Annoucing the Winner of the 2026 Nach Waxman Prize for Food and Beverage Scholarship

Darra Goldstein

Awaiting Their Feast is a magisterial study of the precarious lives of Latinx food workers in the US. Lori A. Flores incisively yet empathetically documents the difficult, often horrific, working conditions of farmworkers, laborers in food-processing plants and restaurant kitchens, and food-delivery couriers, grounding her storytelling in exacting scholarship. Awaiting Their Feast demonstrates how crucial these workers are to the American economy, and how strong their work ethic is despite frequent maltreatment by their employers. The book’s narrative centers around the inadequacy of the food workers’ diets. Flores invokes the concept of “alimentary dignity” to emphasize the cultural significance of food beyond its ability to provide nourishment—how it is not appropriate to serve workers cold ham sandwiches instead of a hot meal that includes tortillas rather than white bread. While the political activism of the United Farm Workers in California under Cesar Chavez in the 1960s is well known, Flores relates the less familiar history of political activism among food workers in the Northeast, who have deployed a “politics of disgust” to campaign for healthier and more culturally meaningful food. At a time when already insecure food workers in the US are suffering from newly cruel government policies, Awaiting Their Feast resonates all the more strongly.

—Darra Goldstein, Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, Emerita at Williams College, is the founding editor of Gastronomica and editor in chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies

Morna Livingston

In Awaiting Their Feast Lori A. Flores describes how foods in the Eastern United States, from fruit and vegetables, to dairy, fish and wine are grown or caught, then processed. Beginning with Mexican guestworkers given visas to build railroads, she explains a labor shift after World War II took them from rail work into the food industry. Living in camps often little better than jails in terms of meals, accommodation or support, these men garnered meagre salaries. Gradually workers came from other Latin countries, then whole families began to migrate to North American cities, making and shaping communities largely around food. While non-Spanish speaking Americans came to admire this food, they resisted providing those who grew and prepared it a decent living. Labor organizing helped but did not resolve the major issues. Flores brings the Latinx workforce currently laboring in American agriculture and restaurant kitchens out of obscurity in her challenging, thoughtful book.

—Morna Livingston, Professor Emeritus, Thomas Jefferson University, is an architectural photographer specializing in gravity water systems and cultural landscapes

Mayukh Sen

How can you hate a people but love their food? Lori A. Flores explores this paradox in her engaging, well-researched Awaiting Their Feast, complicating the truism that food can always function as a salve for deeper, systemic ills. Her survey, which begins in the World War II era and stretches to the present day, chronicles the myriad ways this country has disenfranchised migrant food workers of Latin American origin while regarding their food with near-fetishistic adoration. Flores matches the ambition of her project’s scope with precisely rendered, human-first storytelling, bringing to vivid life the struggles and needs of laborers so often been effaced in traditional food narratives. Especially impressive is the emotional pull of Flores’s writing: The clarity of her prose is likely to draw in general readers. This amounts to an impressive work that will surely be of great use for future scholars writing on food, labor, and migration.

—Mayukh Sen is a James Beard Award winner, and the author of books on American culture and food history, including Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America.