Less than a year ago, Arkansas journalist Alice Driver won a 2023 James Beard Media Award for her contributions to a Civil Eats investigation about unjust working conditions for laborers in the U.S. animal agriculture industry. Her story zeroed in on workplace injuries at Tyson Foods plants in Arkansas.
Now, her reporting on a different Arkansas juggernaut has been nominated for the same distinction in 2024. As part of an ongoing Civil Eats series about Walmart and “its founding family’s influence over the American food system, over the producers and policymakers who shape it, and how its would-be critics are also its bedfellows,” Driver took a thorough look at lobster fishery workers in Honduras, thousands of whom have been seriously injured or killed from the risky and often unprotected dives they’re expected to perform day after day.
The reason the Waltons are connected to the story is that the Walton Family Foundation has invested in — and benefited from the publicity of — fishery improvement projects in the area that had an ecological impact but didn’t seek to ameliorate the devastating human costs.
“Food Stories: Writing That Stirs the Pot,” an anthology of work published in the Bitter Southerner that includes a 2021 piece by Driver, was also nominated for a James Beard Media Award this year in the Literary Writing category.
Since the ’90s, the James Beard Media Awards have recognized exemplary “food authors, broadcast producers, hosts, journalists, podcasters, and social media content creators” for their artful uplift and interrogation of the culinary arena and the institutions that feed it. The James Beard Foundation is perhaps more popularly known for its chef and restaurant awards, which CNN said are “widely considered the Oscars of the food world.”
Driver’s forthcoming book, “The Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company” — also about Tyson — is set to come out on Sept. 9 and can be pre-ordered here. The book recently received a J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. Hot Springs native Liz Sanders, a frequent collaborator of Driver’s, took photos for the cover:
