According to Leslie Kaup, before she and her partner moved onto their farm in Albert Lea Township, about half of it had been used for sweet corn and it was stripped of nutrients. Today, she has planted over a thousand hazelnut shrubs, among other plants. Photo by Amie Stager.
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“I love being part of a union, and I love being in SEIU because it’s an active union, and I will always be an environmentalist,” says hospital cook and small farmer Leslie Kaup.
Kaup has worked in restaurants, coffee shops, landscaping, food trucks, and plant nurseries. She has traveled across the globe feeding people and participating in various activist movements. For the past nine years, she has been working in healthcare cooking for patients and staff at the Mayo Clinic Health System in Albert Lea, Minn.
Albert Lea is a large town in Minnesota’s southern Freeborn County where over 18,000 people live and work close to the Iowa border. In 2009, it became one of the first designated “Blue Zones” projects in the U.S., an initiative that uses community design principles to increase the health, wellbeing, and lifespans of residents.
Back in 1997, Albert Lea’s community clinics merged and became affiliated with the Mayo Clinic. Services such as the intensive care unit, birthing center, and surgery were stripped. When Kaup first began her job, she was an employee of the Mayo Clinic Health System, part of a network of clinics and hospitals that collaborate with and are owned by Mayo Clinic. But a few years after being hired, she and her coworkers were subcontracted out to Morrison Healthcare, which provides food and nutrition services to healthcare systems across the U.S. and is based in Georgia. Morrison Healthcare is owned by Compass Group, which is based in the U.K.
This led Kaup to become more involved in the union. She joined the bargaining team in order to negotiate over the effects of the transition, then she became an orientation and grievance leader, and now she is on the union’s executive board as vice president of the southeast sector. Currently, she is on leave from her part-time job in the role of member political organizer for her union.
Born and raised in Iowa, her father was a member of Grain Millers Local 6 and worked at a plant owned by the Clinton Corn Processing Company, where a year-long strike that began in 1979 ended in the union’s decertification. “I’ve read about the history, but he doesn’t talk about it,” she says. She moved to Minnesota in 1998, where she obtained an English degree from the University of Minnesota. “Never forget that while we work to afford to live, we work even harder to create the world we want to live in,” says Kaup in a spoken word piece shown at SEIU Healthcare Minnesota & Iowa’s union convention in 2022.
Today, she lives on a seven-acre farm in Albert Lea Township with her husband, Bill, who runs an antique shop in town. She is on the Land Stewardship Project’s (LSP) climate committee, and also joined the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s (MPCA) Environmental Justice Advisory Board. She takes classes at New Brookwood Labor College and participated in the Labor Education Service’s Minnesota Union Leadership Program.
Kaup sat down with Workday Magazine to chat about her work as a cook, union leader, environmentalist, and writer. She also gave a tour of Wild Again Farm, where she practices permaculture and hopes to do more environmental education and workshops. The following interview was edited for clarity and length.
Workday Magazine: How did the pandemic affect your work?
Leslie Kaup: We felt like we were the only ones in the world that couldn’t just stay home. Every day we would go to work and talk about how everybody else can just stay home and we wish we could. We had to fight the administration to get the right to wear masks, because they at first thought that you’re not like health professionals. You’re gonna touch your face and then touch the food. So we had to remind them that we’re actually food service professionals, and we wash our hands. We put calls out to friends and family, and they made masks for us, and that’s what we wore for the first couple years, and then eventually they’re like, “We have enough masks.” Now you can wear these really cheap surgical masks. Then we all had to wear those instead for another year or so.
We’d already lost a lot of our services at the hospital, but we have an addiction treatment center, and we had a mental health unit. So those were in-house units. We didn’t have direct patient contact, but there were definitely some times when there’d be some interactions. Almost immediately after folks went out on furlough, we started getting more patients and started getting too busy to keep up at times.
I had a manager telling me, “This person doesn’t have anything to do, have her help you.” But she’s not a cook. If you’re not a trained cook, it’s like teaching a kindergartner how to do something. I’ll just do it myself. I’m stressed because I don’t have the correct support for my job. There were a lot of food shortages of different products or packaging materials.
Workday: What would a typical shift look like?
Kaup: My shifts were eight hours, and I was working from 5:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. I would get there and make breakfast. But of course, the cafeteria closed during that time, so we didn’t have the cafe open, and we went to all packaged foods. Nobody had to touch anything. I would get there and make a whole bunch of breakfast stuff, and then I would get the tickets to feed the patients. We would make all their meals at once, get them in a cart, and then someone would deliver it to the unit. Then after that, make lunch, kind of the same process. As soon as lunch was over, clean up and go home.
Workday: How did the union respond to pandemic?
Kaup: I was getting to know folks on the executive board all over the state, and then all of a sudden there was this barrier to networking with folks and becoming more of a cohesive board. But I felt like our union was so supportive. We had town halls with our union and with people who are resources for us, trying to figure out furloughs and unemployment. We fought for essential worker pay. I remember the first week or so after the pandemic was declared, and my boss gave us this letter and said, “Carry this with you, and if you’re stopped anywhere, tell them, it shows you’re an essential worker.” I never had to show it to anybody. It was surreal.
Workday: I remember the debate over front-line worker pay, and how conservatives wanted the money to only go to nurses, but nurses were saying they weren’t the only essential workers.
Kaup: It ended up being too little too late. We were still grateful for it, it ended up being around $340. It would have been very useful two years earlier.
Workday: Where do you find community in Albert Lea?
Kaup: It took me a long time to find my community. It was after the election of Trump that I sought out more like-minded folks. I became active in the local DFL, and we started a lefty book club last year. I’m trying to create the community I want to live in. Albert Lea’s a pretty red place. There’s pockets of progressiveness, and we just need to find each other.
Workday: What’s your family like? What do you do in your free time?
Kaup: I have a partner, he runs an antique shop. I don’t have kids. We have a dog, cats, rabbits, ducks. I read and pull weeds. I like historical fiction. I like things to look up and research. I enjoy a lot of Minnesota authors. I read some poetry. I’m taking a class right now. I’m also part of a worker writers school with Mark Nowak who used to live in Minneapolis. We do it on Zoom during the school year. Cab drivers, domestic workers, paraprofessionals—–it’s workers!
Workday: I just went to the Remember 1934 memorial picnic and it was great. The arts organizing around labor and environmental topics is one of my favorite things to see and write about.
Kaup: There’s also the Rural Regeneration Storyteller Minigrant Program. I was recommended for this writing grant and was a recipient for that this year. Someone at the Environmental Justice Advisory Board for the MPCA recommended I join the LSP climate committee, and then someone from LSP recommended me for the grant. One of the things I’m doing with this rural storyteller project is just telling what’s going on my farm every day. It’s a kind of land-based storytelling.
Workday: How do you see storytelling as part of your activism? Was that always a part of you?
Kaup: That’s a good question. I feel like it is. I was a kid who was reading all the time, so there’s always stories going through my head. When we tell each other stories about our own lives, we find connections that we didn’t know we had. Part of what’s wrong with everything right now is that we don’t listen to each other. Everything has to be factual. If we can just hear each other’s stories and pick out the nugget that’s part of our story too, we can make connections instead of division.
Workday: How did you join the MPCA environmental justice advisory board?
Kaup: I saw a post by the Sahan Journal that said they needed people. It was at a time when I had just dropped to part time at my job because I wanted to focus more on my activism and because I was burned out after three years of pandemic work. We meet every two months in person, and we do subgroup meetings on Zoom. The big news this past week was Smith Foundry closing, so we had conversations about how to support the community.
Workday: Industry is really big in Minnesota, from agriculture to mining to tourism. How can a strong labor movement protect the land?
Kaup: I was at the DFL state convention this past year. My union was sponsoring my trip, helping me get there. A lot of the other unions in our state want to support mining in northern Minnesota. And some of us broke from that, and we’re not very popular at that convention because we were wearing our Boundary Waters T-shirts instead so it was an interesting dynamic.
I want to point out that Big Ag doesn’t feed people. We’re not eating corn and soy that the corn and soy farmers are producing. Those are industrial products, they’re not food. There’s this persistent “the farmers feed us” attitude, but not these farmers.
That’s what my farm is about, creating the world that I want to live in. And it’s intensely biodiverse.
Workday: We need leaders to be able to bring audiences together and talk about our planet.
Kaup: There’s this idea that we have to have all these facts and figures to talk about climate. Nobody listens to that. They listen to stories and they see images. Personal stories, things that affect them, right? They don’t need to know what percentage of carbon dioxide is being emitted, that’s way too abstract.
Workday: If you had everyone from Minnesota in a room, what would you say to them?
Kaup: I would want to say that we all want the same things. We love where we are. We love our families, we love our place. We have more in common than we have divisions. If we just look around us, at what our priorities actually are, we’ll realize that we’re on the same page.
This story is part of the Greater Minnesota Worker Listening Project series, a profile series on union and nonunion workers in Greater Minnesota and other rural communities.