The damage the oil will cause to the Gulf ecology and economy is, of course, still unknown. As Mike Madden reported for Salon, many fishermen are stuck waiting for an all-clear to go fish, while the mortgage bills on their boats stack up. But even for the fishermen who survive what the black goop hath wrought (and, battered by decades of cheap imported shrimp and barely hanging on after Hurricane Katrina, there may not be many), the gravest damage to the Gulf fishing industry may be, like the oil spill itself, man-made: a market hollowed out by fear of contaminated seafood, even if it’s actually safe to eat.

Right now, there is a surge in What-if-I-Can’t-Have-It-Anymore Gulf seafood sales; spurred on by reports of impending oilpocalypse, fans of the stuff are loading up for their last hurrahs. A friend who stopped by the Crescent City market saw people filling coolers destined for their freezers; a friend of his bought 20 pounds of shrimp — 10 for herself, and 10 for her friend on jury duty. But for shrimpers, this is a good thing that’s also a bad sign, because the more the anticipation of Gulf Shrimp Armageddon grows, the more likely we are to eventually turn and believe that whatever Gulf seafood that makes it to the market is tainted.

The misunderstanding would be easy to understand. After a string of widely publicized food safety failures in recent years — from E. Coli spinach to all manner of ground beef badness — consumers are already jittery about food that comes from seemingly wholesome places, and “75% of the Gulf is still clean!” is not the kind of PR slogan that’s going to get a lot of traction. And then there’s the fact that the closing of fishing grounds is actually a bit more complex than is usually reported. Concerned about oil contamination, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declared an open-ended hold of at least 10 days on all fishing in an area of Federally-controlled waters between eastern Louisiana to Pensacola Bay in Florida. (Click here for a map of the closed area.) I had to say that again, slowly, three times before I caught all that, with the important caveats — like fishing still being legal and safe in the closer-to-shore State-managed waters. But boil it down to a media-friendly headline, like “Gulf Fishing Closed from Louisiana to Florida,” and you can see where people will start thinking there’s no safe fishing in the Gulf at all, and even legal, NOAA-inspected catches will be shunned in the market.

That’s what worries Frank Parker most. Frank is a seventh-generation fisherman in Biloxi, possessed of a swagger and optimism I didn’t see elsewhere among Gulf fishermen. “I’m one of the aces in this business,” he said to me, proud of his ability to make it in shrimping after Katrina, when many captains were hanging up their galoshes for good. He’s confident his ace-ness will carry him through this oil spill, too, since he knows the spots to fish that are expected to be unthreatened by oil, spots in the area that produces 77% of Louisiana’s shrimp catch anyway. But what he can’t control is whether people will buy his catch. “Oyster season, for instance, always closes around the end of April. It just coincided with the oil spill this year, so the media jumped on it, and that caused a frenzy of people thinking that they closed the oyster season because of contamination. I will worry if we do get some kind of oil, but I’m really worried if they open the shrimp season and the public still thinks the seafood is tainted.”

Dr. Jim Cowan, a professor in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Science at Louisiana State University, is an expert in fisheries management and ecology. “There’s no potential now for contaminated seafood,” he says. “All the seafood available now was harvested before the oil spill, so I certainly wouldn’t be worried about it being contaminated.”

But he’s concerned, too about the public shunning of Gulf seafood. “When the fishing grounds are reopened — and they will be — I’d be confident in the safety of the food. It’s pretty easy to test [for oil-related toxins] in the product. Consumer safety is as big a part of NOAA as fisheries management, and they’re very, very good at monitoring contamination. Every once a while, small oyster areas will be closed because a boat came in and pumped out their ballast water. They can find that, so they have a strong system. I think consumers can be confident.”

But what Dr. Cowan is not confident of, though, is whether there will be many fishermen left to work the waters when they re-open. Many, who work on bigger boats, do need to fish in deeper waters — the kind that are currently closed — and it may not be long before their unpaid mortgages put them out of business. And, of course, the spill could move and worsen.

“The shrimp industry in the Gulf has declined primarily because of the price of imported shrimp. Between that, Katrina, and the price of fuel going up again, I don’t know whether the fishery is resilient to withstand a closure like this for very long. This could be very serious,” he says. When asked what can be done to save this industry and this way of life, he reiterated an answer I’ve been hearing from years from fishermen themselves: “Encourage people to eat Gulf oysters and shrimp.”

“I consider myself extremely lucky to have stumbled upon this,” says Ramfjord, 20.

Ramfjord and Riddle each paid $20 to become part of World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms USA, a group with 9,000 members known by a variation of its acronym, woofers. It’s kind of a new millennium version of the traveling hobo willing to work for a meal.

The website allows willing workers to negotiate a non-paid work stint with nearly 1,200 U.S. farmers and ranchers. Every farm could use an extra hand, but the hosts also benefit from the parade of characters who become a part of their lives, if only temporarily.

“When I was younger, I used to hitchhike; it’s not the same, but it is that idea,” said Ryan “Leo” Goldsmith, executive director of WWOOF-USA, founded with former classmates at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “You have to have faith in humanity and that showing up at someone’s house is going to be OK. The tie that binds is a shared interest in sustainable agriculture.”

Most are young people from urban areas who want to experience rural life. Some are newly jobless, or don’t have prospects. Membership has skyrocketed as the economy has plummeted, soaring from about 1,600 willing U.S. workers in 2005. More than a dozen other autonomous branches match workers with farmers around the globe.

After a year woofing across the U.S. with her boyfriend, Jennifer Makens of suburban Detroit plans to ditch her teaching career to farm for a living. But first the couple will woof on a farm in Pennsylvania, then California and Oregon, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Argentina, Japan and New Zealand.

“I had no idea we’d do this for so long,” said Makens, 29, who travels with Charlie Ryan in a Saturn with 150,000 miles on it. “We’re getting proud of all the calluses on our hands. It has really changed the way I feel about material possessions, as well. If it won’t fit in my car, I don’t need it.”

Ramford heard about woofing while a student at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, so he signed up while awaiting a guide job on the American River in California. Riddle will work this summer with the California Conservation Corps.

On the Douglas Ranch, about 75 miles south of San Jose, they start their day with the pigs, move to milking Bonnie the cow and feeding horses and lambs, then take on whatever owners Don and Rani Douglas need done. It ends at sunset with the cow’s second milking and another round of feeding.

The Douglases have hosted woofers since 2005. They’ve made connections with people from Italy, France, Belgium, South Korea, Scotland and England, and across the United States. Forty in all.

“Besides all the hard work that they do for us, it’s been a wonderful experience meeting them all,” Rani said.

At South Carolina’s Utterly Awesome Goat Farm, the owners need someone to tend Nubians and build a barn addition. West Elk Ranch in Colorado wants help with a garden and vineyard.

Having woofers at Butternut Farms has allowed Patricia West-Volland to hang onto the 20-acre farm in Glenford, Ohio, since the death of her husband a year ago.

“I truly could not stay on this farm without their help,” she said.

Not all experiences are good, so Goldsmith encourages woofers to make sure expectations are clear, including how long the visit will last. One left a Georgia farm when an emotionally unstable neighbor joined the crew. One host said a worker broke candlesticks when she asked him to leave.

But usually it works out.

“The first night I was sketching out,” Ramfjord said. “I was with people I never met. I thought, ‘I’m a dead man.’”

One day an outbuilding needs a new roof, or Ike the pet buffalo has broken a fence, or the cow’s eye infection needs medication. They talk excitedly about what they have learned.

“Oh, man, how to drive a tractor, how to use a chain saw, how to roof a house,” Ramfjord began.

“How to milk a cow, how to brand, how to dehorn a cow,” Riddle continued.

“How to fix a barbed wire fence,” Ramfjord added.

“I’ve extracted a dead pig from Vicki, which was different,” Riddle said, and they stop briefly because Vicki did not survive and left two orphans, a harsh reality of ranch life.

“Just being around a pig,” Ramfjord offered, then adds: “How you can use a tractor for anything.”

Both said they have a better understanding about the labor that goes into food production, and a new awareness about its origins.

“I definitely want to eat meat from a place like this, not a factory farm,” Ramfjord said, then he paused and surveyed the green hills around him. “I consider myself extremely lucky to have stumbled onto this ranch.”

What worries fans of small farms and locally produced food is that the closing of small processors will mean the closing of small farms. Slaughter and processing is the biggest challenge for small-scale meat; they’re operations simply too costly and complex for farms to handle themselves. As it is, farmers have few options for meat processing without selling their animals to massive feedlot-meat operations, and without that piece of the puzzle, many farmers may quit. Why is the USDA considering the new testing regime? Some producers wonder if the machinations of Big Food are in play.

“The new testing would just ensure that the current processes, which are based on scientific consensus, are working,” according to Dustin VandeHoer of the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. But, he adds that it’s not clear why they’re being mandated: “It doesn’t appear that it’s in response to any specific situation. They’re just kind of reinterpreting the existing rules.’” And he’s unsure that the new tests are necessary. “We haven’t had problems with food safety, especially with the smaller plants,” he says. “We should never become complacent, but I think we can reach a point where [small meat processors] can still be allowed to operate and food can be safe. I don’t know that we need to be taking this path that’s going to put small plants out of business.” (Repeated attempts by Salon to solicit comments from the USDA were unsuccessful.)

Greg Higgins, chef/owner of Higgins Restaurant in Portland, Ore., and a founding member of the sustainability and local-food-focused Chefs Collaborative, has darker suspicions. “What’s always in the back of my mind is the industrial food lobby,” he says. He suspects that the change in the USDA regulations, and the way they will affect small meat producers, was probably “fairly well thought out by the lobbyists.” The popularity of small farms, grass-fed meats, and artisan products like salumi and prosciutto is expanding rapidly, and Higgins suspects that the industrial food lobby is trying to squeeze producers out so as not to lose a share of the market.”They don’t want any competition,” Higgins says. “They’re very powerful and I think they would relish the opportunity to keep the market closed.”

Mario Fantasma of Paradise Meats in Trimble, Mo., wants to trust the USDA. “I’m sure their intentions are good,” he says, “but I don’t think that they see far enough into what it can do to small companies — and even large companies for that matter.”

Higgins says that it’s unfair for small plants to suffer when health safety risks are disproportionately linked to large-scale processing. “Think about all the big health scares we’ve had,” he says. “They’re all related to large-scale food production, whether it’s spinach from a massive grower in California or ground beef out of the Midwest, they’re all gigantic, they’re never these little tiny plants.”

And Fantasma argues that small plants are, by necessity, already more conscious about food safety. “At small facilities, we’ve always had food safety in our top priorities. We can’t afford not to. If one of our customers came here and got sick, what do you think would happen to my business? That alone would kill us. It’s common sense that we want to do everything in our power to make sure that our product is safe.”

“The thing that’s going to affect us is the cost of the testing,” Fantasma says. Regulations for small plants like Fantasma’s will require 13 samples of every product to be tested before processing, and another 13 samples after processing. “When you add all those products and tests, it racks up a super amount of money,” he says. “Right now we’re sitting at about $500,000 for the initial validation tests, just for the first year. We wouldn’t be able to do it. It would just really devastate our business.”

Fantasma recognizes the trickle-down effect of the new regulations. “It’s not just about us, the processors. Look at what would happen to the farmers who are trying to offer their farm-raised products to their customers. [The USDA is] taking away their ability to market their own products. Their farms would wither up. They would have to go back to selling to commodity markets, whether they want to or not. And what’s bad about it is that these guys raise some nice animals, hormone- and antibiotic-free. They work real hard for their living, trying to keep a sustainable farm running, and when you take their market away from them, it shuts them down.”

The American Association of Meat Producers and the Iowa Department of Agriculture have both made public statements against the new regulations and have started a letter-writing campaign. VandeHoer is hopeful that the USDA will heed their concerns about the fate of small plants, and Fantasma says the letter writing is his only hope. “All we can do is go to them and say, ‘Look, this is going to kill us.’” 

The result was a massive class-action lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, which the USDA settled out of court in 1999, admitting to widespread racial discrimination against black farmers in its loan programs between 1981 and 1996. About 15,000 farmers were paid a total of more than $900 million in the settlement. But tens of thousands of farmers filed claims after the deadline, and many charged that the government’s outreach had been insufficient, causing them to miss their opportunity.

In February 2010, President Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack promised an additional $1.15 billion to cover the remaining claims, but the story doesn’t end there. The settlement agreement mandated that Congress appropriate the funds by March 31 of this year. The deadline came and went with no action by Congress, and so the future of the settlement remains in limbo.

After years of Black Wednesdays, John Boyd founded the National Black Farmers Association, spearheading both the original lawsuit and the effort to reopen the Pigford case in order to allow the claims of the farmers who missed the deadline. Salon spoke with Boyd about the history of the lawsuit and what the missed deadline means for farmers.

What happened between you and the USDA loan officer in Richmond?

Mr. Garnett had made 147 farm loans in Mecklenburg County, Va. Only one of those loans was to a black farmer, and he was the minority advisor to the USDA county committee. When they investigated Mr. Garnett, they asked him, “Do you have a problem making black farm loans?” Guess what he said? He said yes. He said yes, I think that they’re lazy, and they’re just looking for a paycheck every Friday.

Mr. Garnett took my loan application and tore it up and threw it in the trash can while I was sitting there in front of him. And he said he wasn’t going to lend me any of his money. When I asked him why he wasn’t going to make the loan, he said, “Well, I don’t have any money now. If you want to come back again next year, that’s up to you, but I think you need to go ahead and just sell your farm. I’ve got a farmer, Mr. Blaylock, and you can milk cows on his farm. I think that would be the best opportunity for you and your family.”

I was mad. I was looking for a $10,000 operating loan to plant my crop. After nine years in a row I’d only gotten one loan from the USDA farm services, and I would apply every year.

I said, “Mr. Garnett, I don’t think I can go back and tell my wife that I’m not going to get an operating loan again.” And he said he didn’t care. And when he said he didn’t care, I told him to go to hell in a handbasket, and he began to use profanity, and he spit tobacco on my shirt.

When the investigator asked him, “Did you spit chewing tobacco on John Boyd’s shirt?” He said, “Well, yeah.” He claimed he accidentally missed his spit can.

When was this?

 This was in 1994.

What was the result of the investigation?

In my case, they found Mr. Garnett guilty of discrimination. But they didn’t terminate him. They allowed him to move to the sister county, which is Greensville County, Va., and they let him retire after two months in Greensville. He didn’t see anything wrong with that.

This is a federal agency, admitting to racial discrimination in the very recent past. Why do you think more people aren’t getting angry about this?

I think many people don’t realize it. The problem that I have is that the USDA is the last plantation. I’m not using the past tense. It is the last plantation.

Hispanics have had problems, Native Americans, women — they all have problems with the USDA and its lending programs.

[Native American farmers filed a lawsuit, known as Keepseagle, alleging discrimination against the USDA in 1999. The case is currently unresolved. -- Ed.]

The USDA was the last federal arm of this country to integrate. It filed lawsuits in federal court to prevent it from integrating. And to me that [influence] exists today. The average subsidy to the top 10 percent of farms is over $1 million per farmer. The average subsidy to a black farmer is $200.

How can the disparity be so extreme?

Very few black farmers take part in U.S. farm subsidy programs. We have these programs that we should be participating in, and we’re not. I think it has to do with outreach, and a lot of it has to do with the “good old boys” system that remains in place. This is a system that needs to be revamped. That’s part of what our original lawsuit was about.

What is the history of the current claim and the $1.15 billion settlement?

Eighty thousand farmers filed claims after the deadline. You know, they didn’t know about it.

It took from 2000 to 2009 to get the case reopened. I spent eight years on [Capitol] Hill, getting the measure in place.

But Congress missed the March 31 deadline to appropriate funds. What does this mean for the farmers?

We’re going to miss another planting season, so that means more black farmers out of business.

The government announced the settlement like it was all over. They didn’t announce the settlement like there was another step that still had to be done. The farmers that read these articles around the country were thinking that they had money on the way. We’ve hired an additional phone bank to take all of these calls that are coming in about the cases.

I’m just hoping that the administration is going to help us get this done. The president is going to have to get involved. [Vilsack] released a statement saying that he was still committed, but the question is, committed at what level?

A billion dollars is not going to happen by itself. Let’s be real here. The administration is going to have to push it. The same way [Obama] was out there fighting for healthcare, he’s going to have to stand up with me and help us get this done. You can’t just go out there and say, “Hey, I did my part. It’s in the budget, it’s done.” The budget is like the president’s wish list. If you want to turn that into a reality, you’ve got to put a little elbow grease in there.

I’m so tired of going to funerals and saying, “He died before he saw his settlement.” I look at these families and say, “I’m sorry that your daddy didn’t see the justice while he was living, but maybe you will.”

In these jobs, he meets people who have no other options, but also people who are grateful for the economic stability work offers them, people who take great pride in their skills with lettuce, and people who can’t tell if it’s their fingers or their minds that are more numb while tearing apart chicken breasts on an icy assembly line.

Salon spoke with Thompson about the relations of immigrants and locals in these industries, how he managed to not realize he was writing a book on food, and about how breaking your back while harvesting lettuce can be kind of … fun.

The part of the book on working in Yuma, Ariz., lettuce fields is called “Salad Days.” At first that just sounds like an ironic joke, but that time does seem to be the most positive experience in your project.

Yeah, there was something very lighthearted in it. The work itself was the most physically demanding, and I contemplated walking away from it more than the others because of the pain in my hands and back. But there were things that made it more pleasurable.

One, people, our crew, was always looking out for me. And not just me — people would jump in and help each other out. No one used the word “solidarity,” but there was a sense of worker solidarity, that we’re all in this together. My crew was at first concerned that I was some kind of undercover agent, but then later was just worried that I had some sweating problem I should have checked out. For my last day, they put together a huge meal for me, and the foreman gave us twice as long as normal for lunch, a full hour.

Two, there’s something about working outside versus in a depressing plant that just feels psychologically healthier, even though in two months in the fields, I never saw a single insect. They had that much fumigation going on.

And three, there was a sense of pride in the workers in their abilities. “We want you to tell your friends what it’s like out here, how their salad got there,” they told me.”It’s the toughest work around, and we’re good at it.” It helps a lot if you have pride in what you do. If you believe it’s important and not many people can do it, you can put up with a lot of crap.

Can you talk about that pride? What are lettuce skills?

Well, first, you don’t pick lettuce, you cut it. So you have to bend down and stab it to separate it from the ground, then trim the outer leaves off before it starts to look like something you’d recognize. It would sometimes take me 30 seconds, and others would have it cut and bagged in just a few seconds. In low points, dribbling sweat all over the stuff, I would just slice the heads up and crush them like they were defective. At one point my co-worker called me the “Lettuce Assassin.”

I thought it was just going to be backbreaking work. Well, after a while, my endurance was increasing, and yet my maximum speed for cutting one row was like everyone else’s relaxed pace for cutting two. So what I thought was an “unskilled” job is in fact very skilled. With every new head of lettuce cut I learned something new, so the chance to constantly try new theories, like different movements, made it interesting.

Towards the end I was getting a little nostalgic, but the last two days we harvested more than 40 tons of lettuce, and that beat the nostalgia right out of me.

Did work in the chicken plant ever seem challenging in that good way?

In the poultry plant — and this is purposeful — all the jobs have been deskilled to the point where anyone can be bored within five seconds; it’s something a monkey can do. The turnover is so high, they don’t want to train anyone new. One week I was there, they had rehired 10 percent of the entire workforce. You’d think it was easy, but it’s much more difficult, because you go a little crazy. You’re just grabbing a chicken breast and tearing it in half 7,000 times a day. You can’t have conversation because you’ve got headphones on from the machine noises. You have to stand still. Half of my orientation class left within one week.

One day, I had a revelation: that chicken breasts look like the butts of white babies. And that was probably my single thought in that five-hour session.

Was there much of a sense among the people you worked with that they had other economic options?

What was most shocking of all to me was rural poverty for Americans. Russellville is where people bounce between two jobs — Walmart or the poultry plants. You just can’t work in the poultry plant very long before you have health problems. It’s just designed very clearly without the health of workers in mind. Lots of repetitive stress injuries in this push for everything being cheap: Who can get the cheapest chicken to McDonald’s?

There had been a KKK march before I showed up, so I expected lots of animosity between locals and immigrants. But the Guatemalans were treated almost like foreign exchange students, more with curiosity than animosity. And it turns out that no one believed that immigrants were taking jobs away from Americans. People didn’t have the jobs because they couldn’t stand them.

One night, we were tearing breasts in half, and the supervisor comes over and says, “You have to work as hard as possible, this is really important!”

And Kyle said, “What is this, national security?” There was this sense that this stuff is cheap and we are treated like we are cheap.

You wrote a book about life in lettuce fields, working in a chicken plant, and being a restaurant delivery boy. So how is it that you didn’t set out to write a book about food?

Well, my general take on food was always: “Where is it, and can I have some?” So, honestly, it wasn’t until groups like Slow Food started asking to talk with me that I thought that maybe this book can help people in the food movement go beyond “Is this food safe for my kids?”

For me, it’s as much about the woman who couldn’t stay awake, falling asleep while standing because she worked the night shift and took care of her kid during the day. I wrote this, to the best of my ability, as a portrait of immigrant work, which is the subject of lots of loud, abrasive conversation, but which people have so little sense of in their everyday lives. I just hope that the book will let people pause for a minute and think about the work they do that supports us.

Before I got to Arizona, to get ready, I was doing push-ups and I bought a biography of John Steinbeck. I read about him talking about wanting to write, supporting himself through hard manual labor, like digging ditches. And what he realized after not too long was that he didn’t have any creative energy at the end of the day to write. That was one of the lessons to me early on, how privileged I am. In Yuma, I was in bed, exhausted, every night by 8. Creative work can be angst-filled, but it’s a privilege to have the energy to even think of doing it.