Washington Post enterprise reporter
Jessica Contrera
knows how to follow her senses
to find powerful details
that immerse readers in a story. Still, tracking a hamburger from steer seed to mouth-watering plate presented new challenges.
What inspired this story? How did you decide to trace the burger’s entire history, and how were you able to track it so thoroughly?
Contrera
: Most days, my job is to write about people whose lives are being directly and majorly impacted by an issue in the news. Right now, that’s literally everyone. But everyone is being affected in different ways – and some much more than others. We are trying to tell stories that highlight those differences, and the ways in which, despite them, we are all still connected.
We knew early on we wanted to follow the burger’s journey as far back as we could because it allowed a reader to meet all kinds of people: men and women, white, Black and Latinx, the owners of companies and the lowest-level employees, rural Midwesterners and East Coast city dwellers, etc., and to see both the unique circumstances and the telling patterns in the ways they were being impacted.
I started in the middle of the journey, with the burger itself, and reported in two directions. Figuring out where the burger came from led me to a New Jersey butcher, then to National Beef in Kansas. I had to figure out which feed lots sell cattle to National Beef, then ask the lots where their cattle came from.
To follow the burger from the restaurant to its destination, photographer Evelyn Hockstein and I first tried approaching any customers who came to the window to pick up their food to ask if we could follow them home. That worked, but it meant we wouldn’t get a delivery courier in the story. We tried following the delivery couriers, but they are very fast on their bikes! Eventually I started calling anyone who placed an order for a burger via Doordash or Caviar.
It’s very weird to say, “Hi, can a total stranger and a photographer come into your home in the middle of a pandemic?” But I have gotten used to making very awkward asks in this job. I always approach them by just being direct: “This is going to sound really weird, but I’m a reporter with The Washington Post and I’m doing a story about the Le Diplomate burger. We are trying to follow the burger from farm to table, so to speak, and I understand there’s one headed to your table?”
And so on.
One of the first customers we called was very kind and said yes, we could come to their house. We watched their order be made, and then when Tiffany the delivery driver arrived to pick it up, we quickly explained the story to her, too, and thankfully, she also said yes.
A reader wrote in to say we didn’t follow the burger’s entire history, because I didn’t follow it to the sewage plant. :)
