Mississippi Chicken screens at UNC-Chapel Hill
Last week, Anita and I were in Chapel Hill at the invitation of Brenda Baletti and Chris Gaffney to screen Mississippi Chicken for the Social Movements Working Group at The University of North Carolina. We had a packed room of graduate students, undergraduates and community members with a lively discussion afterwards.
Similar to Mississippi, North Carolina is a hub of the poultry industry and industrial meat and agricultural production in general, relying heavily on vulnerable immigrant workers from Latin America. The audience at the screening was deeply involved in issues of workers’ rights, immigrant rights, sustainable agriculture, and the politics of food production, and they seemed to truly connect with the film.
We learned about an amazing student group on campus called FLO Foods (Fair, Local and Organic), which has convinced the university to shift much of its enormous buying power away from industrial farms toward more sustainable food producers. Check out Tom Philpott’s Grist.org article about FLO Foods here.
Tom is the food editor of Grist.org and one of the many wonderful people we met in North Carolina. We’re hoping to get back to North Carolina soon and, among other things, visit Maverick Farms, which Tom runs along with several other people, including Alice Brooke Wilson–one of the anthropology graduate students we enjoyed getting to know at the screening.
The highlight of the screening for me was the opportunity to hear from Tony MarĂn and Lourdes Carrillo, who traveled from western North Carolina to see the movie and participate in the discussion. They are staff members in a partnership between the Western North Carolina Workers’ Center and the JUSTA research project at Wake Forest University. In the discussion, someone asked me whether I thought the immigrant experiences depicted in the film were broadly representative of immigrant experiences in Mississippi and in the U.S. or whether they were more idiosyncratic. Tony and Lourdes were in a much better position than I was to answer this question, and they said that the film captured what they see and experience every day in their work with poultry workers and the immigrant community in Western North Carolina. Their comments meant an enormous amount to me.
