text: In many cases, the pandemic flipped the traditional script, putting women on the front lines. A significant number of workers who briefly gained higher (but not high) "hero" wages are women, many of them women of colour. A lot of them are new Canadians, mothers, recent students, seniors: economically vulnerable populations scraping by. They are the people we thanked with colourful, bold signs, staked in lawns and taped in windows. Children wrote pastel tributes to them in sidewalk chalk. We drew hearts and grocery carts and we drew women on signs, happy and uniform. Perhaps you thought of them gratefully when you got home and plopped three browning bananas into a bowl. Or maybe you realized, as you pulled your lumpy bread from the oven, that you could have been nicer when you paid for your flour, yeast, or butter. Maybe you thought, "Thank goodness I only have to do this once a week," as you made it to the front of the winding line, nodded to the security guard, and walked through the automatic doors. Maybe you were one of these workers, just trying to make it through the day before you made it home with your own hard-earned bags of sugar and chocolate, chips and cheese. Maybe, regrettably, you didn't think much about these workers at all. Certainly, there were some people in this comfort-food chain that we didn't see, that we never see—even before the pandemic. Much of the country's mass-produced food system relies on certain invisible workers staying invisible. It took longer for us to thank them, if we did at all.
  
  Pramie Ramroop went to work one morning in March and kept going until July. Seven days a week, she'd arrive early for her 4:55 a.m. shift at a food processing plant in Mississauga. She needed time to don her arsenal of protective gear and get her temperature checked. Ramroop has been an employee at the plant for over two decades. When she was hired, she worked the line for three years, packaging precooked chicken and sauces in box after box. Eventually, she worked her way up to the position of packaging lead hand, what might be called an assistant supervisor. She watches the line run. If there's a breakdown, she figures out how to fix it. She knows every single job required to keep the plant running, and she knows how to do all of them. She's also the person whom many workers come to if they have a question or a complaint, or if they need to share their feelings. And how they were feeling in March and April was scared. Ramroop was also scared. The plant had told workers early on that there would be no days off unless they had a doctor's note—demand for prepackaged, frozen food was through the roof. "We're helping our Canadian family through this pandemic," Ramroop said, explaining the duelling emotions many workers felt. "But we don't want to go home sick."
  
  Even before the pandemic, Ramroop's workplace followed strict safety precautions. Where COVID thrives, so too can nasty, gut-churning bacteria like listeria and salmonella. Anybody entering the plant's ready-to-eat area already had to wear a face covering, hairnet, helmet, protective sleeves, gloves, an apron, and water boots. To get inside, you walk through a sanitizer that sprays white foam on your feet—imagine a car wash for humans, except the effect is more like the fog that eddies the ground at a rock concert. Once you're there, handling all manners of precooked chicken, you're so swathed in protective gear only your eyes show. COVID-19 added face shields, better masks, and extra sanitization. People distanced on the line and started tapping their feet together like Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly to say hello, forgoing hugs. When one person tested positive for the virus, everyone watched, aghast, as the story made the local TV news. Ramroop was just as shaken as everyone else. "Oh my God," employees exclaimed in the lunchroom, on the line, as they passed each other on the floor. "Oh my God, are we going to get it, too?" An entire production line closed so everyone could get tested. The company put more Plexiglass barriers up. Co-workers were forbidden to sit next to each other in the lunchroom. Cleaners regularly sprayed tables, doorknobs, washrooms—everything.
  
  Only one other person at that time at the plant got sick, but it didn't make Ramroop any less nervous. Most of her family were essential workers. Her husband had a job at another food processing plant, one that was much slower to take extra precautions than hers. At the beginning of the pandemic, she drove him to Costco, stockpiled disposable masks, and forced him to wear them. Her son is a paramedic who worked some of the hardest-hit regions of Ontario. She didn't see him for months, but sometimes he would drive by her home in Brampton and they would both wave hello. Her daughter, who lives with Ramroop and her husband, stayed working, thankfully from home. Every day after work, Ramroop bolts straight to the shower. She leaves her boots in the garage, dipped in a bucket of homemade cleaner, sanitizes all the mats, and after she gets out of the shower everything is sanitized: her lunch bag, those boots, everything she touched. Every two weeks, someone goes to the grocery store and she'll sanitize whatever bounty they return with, too. Her son, who didn't want Ramroop leaving the house more than she had to, dropped off supplies once. She washed those as well. Whenever someone stuck flyers in her door, she'd wipe the doorknobs clean.
  
  Throughout it all, her son helped keep her going, encouraging her to relax. Every day he called to remind her to lie down and nap. "You're working seven days a week," he'd tell her. "The time you wake up isn't normal. You're going to get drained." She was too worried about catching the virus to risk walking through her neighbourhood, so when the weather became nicer he coaxed her to spend time in the backyard—told her to take her vitamins, try some yoga. Day in and out, he kept her spirits up. Not that Ramroop ever resented the dogged pace at work. She knew that frozen food might be the easiest way to put dinner on the table during the toughest months of the lockdown. People had to work and people were out of work, and both sets of people had children to feed. She doesn't even really resent that her two-dollar-an-hour pandemic pay boost lasted only a month, not nearly as long as the period of intense overtime. What she does wish is that people like her, those who work behind the scenes, were more publicly acknowledged as essential workers. If not for farmers and food processing plants, how would all that food even make it to the grocery stores? "The people who put food on the table," she said. "They didn't get no recognition."
  
  Or if they did, she added, it was because they had died.