. I tend to shop at Aldi and see random GI labels there often.  

A lot of geographic identification has kind of lost its meaning in the U.S., with things like Parmesan, which theoretically originates in Parma in Italy, or Champagne which in theory should be just from the Champagne region of France. People can buy pre-grated cheese in a plastic can that’s called “parmesan” when it clearly is not a true Parmesan from Parma. Or there might be a cheese with a label with a very detailed map of Italy and an Italian flag that says “inspired by Italy” somewhere in small print, and if you’re not looking closely, you might think it was imported. Any conversion of this model to the U.S. will be difficult but interesting.  

Q: Any final thoughts you would like to cover? 

A: Something we haven’t looked at, which could be super interesting, is whether, on the consumer side of things, people care about GI labels. Some Sicilian farmers are saying that they have more business when using the “organic” label than their GI labels. The organic label is meaningful globally, but their GI labels still feels more like a thing of only local significance. So, another question is what makes sense globally. What labels might make sense globally from a consumer’s perspective? What would make consumers pay attention to those labels? 

Overall, the big question is not only about how we can protect laborers and cultural foodways, but how are we going to be moving towards a sustainable food system equitably. 

Guest written by Campus Kitchen student leaders

Campus Kitchen has seen a change of leadership in spring semester. We said goodbye to Cally Wilken, a founding member of the organization, and Celeste Coughlin, an exceptional grant-writer and organizer. Thomas Zeedyk, a Cox Scholar and a freshman, has assumed a leadership role as a Program Assistant, joined by Emma Bartolo, a sophomore, and Don Donduk, a graduate student. Thomas studies accounting and finance at the Kelley School of Business. Emma is pursuing a major in International studies in the Hamilton-Lugar School, and a minor in Environmental and Sustainability Studies with a focus on Sustainable Food Systems in the College. Donduk is pursuing a Ph.D. in Geography and a regional focus on Central Eurasian Studies.

Campus Kitchen has continued to address food insecurity among IU’s students this spring. Early in the pandemic, the organization pivoted to a Campus Supported Agriculture (CSA) model to meet the demands of students whose primary residence was off-campus. Aided by two sizeable grants from the IU Student Government and the Metz Philanthropic Opportunity Fund, Campus Kitchen was able to distribute 187 meals to students by organizing 6 CSA Box events. Based on the mission of the organization, all our food boxes are free and available on a first-come, first-served basis. We serve students across Bloomington by offering both pick-up and delivery.

The boxes were organized along themes with a recipe accompanying locally sourced ingredients as well as staple pantry items, recipe suggestions, and cooking tips. Among the themes were: an Asian-inspired box that contained food such as pork sausage, rice, and soy sauce, and an Italian-themed box that contained pork sausage, collard greens, and tomatoes.

Spring 2022 proved challenging; wet and unseasonably cold weather decreased local produce availability. We had to be creative to support our local farmers and be able to provide nutritious food options to students. We managed to get plenty of pork sausage, potatoes and leafy vegetables from farmers at the local farmers’ markets but had to substitute with rice, spices and other staples from our local food businesses.

We hope to pivot to our original mission in fall 2022: addressing food waste at IU by collaborating with IU Dining to repurpose and redistribute food to students in need. In the meantime, we wish everyone success in their last few weeks of this semester and we will see everyone back on campus in August 2022!

To stay up to date on Campus Kitchen events in the future, visit our Instagram page @campuskitcheniu or their Facebook page. If you would like to be part of our organization, request to be added via our beINVOLVED student roster.

Ariana Gunderson is a graduate student at the IU Food Institute and a first year PhD student in the Anthropology Program at IU. She was recently awarded an Ostrom Fellowship to support her dissertation research and is a member of the Sustainable Food Systems Science group (SFSS). 

Q: So, Ariana, what brought you to Indiana University? 

A: I was drawn to IU for the very strong focus on food within the Anthropology Department and within the university as a whole. I knew right away that I wanted to get involved with the Food Institute and SFSS, and they’ve both been a really wonderful physical space, and also community, to be a part of.  

Q: What were you doing before coming to IU for your PhD? 

A: I come from a Food Studies background, and I got my Masters in Gastronomy from Boston University. I’ve been working these past few years on the study of public and private space, specifically in restaurants. Right before I started my doctoral work, I was studying COVID outdoor dining in San Francisco – how, for instance, restaurants have created new spaces on sidewalks and public streets in response to COVID policy and how that has changed the city. I also have been exploring ideas of dining culture and public and private space in general.

 Q: What are your plans for your dissertation project?  

A: This summer will be my first summer of dissertation feasibility research and I’m going to be studying the German recipe industry. I’ll be in Berlin for three months, starting mid-May, exploring food media. Specifically, I’m going to be working with recipe developers to study what the process is, in their mind and body, through which a sensory food experience gets translated into text, as a recipe, and then how that recipe gets again transformed into text and then into an economic object. Essentially my research is asking, “How are these words about food a commodity, and how do they move through space?” 

 I’m really excited about this project because it brings together Economic Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology, and Food Studies. 

Q: Will this be your first time in Germany, or do you have a background there? 

A: I lived in Germany on a fellowship for one year, and I have spoken German more than half my life. I started learning German in high school and have continued up till now. I’m just so excited to go back! 

Q: Is there anything else coming up that you’re feeling excited about right now? 

A: Yes, I’m very excited to be presenting on my San Francisco project at the Michicagoan Conference this May. It’s co-hosted by University of Michigan and University of Chicago, and its focus is on Linguistic Anthropology. Then I’m also going to the big food studies conference co-hosted by the Agriculture, Food and Human Value Society and the Association for the Study of Food in Society. I’ve been very generously supported by a Food Institute travel grant for that conference and I thank the Institute so much for making it possible for me. Then I’m also going to go to the Society for Economic Anthropology Conference in Copenhagen in June. I’m really looking forward to all of them.  

Q: This does seem like a very full and exciting time! What would you say you are most excited about in the next 12 months of your studies?  

A: I’m really excited to explore Visual Anthropology more. I am a new analog photographer – I work with film photography. It was a pandemic project that has bloomed into being a really wonderful part of my life, and I’m exploring how to make it a part of my professional practice as well. This summer, I’m going to be working with community dark rooms in Berlin to explore new techniques and to have the experience of developing alongside other people instead of just by myself in my bathroom. Analog photography is huge in German-speaking Europe. Vienna and Berlin seem to be real centers of the practice, so I’m so excited to be there. 

Q: I understand you were recently awarded an Ostrom Fellowship. Can you tell us more about that?  

A: Yes, I’m absolutely thrilled. I just got the news and I’m just tickled! I think it’s going to be such a great intellectual community and another way to sort of connect with the SFSS family because the Ostrom Workshop and SFSS are so connected. I’m just really grateful for the opportunity to be in an interdisciplinary setting because so much of a doctoral program is about becoming more and more hyper-focused on one project, on one way of doing things, and so I’m really grateful for the chance to be in an interdisciplinary community to learn how to talk about my research to a lot of different people. And to learn different ways of doing things. 

Q: What first led you to this area of studies?  

A: So, I have always loved learning and I have tended to get very interested in something and then sort of burn out on it. My undergraduate degree was in Egyptology, which was incredible. It was something wonderful for four years of my life and then, when I graduated, I needed something new. I knew that if I was going to continue in a professional research capacity I needed to be able to sustain interest in something longer than four years at a time and I thought, “Well, I’m going to have to eat every day for the rest of my life, and so I can’t get bored of food!”  And that actually has worked!  

What’s interesting about food as an object or field of study is that it is endless. There’s always more to learn about it. It’s also a younger field, so there’s a lot of space for junior scholars to explore. There’s new territory to draw new connections, and it’s something that I get to think about all the time. I’m always engaging with food and food messages and food media. It’s all around us, so I get to have my scholarly researcher brain activated all the time, not just in really specific settings, and I really enjoy that. 

Q: What would be your advice for a younger scholar who is just embarking on their academic career and struggling to find their focal point. What would be the guiding questions you might suggest someone ask themselves? 

A: I would encourage someone to find something that they could very happily think about for 10 years. I think a sign of a good research topic, theme, or area is one where questions beget questions, where you start to wonder something that makes you wonder something else that makes you wonder something else. That shows that your brain is able to trace the connections in a way that, even though you’re thinking about one topic for a really long time, it’s actually just that you get wider and deeper into that topic. If your brain can already latch on to new connections, then I think it’s a good sign that that’s something that you would be able to find interesting for many years. 

Written by project co-lead, Shellye Suttles

How did the Food Comida Rawl 317 (FCR317) project come about?

In Indianapolis Mayor Hogsett’s 2019 State of the City address, he advocated for the creation of a collective vision, mission, and goals for Marion County’s food system to guide residents, community organizations, businesses, and policymakers in efforts to improve long-term food access and food security. For many years, the Mayor’s Office, City-County Council, and diverse food system stakeholders have been trying to tackle these weighty food policy issues, and this renewed charge to work strategically and collectively presented an opportune moment to launch this collaborative partnership.

Who was on the team?

The team was made-up of a robust core organizing committee with representation from the City of Indianapolis, Indiana University, Butler University, and CollaboCreative, and an advisory committee of farmers, food banks, retailers, aggregators, non-profits, and more. This well-rounded make-up helped give the project an insightful and balanced perspective on the local food system. Our diverse professional representation from data experts to community facilitation specialists allowed us to simultaneously analyze data and empirical evidence from previous efforts while also gathering the current needs of community and policymakers to co-create meaningful food policy solutions.

What do “Comida” and “Rawl” mean?

“Comida” means food in Spanish, and “Rawl” means food in Hakha Chin, a Burmese language. Over 10 percent of Indianapolis residents identified as Hispanic or Latino in 2021 (U.S. Census, 2022) and, as of 2020, Indianapolis and Marion County were home to the largest Burmese community in the United States (Indy Star, 2021). We felt it was important to be linguistically inclusive in the research and policy development process, and “Food Comida Rawl” represents the three most prevalent languages of the communities we were working with. 

What were the project’s goals and how was it conducted?

Our research effort sought to understand the specific challenges households and food system practitioners face in navigating the Indianapolis and Marion County food systems. We also explored consumer visions and practitioner solutions for improvements to the local food system to achieve greater food security and food access for all residents, at all times.

We used focus groups, surveys, and spatial data visualization and analysis. The first round of data collection involved food system asset mapping, a food store survey, a scan of food policies and programs, a consumer survey, a practitioner survey, and focus groups with food system practitioners. Between March 2020 and December 2021, these elements were analyzed, synthesized, and shared back with local households and food system stakeholders through community focus groups and pop-up events to solicit additional community feedback. 

What were some challenges faced over the course of the project?

The project began in March 2020, which was the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, so all of our planned in-person events had to be converted to online activities via Zoom, Qualtrics surveys, or the foodcomidarawl317.com website. Project co-lead and Director of Community Nutrition and Food Policy for the City of Indianapolis, Milele Kennedy, shared that “we know that working virtually created barriers for those with a lack of access to electronic devices, older individuals that need assistance with technology and those that need more inclusive supports.” We offered consumer surveys and conducted multi-lingual Zoom meetings in Spanish and Hakha Chin, but still felt that in-person events could have resulted in a broader participant base. “Face-to-face interactions are very valuable,” Kennedy added. ” For FCR317 version 2.0 we would like to begin to offer in person and interactive options for feedback to ensure all residents have equitable access to our program.”

What did the project find?

Overall, the challenges that residents expressed facing in the local food system were largely cultural and asset-based, with some physical and geographic as well. We found that cultural barriers generally reflected a discrepancy between the healthy diets that households wanted to eat and the culture in which they are trying to eat them. This showed up most prominently when it came to getting groceries, patronizing local restaurants, and trying to eat a healthy diet in all venues.

Asset-based challenges in both accessing and preparing food were most commonly regarding the cost of food, time constraints, and limited access to adequate kitchen space and supplies. A majority of households across demographics expressed challenges in preparing food at home and healthy eating and, for low-income households in particular, there was a negative feedback relationship between the lack of time to get groceries and the lack of home resources to prepare food daily. 

As one respondent explained, “Time is the big issue. Usually, when I start cooking, everyone is already starving, so I feel pressure to make something fast.” Another respondent shared the challenge of “[having] a limited knowledge of food and what can be done with it.” They also added, “I have two kids under 3 and they are picky.” Ability barriers such as transportation, mobility, and disability, as well as COVID-related difficulties, were other challenge-points found in the study. As one respondent explained, “I live in a food desert. I have to make sure I have all the ingredients at home.” Other respondents indicated that their disabilities inhibit preparing food at home because traveling to the grocery store is challenging or because, as one participant stated, “I get easily fatigued when standing to prepare my meals…I simply do not enjoy anything about cooking.”

According to the food system practitioners in the study, the inequitable landscape of food access in Indianapolis is rooted in poverty and systemic racism, which leads to limited food access and food insecurity. They expressed that community voices and lived experiences are absent from the policy process and that regulations are largely unsupportive of small food retailers and local farmers. Additionally, they expressed that stakeholders often point to organizational and informational silos and the lack of a central communication hub as reasons for a lack of food system information sharing and that, while collaboration is strong around hunger relief due to existing collective impact organizations, it is especially lacking around policy change and systemic root cause work in the broader food system. 

What are the next steps in the effort to create a sustainable local food system in Indianapolis?

As a result of our findings from the study, we provided ten policy prototype recommendations that address consumer and practitioner visions for supporting food system equity, diversity, and inclusivity across local food cultures, healthy eating, food access and availability, and incorporation of the community voice, as well as creating asset-based resources for households, effective government programming, and opportunities for food system collaboration and awareness among existing collectives.

We recognize the policy prototype recommendations each have three important components: (1) The City of Indianapolis can design a funding matrix that prioritizes food system improvements as identified by consumers and practitioners; (2) the City of Indianapolis can fund and/or continue to fund existing local programs that meet these priorities and have a record of success; and (3) the City of Indianapolis can experiment with new food system policies and programs, using appropriate evaluation metrics, that may supplement existing policies and programs. To read the full policy prototype recommendations, please check out the full report here.

“This process displayed the value of consistently receiving feedback from residents on the state of food access in Indianapolis.” Kennedy shared. “It is also clear that a more direct approach needs to be developed to ensure minority populations are adequately represented. With this feedback and equitable representation,  data can be utilized to ensure equitable food access for all residents.”

What can I do to support the on-going work of FCR317?

If you know of anyone living in Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, please let them know to complete the household survey: http://foodcomidarawl317.com/survey/

As with the entire FCR317 website, the household survey is available in English, Spanish, and Hakha Chin.