Food Is Not a Prop for Senator Jessica Ramos. It’s a Platform.

The New York State lawmaker has made a name by leading food causes, speaking up for street vendors, farm workers and the many restaurants in her Queens district.

Last spring, when long lines at food pantries first began to form in Queens — where the coronavirus struck harder than almost anywhere else in the country — Jessica Ramos, a New York state senator, knew whom to call to feed her neighbors. It wasn’t the thousands of family-run restaurants that define her district, whose biryani and enchiladas she so proudly promotes on Twitter, or even its street vendors, whose right to work she often steps in to defend. It wasn’t even the hospitality unions she worked for in her 20s. It was Maureen Torrey, a farmer in the Western New York village of Elba, who had vocally opposed one of Ms. Ramos’s most consequential bills to date — the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act, a law some of her colleagues in Albany are still working to repeal.