Luis Garvan@LuisGarvan
Arkansas journalist Alice Driver has won a James Beard Media Award for excellence in investigative reporting for “Injured and Invisible,” a five-part series by Civil Eats spotlighting unjust working conditions for laborers in the U.S. animal agriculture industry.
The five investigations were carried out by four different reporters. Driver’s story unearths the bleak reality of how Tyson Foods plants in Arkansas handle workplace injuries, particularly through the lens of two workers at a plant in Green Forest. Much of her reporting centers on how Tyson “routes injured workers to company nurses and clinics, a process some allege short-circuits injury reports to OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration], limits scrutiny, and complicates injured workers’ access to healthcare, workers compensation, and damages for life-changing injuries.”
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 has previously written about Tyson for the Arkansas Nonprofit News Network and has two forthcoming books, “The Life and Death of the American Worker” and “Artists All Around,” which are set to be released in spring 2024 and spring 2025, respectively.
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