Camille McGriff

From Prison Farm to Table

Installation on Wall Street making visible infrastructures in the food system tied to the carceral landscape

From Prison Farm to Table: Carrots, Apparatus of the Landscape of Global Racialized Capitalism

In a guerilla assemblage along the center of Wall Street and Broad Street in Manhattan’s Financial District, the installation traces infrastructures that support the production of a seemingly innocuous and ubiquitous object, a baby carrot, from its growth in the soil of American prison farms through factory processing until it lands on public school lunch trays. By aligning the infrastructures of prison farm labor, factory labor, and the public school system, they become alarmingly visible, and we can understand the carrot’s deep entrenchment in the project of global racialized capitalism as representative of many other industries and social structures that benefit from the industry of locking people up.

Signage reads: 1. The carrot enters the infrastructure as a product of carceral labor on state-owned prison farms. Incarcerated people work imprisoned land for little to no pay; states sell their labor products to food distributors for restaurants, schools, and grocery chains. The carrot is transported to a factory where is is washed and graded.

2. In the factory, the carrot is cut and graded by hand on an assembly line. Shifts on the line last from 7-10 hours.

3. The peeling drum peels and shapes two-inch carrot pieces into baby carrots and washes them with a chlorine rinse.

4. The pillow packing machine shrouds the portioned baby carrot pieces in plastic that will degrade in 20-500 years. Fertilizer, water, gasoline, refrigerant, plastic, and human labor are all expended in the carrot production stream.

5. The packaged baby carrots are served on a uniform circulating lunch tray conveyer belt, common in public schools, prisons, and cafeterias nationwide. The USDA requires five servings of an orange vegetable on lunch trays every week.

From Imperialism to Capitalism

The above diagram traces carrots’ ubiquity in global trade from its origins in Iran to its import to the New World as part of the first wave of global colonization as well as its role in native and subsistence farmers’ land dispossession. Aligning the history of the carrot with the daily monetary value of the carrot industry in a case study prison farm in Texas, which was originally a plantation and bought by the state for prison use in 1910, we can understand the labor and economic impact the carrot still carries today.

Text reads, from left to right:

1. The first sign is positioned on the bin where the carrots enter the assembly line. It explains the history of carrots arriving in the Americas and the plantation paradigm in which the U.S. food system exists.

2. The second sign hangs on the cutting and washing machine, which explains the industrial and labor processes the carrot undergoes in a factory.

3. The third sign, on the peeling drum, explains the timeline of black and native land dispossession.

4. The fourth sign hangs on the second grading platform after the machine rounds the corner. It explains the United States’ investment in production of capitalist bodies through the National School Lunch Program and FDA nutritional standards.

5. The fifth and final sign hangs on the mechanized lunch line, just before the carrots land on the steps of the Stock Exchange, encouraging observers to question the systems by which our food is made through which it passes.

Scenography

The first model-making exercise gave me the chance to explore the specific thematic perspectives of the project I wanted to portray through constructed scenes—the details of the machinery, the historic and economic significance of the site, and the soil that had been at the fore of my research on the entangled history of exploitative practices on bodies and land.

Federal Hall and the U.S. Stock Exchange

The installation begins at Federal Hall, widely considered the “Birthplace of American Government” as the location of George Washington’s inaugural oath, the meeting place of the first Continental Congress after the American Revolution, and where the Bill of Rights was constructed. It then ends at the U.S. Stock Exchange, the built environment’s most renowned symbol of global capitalism. This visual link between the founding of the United States and global capitalism, bridged by the installation, draws observers to grapple with the entanglement of government, capitalism, and real exploitative practices of people and land that ensured the success of the country and the global economy.

Exercise in 1:1 Construction

The final iteration of the project was to build a 1’ = 1’ building fragment of the installation that metaphorized its purpose as architecture. I analyzed the most important built details that best represented the purpose of the installation, and welded together the assembly line at the end of the installation with wires that extruded the exploited human labor movement on prison farms. I also incorporated the stairs that would be present as viewing platforms onto the installation, as well as the casters at the base of each machine.

Short GIF showing movement of carrot trays along the assembly line and off the end.

To learn more about From Prison Farm to Table, order a work sample booklet about the project.