Seth M. Holmes is a cultural anthropologist and physician whose work focuses on social hierarchies and health inequalities within our immigration and food systems. He is especially interested in the ways in which such social and health inequalities come to be perceived as normal as well as the ways in which this harmful trend can be counteracted. Dr. Holmes is the Martin Sisters Endowed Chair Assistant Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley as well as an attending physician at Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. He is Co-Director of the MD/PhD Track in Medical Anthropology coordinated between UCSF and UC Berkeley and Director of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine. He has received the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology as well as the James M. Blaut Award from the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers.
Dr. Holmes spent several years conducting field research with indigenous Mexican migrant farmworkers: living in farm labor camps and picking berries in the United States, living in their home villages in southern Mexico, accompanying migrant workers to clinics and hospitals in both countries, crossing the border illegally through the desert into Arizona and spending time in border patrol jail. His book from this field research, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, received the New Millennium Book Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology, the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Award, and the Association for Humanist Sociology Book Award. The book was named "Food Policy Stories that Mattered" by Civil Eats and "Our Favorite Food-Centric Books of the Year" by Serious Eats.