September 2025: Who Controls Our Food?

In this special issue, HCN partners with the Food & Environment Reporting Network to untangle the web of food production in the Western U.S., tracing it from the people who raise our food — the farmworkers in the fields and the meatpackers slaughtering the beef — to the ones who ship it, market it, sell it and, of course, profit from it. A six-page data visualization explains corporate consolidation in the grocery business, from Walmart down to your neighborhood grocery store. America’s largest meatpacker, JBS, exploits refugee workers for profit, while in the arid desert of southern New Mexico, pecans have become a lucrative crop, despite threatening the region’s water supply. Transporting fresh food across vast landscapes isn’t easy, so what will Alaska do if tariffs shut down the AlCan Highway? A farmworker-artist brings his fellow workers vividly to life in portraits drawn and painted on produce boxes and cardboard. For the Chinese immigrants who helped build the West, food sustained both their oppression and resistance. Native students worked tirelessly to establish an Indigenous Food Lab where they could study and share Native foods. An Inuit writer reminds us that we eat nourishes more than our bodies, as she recalls cherished memories of cutting salmon with kinfolk. Without old-growth forests and the watersheds they protect, our refrigerators would be empty.

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