I read comments yesterday, so I may be forgetting something, but that is not what I got from comments here. I certainly wasn’t suggesting that I don’t think folks in the food industry should be paid, and paid well enough to want to be in the business. I don’t understand all the reasons it’s so difficult, but I do understand it’s difficult. The comments in the article seem to support that.
I also know there have been times I would not have encouraged folks to go into my field.
I liked the comments on black and brown food and nobody will pay for it. I’ll pay for it. If your restaurant makes great South Indian food, I’ll pay whatever you want for it.
Yup. It’s preposterous and ethnocentric to be fine with paying for elevated French, but not elevated <insert ‘ethnic’ i.e. non-western< food.
I don’t mean to suggest that one is a fool to get into the business and should only do it for the love of it but if you are going into that industry, you should have a love for it. Some motivation other than just money. There are easier, less stressful jobs that compensate more fairly than restaurants. The failure rate is high. I think the rise of the celebrity chef has led to unrealistic expectations from people exiting culinary schools. Much like some artists I know have after leaving art schools. Unless you are open to doing commercial work, it is typically hard, unappreciated work to make a living making pretty pictures.
I don’t think anyone is this thread (certainly not me) was implying that, much less said that.
Of course people in the food service industry should get paid a decent, living wage (and most do). That’s not the point.
When you read some of these comments in the article, the underlying tenor is one of “Gosh, I hate my job because I don’t make enough to justify the whiny bitchy customers that I have to deal with” or “Why do I have to cook and be a small business owner and do pedestrian things like balance the books, make payroll, follow the law, etc.”
It’s that entitled attitude that makes you wonder where these “chefs” (and I use that term very liberally) are coming from.
People who love, and I mean truly love what they do, do not complain about the sacrifices they have to make to do what they love.
Your cat and I are nodding vigorously in adamant agreement.
Preach.
My crowd at another online forum (www.well.com) liked it so much that we started a topic called “Silicon Chef”, where an ingredient was selected and people would post dishes they’d thought up using it. Voting, and the winner chose the next ingredient. Lots of fun, but it faded after a while.
someone mentioned “it’s like art” - very true… unless one derives a lot of personal satisfaction from the “job” - you’ll be miserable.
…which brings up the issue… how many artists got wealthy “in their own time?”
. . . not all that many . . .
which is the root behind “you need a brand with millions of restaurants”
I’ve known two Europeans who came to USA, opened their own restaurants, had super good food, made a very comfortable profit/income/living.
so . . . let’s say you make $200k from one restaurant; heh! I got a winning system!!!
okay - unless your dream is to be a multi-millionaire - then you need 20-50 restaurants all capable of turning out excellent food and generating excellent $200k/yr results.
successfully operating an organization of such size is no mean feat. many have tried, most have failed . . .
I appreciate that you and the others (@ipsedixit for instance) here got that from the posts and that you don’t necessarily believe everything that I felt the comments characterised. BUT I absolutely did not get this from the post. They were pointing out invisible labour for those who won’t know and who will wonder why a sweet potato dish costs X when one can go to the supermarket and get it for Y.
Moreover, they are describing a shifting work place, economy, and sensibility that continues to place more burdens on individual workers.
What is fascinating to me is how readily Americans naturalise this. Others too, but Americans are so accustomed to precarity, austerity, and other features of extreme privatisation that they (in general) think the problem lies with the worker.
Because I pay a lot of attention to these labour issues (as part of my own work) perhaps the subtext stands out as text for me. As for @shrinkrap suggesting she wouldn’t recommend her line of work to people: same with my field. Everyone who comes to me with this direction in mind, I tell them all the reasons they shouldn’t. But in my opinion, that’s horrible. I wonder about the future of my sector (HE) which is absolutely necessary but threatened by all these changes that are naturalised with shrugs or claims of “whining”. It’s almost a joke that now EDI (I guess DEI where you are?) becomes the cause when entering fields is so dependent on independent sources of wealth that women, people of colour, disabled people, working class people, etc would really have to think twice about the sacrifice with no payoff of stability and capacity to retire before they’re dead— and that’s if they get the job.
This piece was very much about the invisible or hidden costs of this business, many of which are exacted from individuals (you don’t want to pay for X? Well where will that cost come from?). The things we as communities value are very much under threat, and I think that listening to these testimonies without sneering at whiners (what next, will HOs trot out “snowflakes”?) is important.
Owning a business is hard? Of course it is. But this piece is saying much more than that as it lays out the twin effects of Covid and the economy (or rather an economic system) that is creating conditions that are both untenable and unsustainable.
And that these resonate with so many other fields of work that are both valorised and under resourced (and increasingly only available to the wealthy) makes me all the more concerned.
Sorry for the long post. I know you all mean well, but I just didn’t read this piece in the same way you did. I saw it as symptomatic of a far bigger problem than “this generation needs a reality check”.
I am curious what HE means @Hunterwali. Is it what I (American) would call HR or Human Resources? Your points, to me, are very well made.
This, in a nutshell.
I think you may be focusing on a different part of the article than I am. But before I get to that, please don’t make silly blanket statements like
unless you’ve had a chance to chat with all 350M of us. Adding a little parenthetical in there does not get you off the hook. I know exactly zero people who think workers are the problem. Most of the people I know think corporate welfare, anti-unionization and a lack of affordable health care are the problem. Also? Chefs aren’t the workers. They are the bosses.
And re the article: The chefs quoted have an inflated opinion of their own necessity. This is the very first quote, from a guy who runs a fancy fried chicken place in Brooklyn.
Once upon a time, I was an essential worker, right? And everyone was tipping so graciously and saying the restaurant is the backbone of our economy. And now, just three and a half, four years later, we’re back to everyone complaining about a dollar tip on a touch-screen.
No, you were not an essential worker. Health care is essential. Grocery stores are essential. Fancy fried chicken places in Brooklyn are not essential. We love restaurants, we appreciate restaurants, we would be very sad to not have restaurants. But restaurants - the fancy ones in particular - are not and never have been and never will be essential.
The chefs also assume that they are performing a task so rarefied that the common woman cannot begin to understand it. To whit:
People don’t understand how much work it takes to make something from scratch.
I do. I bet you do. But the reason Restaurant X charges $10 for miso soup and Restaurant Y charges $5 is not because the former is putting more work into it. X pays higher rent. Or employs more people. Or had an expensive firm design its dining room. It’s not the soup.
And I found this completely beyond the pale:
We put a line on the check — 3 percent comes from the customer, so that counts as income and we have to pay tax on it.
Lemme get this straight. You pass the cost of health insurance for your workers on to your customers and then complain that you need to pay tax on the money those customers paid you?
Whining. I know the whining isn’t directed solely at the customers. It’s also directed at the “system” I noted earlier. And as I said in my initial post, I assume that a lot of non-whining was left out of the article. But the tone-deafness is exhausting. No one is forced to be a chef. These folks are working in a field they chose, and it is glamorous (even with all the grunt work behind the scenes) and celebrated. Not one of the chefs seems to acknowledge or even understand this.
Blanket statements? Here? On this site?
Why, never 
I am so not a fan. It just weakens every argument.
Perhaps not the point, but for the record, being an "essential worker " in 2020, at least in California, was defined like this;
Scary and maybe questionable at the time, and a bit of a flashback now. It did not feel like an exemption was a privilege. It felt like hazardous duty. Here in California at least it included folks who worked in restaurants.
Yep. There’s a “regular” or popular definition for essential (first responders, hospital staff, etc.), but then there’s also a legal definition.
If you think about the kind of sausage making that goes into stuff like this, with all the interest groups being consulted for their inputs, it makes sense that all kinds of food workers, not just grocery, would be included in the definition. This is because the definition works together with a proscriptive decree. So if restaurant staff are not essential, then the government is completely[1] shutting down the restaurant industry for so long as any stay-at-home order is in effect. [1] As opposed to the not inconsiderably damage we did to it in any event.
In my state, liquor store workers were counted (legally) as among the essential workforce. 
I didn’t see a reason to argue with that, although early on there were a couple of news blurbs about some teetotalers being up in arms about it.
Much to think about. My memory of it was that essential workers had to eat, and for many, a grocery store wasn’t practical.
Good point there.
All workers are essential.
Some workers are just more essential than other workers.
#AnimalFarm
Fair do’s. I was making a broad generalisation (based largely on the character of comments, reportage, conversations) that do not reflect the number of progressive Americans who are paying attention to systemic issues. And yes, the labour activity is enviable (compared to the UK, where trade unions have been damaged by laws developed under Thatcher).
So yes, #notallamericans.
