The Associated Press's Henry Jackson gets the Food Fighter nod for finally lofting this story into the big national spotlight. Forbes first carried the story tonight, I believe, and the New York Times just posted Jackson's AP wire story at roughly 10:15 pm tonight.

The NYT's Headline "Iowa: Slaughterhouse Managers Are Indicted." The lede:

A federal grand jury has issued a 12-count indictment claiming that managers were intricately involved in efforts to employ illegal workers at a Postville slaughterhouse that was the site of one of the nation's largest immigrationraids. The indictment includes three new defendants - Brent Beebe, Hosam Amara and Zeev Levi - who have not previously faced federal charges in connection with the Agriprocessorsslaughterhouse. The company's former C.E.O., Sholom Rubashkin, and a human resources worker, Karina Freund, who were already facing federal charges, were also named in the indictment. The superseding indictment pulls together a handful of cases pending against Agriprocessors employees and lists charges including conspiracy to harbor undocumented immigrants for profit and conspiracy to commit document fraud.

That lede is the whole article, actually, and it's a damn big paragraph. But forgive the writer; Jackson is introducing America to a snarled and snarling rat's nest of a story and he obviously wanted to keep it short enough that news outlets nationwide would actually run it.

We find this national attention coming to bear on Postville fascinating to watch because Postville is a snarling rat's nest, and we wonder how the story is going to get crystalized (read, "dumbed down") for mainstream readers. Because, really, it's too big to contain in a one-minute eyewitness news piece. Now that the Associated Press has deemed the topic worthwhile of national attention, Time, Newsweek, or USA Today is going to take on this multi-narrative issue. And the question is, how will it be digested? Is the story going to become pro-union now that we're in the Obama era? Will it be anti-semitic? Anti-immigrant? Anti-government? Is it going to crystalize on the soap opera of the Rubashkin family (and, holy smokes, is that family a soap opera) or the impending legal drama, Law & Order style?

That's actually the wonder of Jackson's little piece of writing. From that one paragraph, it could break any number of ways in the national consciousness.

We're following this story on Fair Food Fight because this issue is a whole slew of narratives -- or "food fights," if you don't mind. It's a fight between the apparent entitlement that a meat producer feels to mask what it's doing on the production end versus the truth that we consumers seek in the labeling of our foods. It's a fight between management and undocumented food industry workers, between the Immigration and Customs Enforement raids and the human beings who routinely perform the shittiest jobs in the food industry (and America desperately needs them to perform those jobs -- but that's another blog post).

Personally, where Postville is concerned, I'm most fascinated by the tensions within the kosher foods world, because, in my opinion, we're going to see something similar to Postville happen in the certified organic foods industry eventually. Agriprocessors was a kosher certified operation, after all. Former Agriprocessors CEO Sholom Rubashkin, who was ordered held without bail despite posting $3 million, is a rabbi. The community that bought those foods assumed that the foods were produced ethically and paid a premium price for the assurance. Nevertheless, like organics, kosher certification has no clear social justice standards, and with the last decade's gold rush of corporate giants glomming up organic food companies, it's easy to imagine a well intentioned fomer hippie or saintly farmer-CEO in the role of Sholom Rubashkin, having bail denied while devout followers and clients are left asking, "But how could this happen?"

It happens in all corners of the food industry -- not just Iowa, not just kosher foods, not just meat -- and it happens because undocumented workers are invisible to us. Please note that in Jackson's perfect little execution of journalism above that he did not mention that undocumented workers are homeless and living in churches, emergency shelters, and skating rinks tonight in Iowa. That's not the story, after all, is it, Mr. Jackson?

These people are invisible, yes, but they are not without their uses, even now.  Six months after the ICE raids, dozens of undocumented immigrant workers have completed their sentences and they are out of prison, but ICE has not deported them to their home countries. Why? Because they are needed to prosecute the trial against Rubashkin and other Agriprocessors managers. According to an editorial in Forward: The Jewish Daily, which has been covering this issue expertly for two years:

In a Kafkaesque turn of events, [undocumented workers] are being held in Iowa so that they can testify against their former employers on charges of child labor and employing illegal immigrants. They cannot leave, they cannot see their families, they cannot yet work and the government will not provide them with the wherewithal to live while they wait. They live day to day on the charity of a Catholic church as they prepare to help the government prosecute their former abusers for the suffering that they continue to endure, now at the government's hands.  

This story will break nationally. But the American consciousness won't allow itself to contemplate this kind of casual, premeditated wrong, especially when it's so prevalent, so systemic.  But some in the kosher certification community can and Forward's editorial writers conclude:

The rules of kashruth [regarding kosher food] are a legacy of the Jewish spiritual tradition, preserved by the courage of countless generations as a gift to the present. Dishonoring them and violating their spirit shames all Jews. Those who honor the laws must stand up to their abuse.

Those who don't honor those laws must stand up to the abuse of human beings, as well.