A hard look at industrial food systems and the people who work within them
Most days, when I reach a point where I’m overstimulated and tired of pitching and doing freelancer taxes and tired of every stupid way I’m reminded that journalism and film are brutal industries, I find myself daydreaming of working in restaurants again. I know I’m not alone in this. I know, given the pandemic and its many devastating ripple effects, that literally millions of people who work in restaurants are out of a job. Most of those are certainly people who love cooking, or love working with their hands. People who miss the energy of a collaborative work environment. All of them are missing having a paycheck. Many have lost loved ones, or been forced to go back to work. Many, given their financial situation, wanted to go back to work at their own risk. Then there was the study showing line cooks have the highest chance of dying due to the coronavirus, with a 60 percent mortality increase from before Covid-19 hit. The restaurant business is cruel under normal circumstances. This is something new.
Compounding this problem is the fact that a large portion of restaurant workers around the world come from low-income backgrounds or are migrants, often undocumented. Back in 2016, according to Eater, 1.4 million out of 13 million restaurant workers were migrants. About 12% of all restaurant workers and nearly one-third of all dishwashers across the U.S. are undocumented, according to a 2008 Pew study— meaning that number has certainly increased in the past 13 years. In cities like New York and L.A., that number is around 40% as of 2020, according to the research center One Fair Wage. The takeaway is that this industry is massively oversaturated with under-the-table workers who are vulnerable to many threats, un- or under-banked, and even sometimes underhoused. There was massive exploitation even before this virus found its way into human bodies.
When I daydream about being a line cook again, I immediately feel the weight of an industry that can be even more cruel and exploitative than the one I currently work in (journalism and documentary). Comparing these traumas — i.e. the experiences of fixers who’ve been abused by major news publications or parachuting journalists versus the day to day of undocumented line cooks — is genuinely unhelpful. Trauma is relative and inherently imprecise. But the scale in hospitality is devastating. It can be impossible to make sense of how much food service as a worldwide industry — from farming/fishing/slaughtering to transporting to preparing to serving to delivering — is built on a foundation of exploitative labor.
While pandemic burnout is so profoundly real, my daydreaming isn’t that. These impulses started a long time ago, basically the moment I left restaurant work, and it’s only been heightened by my decreased appetite for bullshit this past year. I’ve always missed the energy and camaraderie of restaurants. I’ve missed working quickly with my hands. I’ve missed being in the weeds and working my way out. Spending hours breaking down proteins, and preparing my mise en place. Making something absolutely gorgeous only to watch it fly away from the expo window, to be taken apart and consumed way faster than it was made. I’ve missed ending a shift and being genuinely done for the night, no lingering sense that there’s something else hanging over me as I go to sleep. Food is fleeting, even when it’s art. I miss having a drink, or many, with my coworkers afterward, only to wake up and do it all again.
Even those of us who are U.S. citizens, who come from stable economic backgrounds, who went to college or culinary school, who have other jobs we can do face deep systemic problems in the food service industry. There is institutional misogyny. There is widespread underpayment. There are rarely benefits. And there is the unending shift toward franchising — even at a regional scale — that threatens workers’ ability to push back against unfair policies. It is long hours and almost no money, and you often have to live in expensive cities, with landlords that won’t care if you lose your job to bad working conditions or a restaurant that closes abruptly. It all makes zero sense unless you’re a hedge fund manager taking a date out for dinner at atera, where you pretend you care that it’s an “ingredient-focused” tasting room that costs $250 per person, or you’re the owner of a suddenly popular chain in Williamsburg with a very high employee turnover rate. Or if you get to be on TV.
All of these things must be taken together, because all of these things are how our modern food system works.
Working in restaurants is extremely fun, and wildly satisfying. But pretending it is fully good or fully bad misses the point. To see the artistry, the passion, the absolute deliciousness without the underlying architecture of abuse would be a form of lying. We’ve allowed this lie to spread throughout TV shows, food blogs, cookbooks and the front of house in every restaurant you can think of. My aim in this project is to capture all sides of food, because even though it gets a massive amount of attention, it is still a deeply underreported field.
So these are the kinds of things I’m looking to report on in this newsletter. I chose this format instead of pitching to food outlets because I wanted more control over the stories I pursued and wanted some freedom around how I packaged everything. The lack of an editor is certainly worrisome, we all need someone to fact-check us. But I’m excited to tell some hard-hitting, people-driven stories that unpack this complicated world. If you have story ideas you’d like to read about, let me know.
Here are some topics you might read about here:
Discrimination in cookbook deals: who gets them, and how much do they earn in advances?
Environmental justice around farming: discrimination against Black farmers in the U.S., the impact of industrial farming on ecosystems, how global trade can leave small farmers completely out to dry, things like that.
Is a nonprofit restaurant possible?
Is Modernist cuisine just for wealthy cooks and wealthy clients?
Orientalist and colonialist food: tracking the idea of “authentic” food, and who gets left out of trends. (This point is getting a lot of attention at the moment, which is great — I’m interested in looking at it within the larger context of economic and social control that was built over centuries.)
Profiles of chefs and their experiences in the workplace, as well as their artistic approach to food.
If you have suggestions for sources or any cases that come to mind for these, please reach out!