Somebody Picked These Chiles

Every year around the end of August, a box shows up on my porch that I’ve been waiting on since roughly the previous September. Twenty-five pounds of Hatch green chile, fresh, packed tight, still smelling like the field it came out of. I order it from the same New Mexico family I’ve ordered from since 2017, and the day that box arrives is one of my favorites of the whole year. I plan meals around it. I clear the calendar. Zach knows to just stay out of my way.

I’m a Texas girl who’s spent a lot of her life chasing the exact flavor of a good roasted green chile, so I don’t want to undersell what this box means to me. It’s summer, distilled. It’s most of my fall cooking. It is, in a real way, one of the great pleasures of my year.

And for a long time, every single year, I never once thought about whose hands put those chiles in that box.

That’s what I want to talk about this Labor Day. Not to ruin anybody’s cookout, mine very much included; I will be elbow-deep in this chile by Tuesday. But because Labor Day is the one holiday whose name says the quiet part out loud, and then we spend the whole day very carefully not listening.

We’ve turned the first Monday in September into the unofficial funeral for summer. A day off, a grill, a cooler, a sale on mattresses. What it actually is, is a holiday the labor movement had to fight and bleed for. It exists because working people organized, and struck, and in some cases died, to win the then-radical idea that a human being is owed rest, a limited workday, a life outside the job. We got the long weekend because other people got beaten and jailed for the eight-hour day. That isn’t a downer; it’s just the receipt. It’s worth reading the receipt once a year.

And nowhere is that receipt longer, or less paid, than in the food we pile on the Labor Day table.

Let me start with my chile, because that’s the honest place for me to start. It’s the thing I love, so it’s the thing I’m most tempted not to look at too closely.

Hatch chile is picked by hand. It has to be; the pods bruise if you so much as look at them sideways, and a bruised chile has no shelf life, so no machine has ever managed to replace a human hand for the fresh market. Which means every one of the twenty-five pounds on my porch was picked by a person bent over a plant in the New Mexico sun, in the hottest stretch of the year, working down a row with a sack that only gets heavier as the day goes on.

Here’s what that day actually looks like, according to the people who have been organizing these workers since 1983. The Border Agricultural Workers Project, out on the border at El Paso, breaks a picker’s day down like this: about two hours waiting at the pickup point to see whether a contractor takes you at all, about four hours on a bus, six to eight hours actually picking, and then another hour or two waiting around to get paid. Sixteen hours, give or take. Six to eight of them are the part anybody pays you for.

The annual income that comes out the other end of that is under six thousand dollars. Roughly a quarter of the chile pickers are women, who earn less and endure more, including the kind of harassment most of us wouldn’t survive one afternoon of. At least half of these workers don’t have a place to live.

And this is not a New Mexico problem, or a chile problem. It’s the whole table. Somebody picked the tomatoes for your burger and the lettuce sitting under it. Somebody stood on a line in a plant that smelled like blood and bleach and broke down the meat. Somebody drove it through the night to get it to you. The great open secret of American food, the one we swallow with every bite, is that it’s cheap and abundant because the people at the bottom of it are paid as little as the law allows (and sometimes less than the law allows), and a great many of them are immigrants, documented and not; precisely because immigrants are the workers a system can most easily underpay and, when it’s convenient, most loudly blame.

And since we’re going to stand out here on a holiday and grill, we ought to be honest that the very tradition we’re practicing was built on unpaid labor too. American barbecue, the thing I do on my Kamado and write about all summer long, is not a white invention with a few guests. It is Black and Indigenous cooking at its root, carried and refined and kept alive in large part by enslaved people and their descendants, whose names mostly never made it into the cookbooks even as their technique quietly became the entire cuisine. If you have not read Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene*, this is the year. He traces that history through his own ancestry and does not let anybody off easy, least of all himself. I’ve said before that you can’t cook Southern food honestly without saying this out loud, and Labor Day is as good a day as any to say it again. The unpaid labor in your food goes back a long, long way.

Now here’s the part where I have to be honest about my own chile, and it’s uncomfortable, which is exactly how I know it’s the part that matters.

The family I buy from is real, and their story is genuinely a good one. The farm traces back to a man named Joseph Franzoy, who came from Sporminore, a village in the Austro-Hungarian Tyrol that is now part of northern Italy, and who in 1917 became the first person to grow chile commercially in the Hatch Valley. The operation I order from now is run by his descendants, five generations on. When I buy from them, I’m getting actual Hatch Valley chile from an actual Hatch Valley family, and not the Mexican-grown chile that gets quietly stuffed into a “Hatch” bag and sold as the real thing (which happens constantly, and is the entire reason there’s now a certification just to prove where a chile was grown at all).

I want to sit on that founding story for one more second, because it’s doing something. The man who started this whole industry was an immigrant. He came from a village that has changed countries since he left it. And the people who now pick the crop he introduced are immigrants too, and are treated as a problem rather than an origin story. Same valley. Same work. Very different reception.

But here is the thing I want you to notice, because I had to make myself notice it. That certification, the “Certified Hatch” seal stamped on the side of my box, tells you the chile was grown in the Hatch Valley. It tells you nothing, not one single word, about how the person who picked it was treated. There’s no seal on my box for that. And when I went looking, genuinely looking, for anything about how my growers pay and house and treat their harvest crew, I came up empty; not because they’re hiding something in particular, but because almost nobody in this industry makes that information public. So let me be careful and clear: I am not telling you my growers do wrong by their workers. I have no reason to believe that, and I’m going to keep buying from them. I’m telling you that I don’t know, that I can’t know, and that the not-knowing isn’t an accident. The whole system is built so the hands stay invisible and the question stays unasked. I love this chile, and I cannot tell you who picked it. Sit with that a second, because I’ve had to.

So what do you do with all of this, other than feel bad while the coals are still hot?

Not nothing, and also not guilt. Guilt is cheap, and it has never once bought anybody a better wage. But you can know where your food actually comes from, and ask the uncomfortable question when you’re in a position to ask it. You can pay what real food costs instead of demanding it be miraculously cheap, because “cheap” is very often just somebody else’s unpaid labor wearing a price tag. You can tip like the person in front of you is a whole person. And you can put actual money behind the people doing the organizing: the Border Agricultural Workers Project has spent more than forty years fighting for the exact people who pick the exact chile in my exact box, and you can support them directly, today.

Mostly, on this one day we named for labor, you can refuse to look away from it. Enjoy the cookout. I fully intend to. But know what your plate cost, and who paid it, and let that knowledge move something in you, even something small.

Because this week I’m going to spread twenty-five pounds of green chile across my grill and roast it until the whole neighborhood smells like the best day of my year. And I am not going to pretend, not this year, that it roasted itself. Or that it picked itself. Or that the best day of my year didn’t begin with the hardest day of somebody else’s.

Somebody picked these chiles. The least I can do is say so.

P.S. Tuesday I’ll show you exactly how I roast and freeze all twenty-five pounds (and yes, there’s queso at the end of it). Come hungry. Come thinking, too.

P.P.S. If you want to do one concrete thing today instead of just nodding along with me, the Border Agricultural Workers Project is at farmworkers.org. That’s the link I’d click.

* Affiliate link, through Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores. This post contains affiliate links, marked with an asterisk.