This panel discussion explores the complex, multifaceted nature of food waste and its broader implications. What does food waste really mean for our society, our climate, and our values? This session delves into the philosophical dimensions of food waste, examining its climate implications and considering the narratives that remain unaddressed. How can we leverage insights from the humanities to reshape our approach to climate change? This panel challenges us to rethink our values, behaviors, and the societal structures that shape our food systems, offering a fresh perspective on how to craft policies for sustainable change. What kinds of research products would make a difference in this space? Panelists:
- Saskia Cornes, Duke Campus Farms
- Matthew Whelan, Duke Divinity School
- Michael Binger, Society of St. Andrew, a non-profit gleaning
- Jarvis McInnis, Duke Department of English
This panel discussion was held at Duke University on Friday, January 23, 2026 as part of the Rethinking Food Waste – Duke Climate Collaboration Symposium event, organized by the Duke World Food Policy Center. The moderator is Norman Wirzba from the Duke Divinity School.
This symposium is the sixth of the Duke Climate Collaboration Symposia, a series of convenings designed to accelerate climate solutions by developing new collaborations among Duke scholars and external partners. The series is funded by a gift from The Duke Endowment in support of the Duke Climate Commitment, which unites the university’s education, research, operations, and public service missions to address climate challenges. The Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability manages the symposia series.
Panel Transcript
Norman Wirzba: Yes, good to be with everyone. My name is Norman Wirzba. I am a theologian philosopher, but I’m also a farm boy. And I want to, in my work, bring together food as a cultural act as well as an ecological agricultural act. And so that informs a lot of what I’m doing. But I’m not going to be the main person speaking today because we have three wonderful panelists. And they are going to introduce themselves and then also give a statement in which they describe the orientation they bring to thinking about food and food waste.
Now, Norbert said that Saskia is unable to be with us. But she did prepare a statement that she asked me to read so you can get her perspective, which I think is a very, very important one. So, this is from Saskia to all of you.
I am Dr. Saskia Cornes, an Assistant Professor of the Practice at the Franklin Humanities Institute and Director of the Duke Campus Farm, a one acre working farm powered by Duke students by training. I’m a renaissance literature scholar, so I think a lot about words. How the meaning of words changes over time and what these changes show about how we make meaning, how we make meaning from the words themselves, and how we make meaning from the world around us.
Waste is a wonderful example. In the medieval period, when people use the word waste, they most often meant something like what we now call wilderness. A place that’s desolate, wild, perhaps even slightly dangerous. Somewhere outside of human control, cultivation or habitation. It’s a particular kind of place rather than a particular kind of thing.
” To waste” could also mean to lose something gradually through use, wear, and tear or decay to diminish or use something up until it becomes useless, as in “to waste away.”
What’s striking to me about these earlier meanings is that waste is not the acceptable, inevitable result of getting the things we want. Instead, it points to what we haven’t sufficiently cared for, what we haven’t made fruitful, haven’t brought fully into the realm of our concern, haven’t properly maintained or attended to.
Perhaps this is because so much of what we now consider waste was actually used, even had great value, often for the purposes of growing food. One of the most prominent how-to manuals for farming during the Renaissance advises, and here I quote: “Liming, marling, sanding earthing, muddling, snail-codding, mucking, chalking, pigeons-dung, hens-dung, hogs-dung… rags… coarse wool… almost anything that hath any liquidness, foulness, or good moisture in it-it is very natural enrichment to any sort of land.”
This may seem primitive, even disgusting. We don’t have to think about what snail-codding is and what it might do, and perhaps we’re grateful for this. Instead of dung and muck, we now have fossil fuels embedded in our food system in fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides; in the heavy machinery used for cultivation, crop management, and harvest; and in transporting packaging, preserving and preparing food. Roughly half and possibly more of the labor that cultivates this food is performed by workers deemed simultaneously “essential,” illegal, and dare I say, disposable. And this is without considering the kinds of food waste that are our primary focus for the day. These more “efficient” forms of food production are polluting at a global scale and now threatened to waste the planet.
I am not proposing a return to snail-codding, but what would it mean to reconsider efficiency, to think about waste, not as the unfortunate but inevitable byproduct of something we need, but as something to which we have not yet applied sufficient attention or care?
Okay, that’s from Saskia. Do write her and tell her how brilliant that was. So we’re just going to go down the line and each person will introduce themselves.
So we’ll start with you Jarvis.
Jarvis McInnis: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Norman. My name is Jarvis McInnis. I’m an associate professor of English here at Duke. I come to the question of food waste through my work on agriculture in black farming practices in the US South in the Caribbean. You’ll hear lots of synergies between my remarks and Saskia’s. Saskia and I actually were graduate students together. She was a few years ahead of me. So it is lovely to reengage her thinking at this point in my career.
So, I come to the question of waste through my research on the Tuskegee Institute. The school established by the African American educator and political leader, Booker T. Washington in 1881. Tuskegee was established on the grounds of a former cotton plantation where the land had been exhausted by years of abusive monocrop agriculture. Under Washington’s leadership, however, it was transformed into a world renowned agricultural and industrial school for African Americans. Throughout Washington’s archive waste comes up in about three to four primary ways. Most often in terms of time or efficiency and resources, right? Wasting time, wasting money on consumer goods. There’s an ontological meaning from waste to manhood, which I’ll elaborate on in just a moment. An ecological and terrestrial meaning, and of course food waste, right? His frustrations over waste in the school’s dining hall.
So for the purposes of today’s panel, I want to suggest that there was an anti-waste ethos at Tuskegee that on the one hand, was shaped by the influence of progressive era reform and its preoccupation with thrift and economy. After all, Washington was essentially a social reformer in the countryside. But this anti waste ethos was also shaped by a sheer sense of pragmatism rooted in the reality of Black Southern life. In the late 19th century following the abolition of slavery, many Southern African Americans lived in impoverished conditions and simply could not afford to be wasteful. Therefore, Washington insisted on the importance of thrift and economy.
Now, as I stated, Tuskegee was transformed from a plantation into a school. It also operated as a large farm and an agricultural experiment station known as the experiment plot that was under the direction of renowned agricultural scientist, George Washington Carver. Since Tuskegee was located on poor quality land, as were many Southern African Americans who managed to purchase land at that time, Carver dedicated some of his earliest agricultural experiments to soil regeneration. One of his earliest agricultural bulletins, for instance, was titled How to Build Up Worn Out Soils. Furthermore, in Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta exposition address of 1895, when he rose to race leadership, he attempted to persuade white Southerns that African Americans could be their partners in restoring the southern economy ” making blossom the waste places in your fields, right?” And you may hear the synergies between the way waste is used there and the way that it’s used in Saskia’s comments.
And in Washington’s recruitment letter to George Washington Carver, he states, “our students are poor, often starving. They travel miles of torn roads across years of poverty. We teach them to read and write, but words cannot fill stomachs. They need to learn how to plant and harvest crops.” Their challenge then, Washington continued, was bringing people from degradation, poverty, and waste to full manhood. And that’s a direct quote from Washington.
So, throughout my research, I think of Tuskegee’s approach to waste very broadly. And through this logic praxis, an ethic of regeneration and reuse, not only of soil and landscape, but of human beings as well. A concept that I call eco-ontology. It is both literal and figural, ontological and terrestrial, and a practical value rooted in the material realities of Black Southern life. And to just put a finer and final point on it, this is the same attitude toward waste that we see in Washington’s letters to Tuskegee staff members about food waste in the dining hall, which I can elaborate on later. Or their efforts to teach fruit canning and other food preservation methods. They could not afford to be wasteful from a practical and financial point of view. But also because they fundamentally believe that waste should be regenerated and reused toward new and higher ends.
Michael Binger: Thank you. My name is Michael Binger. Goodness, I come to this moment having kind of been on a little bit of a journey. My undergraduate training was in mathematical economics. I transitioned that into television news and then into being a local church pastor for about 15 years before coming to the Society of St. Andrew. With Society of St. Andrew what we do is we work with farm and produce distribution outlets to collect what they have excess be it left in the field after harvest. We take volunteers out to glean, package, deliver that to community food pantries, or we work with larger distribution groups to route larger volumes of food, either to food banks or to organizations that can distribute that quickly and efficiently in the communities.
So, in the process of it, I’ve from the mathematical economics end we’ve dealt with the practicalities of what it means to identify excess. The costs of transporting and redistributing it. The value of it has to our communities and then through the work in theology and communications to understand really the impact that has on communities. And I’ve found that waste really does at some level touch everybody and the relationships that are built around this idea of us having an abundance. That there is enough available to feed all. One of my good friends that, unfortunately had to leave this morning that we did some research work with pointed out that there is enough food produce, just produce, left in North Carolina’s fields to feed every food insecure person in the state. Five servings of produce every day.
The issue of hunger in and of itself is not a food supply issue so much as it is an organization of logistics and the value that we put upon the quality of food that we offer to the world. And the value that we put on the people. And understanding that every person is a person of sacred worth, of value, and deserves what is available. How we do that, and how we value that as a community matters. And so, conversations like this where we look at the big picture and the logistics and the numbers and the business of it are very important. But I ask us to keep in mind the value of the person that receives it. My favorite picture from all our work, was I think it was two years ago. We did a peach gleaning, which peaches are my favorite food in the world. I would eat them every day if I could. But we did a peach gleaning and one of our volunteers went and distributed and went to a low income neighborhood and just started going door to door. And there was this woman sitting on her porch and we asked her if she would like some peaches. And she said yes, and we gave her three peaches. And she was holding them with this smile on her face and our volunteer said, do you mind if I take your picture. And the smile and the joy on her face from being offered peaches as something that she didn’t think was going to be available to her. It reminds us of the value and the power of offering real, healthy, caring food. Waste is not just a term it becomes something that values the people that end up receiving it. So that’s where I call.
Mathew Whelan: Hi everyone. My name is Matthew Whelan. I am a professor in the Divinity school. I’m a theologian by training, but also with a background in agroecology. So, I study sort of Christian social ethics, ecological ethics, ecological theology. I have no particular scholarly expertise in food waste whatsoever, but I’m very interested in food waste and the question of waste more generally. Primarily through texts in traditions I study, and I thought I’d begin by just reading one of them. This is from Basil of Caesarea now Turkey, modern Day Turkey, written in the fourth century. He’s writing, I should point out at a time of famine in Cesarea. “The bread you are holding back is for the hungry. The clothes that you keep put away are for the naked. The shoes that are rotting away with disuse are for those who have none. The silver and gold you keep buried in the earth is for the needy.“
Now this is an old text written in the fourth century, but there’s theological traditions in which it’s still living today. One quick example of it is Pope Francis, before he passed, frequently spoke out of this tradition. And would make comments frequently about food waste along the lines of the food you throw away is stolen from the table of the port.
So, I’m interested in this. I think it’s significant and I’ve always been struck by a number of implications of these ways of thinking. The first is what several of the fellow panelists have said, others have said, about there seems to be this moral linkage between the affluent and the hungry. Those that have, those that don’t. Our waste, our wasting food, but not just food, is connected morally to sort of a wider community of which we’re a part. And that seems very significant to me.
The other thing that really strikes me about these traditions and language like this is the way that it articulates implicitly a right to food, right? The bread that you throw away is for the hungry. It belongs to them. They have a right to it. So, it raises very interesting questions to me about where this comes from. And for Basil, it comes from the belief that God gives creation as a gift for all. There’s a fundamental equality that holds between people, that all people are created in the image and likeness of God. So, food waste, in other words, and other forms of waste, are connected to the loss of a sense of connection with a larger human community. But also, to the loss of the reality, practically, of inequality between people, right? And I guess just the final thing I’ll say about a text like this is that there are a range of moral reasons why people come to some of these questions. We’ve talked about them a lot. But it does seem to me for those that take theological traditions like this seriously, they provide very powerful ways to sort of shape and work on a moral imagination for thinking and addressing questions like this as well.
Norman Wirzba: Alright, this is a great beginning. So, Jarvis brought up the word ontology. And I want to follow up on that as a fancy word, but it’s different than ethics, right? And what my next question is about is what do we actually think food is that we’re wasting? You know, Michael, you talked about the sacred worth of persons. Absolutely. Is there something about the sacred worth of food itself, right? What I mean is something like this: we live in a world where food is a commodity, where the things that matter are convenience, cheapness, availability, that sort of thing. What if we thought about food as a sacred gift, or as I like to say, God’s love made delicious, or just somebody else’s love made delicious. And you know this, right? I get to make pizza with my 3-year-old granddaughter. Now, if she made me a pizza, I would never throw that in the garbage because she’s expressing her love. And so, the food is not a commodity in this context. It is her love for me and for other people in the room. I’m wondering if any of you could talk about the ontology of food itself that we are throwing away. What might you say we need to do if we’re going to appreciate food as something more than just a commodity that is then susceptible to the logics of efficiency, productivity, cheapness, and so forth?
Michael Binger: About three years ago, I worked with a researcher at ECU to study the motivations of farmers and why they donated food to food banks or charitable organizations. Why, why, why did they decide to give? And some of the outcoming of that was for about two-thirds of them, it was an issue of faith That they were pouring their heart and their soul into providing food and really creating not much more than a sustenance living for themselves. But they understood their own personal value and how they offered food to their community. And so, they had a high value of understanding that whatever was left that they couldn’t sell was still food that they had put their sweat and their blood and their tears into. And that their community, by the motivation largely of faith, put some of civic responsibility that they felt that they needed to do it. For most of them, the tax incentives… and Norbert and I, we talked about that a few years ago too. The tax motivations really weren’t, or the financial motivations for donation really weren’t why they did what they did. It was because they knew the value of the food that they were creating. And they valued their community and the people that couldn’t afford it as well. And so, yes, all parts of the system were created with passion and love and grace and sacred worth.
Jarvis McInnis: This question reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from George Washington Carver actually. I think he’s such an important ecological thinker, and I think that the ontological and the ethical are interrelated here, right? And he says something like this: he says that the highest attainment in agriculture can be reached only when we clearly understand the mutual relationship between the animal mineral and vegetable kingdoms. And how utterly impossible it is for one to exist in a highly organized state with without the other.
Right? And so, it’s an articulation of the kind of interdependent of species, right? That I think speaks to this question around, you know, what happens if we think about the ontology of food itself, right? Something to be appreciated, and something that should not be wasted and that is something is sacred.
And I think the other part of that, right, is what I call the kind of care work of a place like Tuskegee in the late 19th or early 20th century, which is attempting to teach black farmers how to be intellectuals of the land. How to cultivate, how to be better stewards of the land, how to replenish the nourishment and nutrients into the soil. Not only so that they can steward their land better, their property better, but also to take care of the earth itself, right? Carver says that a poor land is a poor people, right? He sees that if the soil is depleted, then the people are probably depleted also. And I think it’s an ethic there that I pull out of Carver’s work in his ideas about the inter interdependence of species at a place like Tuskegee. And then finally, what I’ll say, the kind of application of that ethic was of Alabama. And really beyond Alabama. Throughout the South. Across racial lines, even though the United States was segregated at that particular moment. But also, throughout the larger Black diaspora. My book follows to the ways that the Tuskegee idea circulated to Black people throughout the diaspora. And so, they are creating all kinds of bulletins and all kinds of print literature, and Carver’s making sure that he’s writing it in a mode that even the partially literate farmers, right, can access to ensure that they can apply these ideas about these up-to-date modern ideas about agriculture on their farm. So that they can be better stewards of the land that they are farming, but also better stewards of themselves to grow nourishing foods for their families.
Mathew Whelan: In response to your question, Norman, I was really struck by Saskia’s meditations on words and the ways that the language we use shapes how we perceive the world. How we act in the world in subtle and not so subtle ways. I’m reminded of a story that Utah Phillips, an American sort of folk singer, storyteller, once told of being at a school where someone from the Department of Education came. And he, Utah Phillips, saw him on the stage. And so, when it was Utah Phillips’s turn to speak, he went up to him and said, you’re about to be called America’s most valuable natural resource. Don’t let them call you that. They’ll pillage you, they’ll strip your soul for profit, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And so, I think that some of the ways we talk about some of these questions sometimes coming from, again, as an outsider. For instance, food is a commodity. It can kind of slip into a sort of a technical language that occludes or can distract us from the deep, complex realities that are involved, right? All the creatures that are involved, all the interconnections, to Jarvis’s point, that are involved in these questions, right? And so, as a theologian, I think a lot about these questions, not through the language of food as a commodity, but food as a gift, right? And in these traditions that I think through and reflect on and teach on, it’s a gift given not just for me, but for others. That’s reflected, right in Basil’s language that I was just reading. It’s a gift given for common use of all people across all lines that divide, right? And I guess I think also in terms of that ontology, that sense of the giftedness of food, what are the practices that accompany that? And you all in your comments and your work, you’ve borne witness to that in so many ways, to me. Like the things that you do are how someone that thinks like these traditions think that’s what they would do. That’s what they should do, right? They should save food, they should reuse it, they should redistribute it, they should, et cetera, et cetera, cetera, do all these things. But also, I think, one practical thing just in terms of, you know, household level. For instance, people of faith pray, right? And even if you’re not a person of faith, you know, sort of before a meal, thinking through and being intentional about what is involved in what we’re about to do here together at this table. What are all the lives, human and otherwise involved in this, right? And it’s simple practices like this that can cultivate a sense of, again, I think to in terms of what Norman’s saying, this ontology. The sense of what are the beings that are involved in this action? What is this action that we’re about to undertake in eating together?
Norman Wirzba: Well, that was great. And I want to just follow up on that, Matthew, because I think one of the things that’s important to me is to see how many people live in an anonymous food economy where we don’t know where food comes from. We don’t know the many lives and the death. And for me, a question is, do you all have any recommendations for policy people, but also for just eaters, about how folks can learn to understand the mystery, the vulnerability, the serendipity in food, right? I think historically, people grew so much of their own food. They had an upfront seat, you know. And my friend Kate Brown’s got a wonderful book coming out soon called Tiny Little Gardens Everywhere. Wonderful. About how much agriculture was embedded in the lives of urban people for so long in this country and around the world. So yeah, people can grow their own food, but do you have any recommendations on how people cannot just cognitively hear food is a gift. But in some deeper, more resonant way understand that food is absolutely precious.
Michael Binger: Well, that sets up to the first thing is you can come Volunteer with Society of St. Andrew. Come out into a field. Dig the food. Pick up sweet potatoes. Take them back to somebody else. Be a part of the system, not just where it shows up at the grocery store and ends up on your table, but at least see and touch and feel while you’re there. Talk to the farmer who’s sitting there with you. Talk to the people at the grocery store even. That oversee your produce department. Understand that in order for food to get from where it started to where you get it, how many people had to be a part of that process with you? And so, seafood is an invitation to understand that it’s more than just, well, I like sweet potatoes, so I’m going to go pick some up at Kroger, right?
Mathew Whelan: It’s a great question. I’m not sure I have a great answer to it other than figure out ways to be involved. Gleaning is a really good example of seeing the connections. Like what the Society of St. Andrews does, making the connections between sort of the food and the field that’s left over and the people who need it, right? And that, I suppose, leads to I guess the one thing I would really say, is just the role of education. Again, this is something that you all have spoken a lot about. It’s come up in a lot of the conversation, but for me, worth dwelling on a little bit. Here, you know, I just moved to Duke University in Durham from Texas. I was at Baylor University, and I was just so struck that Norbert was organizing an event like this. And now that it’s come, I’m so struck by so many people doing such interesting work in so many different places related to food waste. That you all think this is a real important problem that sort of organizes your lives. And I guess the question I have, when I think about this event, and you all, is where did you all come from? How were you formed? Who educated you to care this way about this? And what are the practices that create more people like you? We don’t have many of those people in Texas, let me tell you. I mean, they’re there, but they’re few and far between, right? I think we need spaces where we’re intentionally thinking of how do we cultivate more people that care in this way and that are involved in this kind of work.
Norman Wirzba: All right folks, we have time for question from you all. Please raise your hand and speak loudly.
Audience Member: My name’s Candace Laughinghouse and my trainings in theology and ethics and my work was a little bit similar to yours and Dr. McInnis, right? And, an eco-woman’s critique of earth and animal care. I did a full thing on Fannie Lou Hamer, of course. So, one of the things that I’m glad you brought up, Dr. Wirzba was about this ontology of the word, you know, with food. And one thing that I continued to run into in my work was of course this care of humanity and nature and even with regard to food. Which brought me to then talk about expanding coalition politics and that, you know, what about animals? And with food, is it just because otherwise when we apply this word waste to it? For me as a theologian, I’m very much paying attention to the words as well. And the word waste kind of applies a moral judgment. I’m kind of sitting at these tensions also of the educational aspect because that then gives power back to the same people. I’m thinking of all those that are the terms we’ve used, food insecure. And I just honestly feel that even with all the work that we do sometimes I still feel, and I hope you can answer this, kind of feel hopeless sometimes. Because there’s still people at these, you know, at these spaces. So those are two things that I’m kind of wrestling with in that there is this food, but it’s there for the animals as well. But then those that are experiencing the poverty, like how is education going to get to them and what is that going to really do in the end?
Jarvis McInnis: I don’t know that I have a satisfactory answer to the question. But my wheels are turning about the education piece. It feels like a through line, certainly from the last panel too about how we can educate more . And I had this image as you were talking about seeing grace, right? And I know in the grace that I say over my food, I say, you know, bless the hands that prepared it. But I realized, oh, it also needs to be the hands that grew it, right? As well. And so yeah, that harvested it, right? And I was like, oh, I need to add that to my grace, right? And I’m thinking about it at the level of the individual in terms of bringing awareness to all of the hands that have touched the food that I am consuming. And then I’m also thinking, and go with me here because it may be a bit of a detour, but I think a lot about global commodities because I write on the plantation, right? I’m thinking a lot about cotton, for instance. And I’ve written on sugar. And I’ve thought a lot about coffee as well, right? And I’m thinking about the ways that at coffee shops or places like Starbucks. But like, how can we learn from their efforts to put placards on the wall about where their coffee beans are coming from. Now they are performing a kind of care about the farmer, right? But I do wonder if there is a way to build on that, right? In ways that are not only performative but are more genuine about making sure that we know where the food is coming from. Who is growing it, not only at our farmer’s markets, but at our grocery stores as well. You know? I think there was a speaker earlier who talked about making sure that there are placards up at the food banks, right? So that they know when this food is no longer viable. How can we bring that to thinking about helping people understand where their food is coming from and humanizing pictures, right? This is who grew your food. How can it help you to think differently about who you are regarding as illegal?
Norman Wirzba: I’m also thinking about saying grace in terms of not just the human lives that touched it, but also the other lives. So sometimes at our house when I’ll say Grace, I say, thank you for the chicken that died so we can eat it. And people say, I don’t want to eat it now. But that’s the reality, right? We’re talking about life and death and how do we manage life and death so that we don’t cheapen it. That’s a big question.
Michael Binger: Well, I want to say just two things finishing up on your question. One, we way under discuss the impact of our farm workers and the people that are actually doing the harvest and early distribution throughout the process. And understanding their value and humanity to the entire system and to food in every sense that we talk about it. The other thing I’ll say is from our perspective, we take that education experience as a profound responsibility for the volunteers that come and work with us. There’s only so much teaching that you can do standing in the middle of a field with people that are looking at the food and seeing a project in front of them. But we try to take at least five or 10 minutes at the beginning of every opportunity with our volunteers to talk about one, where the foods come from, why it got to this point, why there’s excess available to us. And to talk at least a little bit of education within the hope that knowing that in that one time, we’re not going to answer every question, but hopefully if we can get people out to have a good experience and come back again. Maybe the second or third or fourth time they hear it, it starts to integrate into who they are.
Audience Member: So, the last National Food waste campaign 2016 called Save the Food, had a very compelling vignette where they follow the life of a strawberry and kind of anthropomorphize the strawberry. And that would some very strong emotional connections. But I’m wondering from the framing here, if that was a missed opportunity to rather reframe about the individuals along that line rather than trying to create maybe something that didn’t resonate more fully. Just thoughts about that. And I think it looks like some of you remember that.
Michael Binger: I’ll say 30 seconds and I’ll pass it on. Yes. I think we under discuss the people involved and we focus on the commodity of the food as we go through the process.
Mathew Whelan: Yeah, I mean that’s essentially what I was going to say. I don’t think it’s necessarily deficiency. It’s just there could be another aspect added to this. And I mean, sort of running throughout this panel is, it seems to me I think rightly, a connection between wasting food- throwing it away, and throwing away people. Certain people being disposable, right? And so, we live in a time where there’s a lot of disposability. Certain populations are being thrown away. And trying to make that interconnection more sort of vivid for people. There are obviously risks. I mean, there’s sort of deep political complex questions involved in that, but it does seem essential.
Jarvis McInnis: I’ll just add briefly that I think, and perhaps an important aspect of elevating the role of the farm worker, right, in the production of food is also about not only appreciating the physical labor, but the intellectual labor. To recognize that to know the land, to know how to cultivate these crops is an intellectual work and intellectual enterprise. So, at Tuskegee, right, what they were trying to do at that time was to help transform Black farmers into intellectuals of the of the land, right? And so how can we, if we’re telling that story of the strawberry, right, not only recognize the physical labor that went into picking it, but also the intellectual labor of how to cultivate strawberries, as well. And how does that help us to revalue the farm worker?