The labor of Black Southern women has been the one true staple of the American dinner table for generations. Most of my seven aunts have worked at produce, pork, or poultry processing facilities in North Carolina’s eastern region for as long as I’ve been alive and much of their adult lives. As we recognize the devastation of COVID-19, and the fearsome cost to meatpacking plant workers, we also recognize this: The resilience and resolve of Black women has persevered in the wake of violent and demeaning conditions from southern fields, to plantation kitchens, and now processing plants.

Two of my elderly aunts and one of my cousins are still employed at the poultry plants back home. Swollen hands and pulsating varicose veins trail the tired limbs of older Black women, like my aunts, who have worked these plants for over 60 collective years (34 years each as of September 2020). They are part of an invisible, devalued labor pool that is deeply affected economically, emotionally and physically by a tainted history that has bled into today’s meat and poultry processing industries. All this, to put chicken pastry on our supper tables.

Read more at: https://bittersoutherner.com/southern-perspective/2020/on-the-line-the-price-we-pay-for-chicken