Food can connect us to the earth, our community, and ourselves. But first, we need to open a space to listen to and be in exchange with the ingredients.

As a professional chef, I have spent years learning to do this with the plants I grow and cook with. This practice has profoundly changed the way I think about my work and the world around me.

Looking back, one of my most important teachers on this journey, in the kitchen and in life, was the tomato.

Growing up, I struggled with my relationship to this beautiful plant and its magic fruit, even as I found myself drawn to it. It was only after I learned how to truly listen to tomatoes and give them what they need to thrive, that I experienced the true magnificence, amazing flavors, and powerful energy they have to share with us all.

The first dish I ever learned how to make was salsa. I was 5 years old, and I can still remember picking the juicy tomatoes, serrano chilies, and fragrant cilantro from my parents’ garden in Ojai, the Southern California valley at the base of the Topatopa Mountains. I kept tasting the salsa over and over again, adding a little more chili, then a little more salt, then a little more lemon. Adjusting and experimenting with the balance of flavors until it tasted just how I wanted it: delicious.

But a tomato on its own? That grossed me out. Now I know that the culprit was store-bought tomatoes—pink, mealy, store-bought tomatoes. I still cringe when I think about their watery, bland flavor. The worst were the slices that sat goopy and soggy in my sandwich, waiting to be eaten in my lunchbox at school.

What I didn’t realize then was that these weren’t a proper reflection of the tomato family. They were the industrialized representatives. There are actually more than 10,000 types of tomatoes out there—way more than the two to three varieties you see in the average grocery store.

The revelation that there was a whole other world of tomatoes out there came to me when I went away to San Diego for college and started working at my first fine-dining restaurant, NINE-TEN. I’ll never forget the heirloom tomato salad on their menu. Who knew tomatoes came in so many colors and variations? I took my first bite, and the bright, sweet, sharp flavors of their tomatoes opened my eyes to what high-quality ingredients can do for a meal, and how limited my understanding of the plant had been up to that point.

After college, I returned to Ojai, where I got focused on growing my own food. With my mom as my mentor and advisor, I started to develop a deeper relationship with plants, and saw how they could thrive when they received the love and nutrients they needed.

The work thrilled me. Every morning, I woke up early to check on the land, inviting friends to come and garden with me. We planted all kinds of vegetables in the beautiful soil we created by composting our food and garden scraps.

Through gardening, I learned that all food needs good food and good vibes to flourish. The same can be said for humans. For years I hadn’t been taking my health as seriously as I should have, and it was around this time that I realized I needed to make some drastic changes myself if I wanted to feel strong and capable in my body and keep doing the things I loved—like surfing, playing in nature, and growing my garden.

At this point, I had been growing over 40 varieties of heirloom tomato plants. I had been so excited to see them fruit, and find out what it would be like to cook with them and how they would taste. Unfortunately, after a few weeks of chowing down on them, my chiropractor recommended that I take a break from eating plants from the nightshade family, as they can be inflammatory.

Author Evan Rilling. Photo by Natalie Karpushenko.

It was a total bummer to stop eating tomatoes after we’d come so far together, but by overindulging in them and then cutting them out of my diet, I actually became even closer to tomatoes. The experience taught me to listen to my body and find out how to develop a healthier relationship with the plant that worked for me. I can now eat tomatoes freely when it feels good for me to and know when to stop when I need to. I recommend this exact method to clients who really want to understand how food affects them. It’s true, I tell them, after you take some time away from an ingredient, try going all in if you truly want to understand how the food is affecting you. Even junk food: I dare you to eat a whole bag of Doritos and see how you feel! I bet you won’t be going back for seconds.

I am grateful to tomatoes for all of the gifts they’ve shared and the lessons they’ve taught me, and am honored to now share these teachings with you.

Here’s how anyone can connect to ingredients in a deeper way:

First, choose an ingredient that you feel called to and would like to build a stronger connection with.

Then place the ingredient in front of you. Look at it. What did you see?

Touch it. What did you feel?

Listen to it. What did you hear?

Smell it. How would you describe it?

Taste it. How would you describe the experience?

How have you worked in harmony with it?

How could you work in harmony with it?

These teachings will expand your abilities and awareness of what you eat.

Developing your own relationship with any plant or ingredient—whether you’re cooking, gardening, applying a wellness technique, or working with them for healing—can be powerful, not to mention fun.

But before you try this process, I invite you to take a moment, center yourself, and let yourself be open to the possibilities that may present themselves to you. Because by letting yourself truly connect and listen to a plant, you may find it has many lessons for you, just like the tomato has had for me.

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The post One Fair Wage President Saru Jayaraman appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors are expected to descend on Indio, California, this month for the 2023 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.

The festival is a banner event for Riverside County, with people coming in droves to catch their favorite acts performing live in the desert.

But with all of this tourism money flowing into the local economy, service industry workers, who have helped Coachella become one of the biggest, most influential, and highest-grossing festivals in the world, are not making enough to get by.

At last night’s program, “What Is a Good Tourism Job Now?,” panelists discussed why in Riverside, and across California and the nation, tipped workers are still not earning enough to cover essential expenses like food, housing, or health care, which has caused many to leave the service industry in droves since the start of the pandemic.

The event was the inaugural program in “What Is a Good Job Now?,” a new series supported by The James Irvine Foundation, where over the next year Zócalo will explore what makes a good job for workers in low-wage sectors across California’s economy.

“We wanted to talk about tourism and service in Riverside County because the industry here has grown tremendously in the last couple of decades,” said Zócalo editor-at-large Elizabeth Aguilera, who served as the moderator for the discussion, which took place at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture at the Riverside Art Museum.

Aguilera asked One Fair Wage president Saru Jayaraman to begin the conversation by explaining why the service economy runs on tips. “Where and how did this get set up?”

Tipping originated in feudal Europe, said Jayaraman, when aristocrats gave extra money to serfs and vassals on top of their wages. “It’s important to start there because wages are very low in this industry,” she said. “It’s been the lowest-paying employer in the United States dating all the way back to emancipation.” That was the point where tipping “mutated” here in the U.S., she said, “from being an extra or bonus … to being a replacement for wages because restaurants wanted a way to hire newly freed Black people—Black women, in particular—and not pay them anything at all.”

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

The National Restaurant Association (which Jayaraman wrote about for Zócalo earlier this week), a powerful lobby founded in 1919, has “fought against and artificially suppressed wages” for the past century to keep its workers living off tips, but it doesn’t have to be this way, Jayaraman said. She points to Europe, for instance, where the industry recognizes service workers as skilled professionals. Across the continent, EU countries have done away with tipping culture and raised the minimum wage to a livable amount.

Aguilera asked Ralph Prado IV, who has worked in the restaurant industry for the past decade, what makes service and tourism jobs so difficult—and also hard to leave. Prado spoke about dealing with low pay, stress, anxiety, and anger in past positions. Prior to having a child, he said, he was managing to scrape by, but now that he’s a father, the situation has changed for him.

“Getting paid a low wage and suffering anxiety from my job when I wasn’t even in a managerial position was spilling into my home life,” he said. “That just wasn’t working.” He left his last job because of this and has since taken a new position that has allowed him to have better quality time with his son. “Even then,” he said, “I am still considering, is this industry still good for me? Is this sustainable for the future? Do I have to keep working two jobs? Do I have to work a combination of jobs?”

These are among the questions that Lesley Butler, who has been a faculty member at the Collins College of Hospitality Management at Cal Poly Pomona since 1992, has been trying to address. “We train professionals, and we take it very seriously,” she said.

The experience that Prado had at his previous job, she said, was likely exacerbated because of a lack of leadership. “In our industry, there is a lack of experience, lack of leadership experience, and we saw that really in the pandemic because a lot of workers who really were not trained to be in leadership positions lacked training and caused toxic environments for their employees and guests,” she said.

Looking at the landscape, Butler does see reason for optimism. She pointed to big companies like McDonald’s and Chipotle making efforts to help employees advance in the field by offering tuition assistance and reimbursement.

And when it comes to pay, she pointed to AB 257, the landmark California legislation that will raise wages as high as $22 an hour for chains with 100 or more locations across the U.S. “That’s a significant change,” she said.

But can better pay solve California’s current worker shortage? Aguilera noted that restaurants in Riverside paying $20-$30 an hour are still having trouble hiring. “Do folks come back, or have they moved on?” she asked.

It can, said Jayaraman, but only if it’s a government-mandated guarantee of a living wage.

In a recent One Fair Wage worker survey 60% of respondents reported they were leaving the restaurant industry for a wide range of sectors. The universal tagline, she said, was, “Honestly, I will do anything other than this because I can’t afford to do it anymore.” Eighty percent reported they would return with the guarantee of a sustainable wage—but only one that was authorized by the state, so they were not dependent on the whims of individual restaurant owners, who might turn around and lower wages again down the line.

The discussion ended on a hopeful note from Prado. He spoke about how rewarding working with his teammates over the years has been—despite being in jobs that many look down upon. “I can’t imagine the kind of citizens we would have,” he said, “if we had people that were getting paid well doing this rewarding work, and [off the clock they] had time to do all sorts of great stuff.”

The post We Can Solve California’s Service Worker Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The story of California’s minimum wage laws is often told as a story of progress. As of January 1, 2023, the state holds the third highest minimum wage in the country. All employees, including tipped workers whom most states exclude, make $15.50 per hour here. But such a narrative obscures the ways that low-wage workers are still being taken advantage of. Like how, for over a decade, California has required millions of its low-wage workers to pay for lobbying to suppress the wages of their fellow workers nationwide—without knowing it.

What organization convinced the most pro-worker state in the country to take money out of food service workers’ pockets to pay for anti-worker lobbying? And what would it take to lessen the grip of that lobbying, and make the minimum wage, which still falls significantly short of meeting the cost of living across much of the state, a true living wage?

In 2011, the California state legislature passed a law requiring all food service workers not only to take a food safety training course, but also to pay for this training using their own money. Lawmakers voted for the bill based on a public health justification. Food safety is indeed an important issue, but something more nefarious was at work. My colleagues at One Fair Wage, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of the workers the law targets, and I recently discovered that the National Restaurant Association (which we call the “other NRA”)—the restaurant industry’s largest lobbying group—spearheaded the legislation in order to dramatically increase its lobbying budget. In early 2023, the New York Times shared what we learned with the world: The lobbying group owned the food-handler training company called ServSafe, which held a near monopoly over this kind of training, and planned to fill their lobbying coffers from the $15 food handler courses. At least one-seventh of the association’s $25 million lobby budget since 2010 has come from California workers.

Chicago restaurant owners founded the National Restaurant Association in 1919, but its roots go back to 1865, when white restaurant owners invented the idea of using customers’ tips as a replacement for wages for newly freed Black workers. One such group, Chicago’s Black Pullman car porters, who handled luggage on luxury trains, began to organize in the early 20th century to win an actual wage. They eventually won their fight, but the NRA made sure that others did not follow suit. Instead, it successfully lobbied to ensure that agricultural and restaurant workers—both majority Black occupations—were excluded from the first federal minimum wage law, passed in the United States as part of the New Deal in 1938.

Time and again, the National Restaurant Association lobby—which today is led by mega-corporate chains, like Olive Garden, Denny’s, and IHOP—has convinced politicians across the spectrum and country to kill measures to increase the minimum wage or end the subminimum wage for tipped workers. In 1996, the NRA’s then-leader Herman Cain struck a deal with congressional Democrats to allow all other workers’ wages to increase as long as tipped workers’ wages stayed frozen at $2.13 an hour—where they still stand today. While seven states, including California, have rejected this system, restaurant workers in other states have been unsuccessful in their attempts to require restaurants to pay a full minimum wage with tips. The other NRA lobbied successfully against efforts in Maine; Michigan; Washington, D.C.; and especially at the federal level—thanks in no small part to money from California workers.

Meanwhile, California has become a model for the country, showing that restaurants can pay everyone a full, fair minimum wage with tips on top and still have a thriving restaurant industry.  But most Californians making $15.50 per hour still cannot afford to live here. Per the MIT nationwide living wage calculator, in Alameda County, where I live, one adult working full time in a two-parent, two-child household would need to earn $33.50 an hour. In Los Angeles, it’s $30.15 an hour. In Orange County, it’s $32.50. By attacking minimum wage laws everywhere in the country for decades—using money taken deceptively from workers—the corporate restaurant lobby has forced all of us to settle for crumbs.

In February, state Senator Monique Limón introduced a bill that would require employers, not workers, to pay for the required food safety training, and compel the State Department of Public Health to publish a list of all available training programs, not just ServSafe. (My organization runs one of these, Just.Safe.Food.) In addition, several legislators across our state have pledged that they will not take campaign money from the National Restaurant Association, and that they will donate past funds received to worker justice organizations.

These efforts are admirable, and I’d like to see more of them. But we can’t stop there. California lawmakers must also focus on legislation to raise the minimum wage closer to what it actually costs for working families to live in the state. State Assemblymember Ash Kalra recently introduced such a bill, which his colleagues are currently considering. Such legislation should both raise the minimum wage closer to a living wage, and end all exemptions to the minimum wage, including the subminimum wage for incarcerated workers, who fight our wildfires for less than $1 per hour.

It is possible for the businesses of this state to pay their workers a “Living Wage for All”; already, restaurant owners are voluntarily raising wages amid a massive staffing crisis. California can create a level playing field for restaurant employees—and ensure every person who works in the state is paid enough to house and feed their families. This would truly be a story of progress.

The post Why Restaurant Workers Can’t Win appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ezgulian is a well-respected figure in professional culinary circles who judges exclusive culinary competitions such as the Bocuse d’Or and champions women’s contributions to French cuisine. But she also maintains what we think of as housewife sensibilities, and has become one of France’s key figures in the “zero waste” cooking movement. “I believe in showing people how they can reinvent their leftovers or use ingredients they usually throw away,” she tells me as she moves around the kitchen.

And that’s when it hits me: What draws me to Sonia Ezgulian is how perfectly she reflects and subverts the tensions that exist in France between domestic and professional cooking. Women have always worked in French professional kitchens. But we hear about them and see them less often than men—in part, my research suggests, because women’s traditional ties to unpaid care work have sidelined them. Ezgulian manages to celebrate domestic cookery while creating a strong connection to professional culinary arts. She telegraphs the notion that women’s culinary accomplishments are equally important in restaurants and at home.

Ezgulian’s biography straddled the two spheres from the get-go. She never went to culinary school, deciding to become a professional cook after working for many years as a successful journalist in Paris. She and her husband Emmanuel moved to Lyon, Ezgulian’s hometown, and opened a small restaurant called Oxalis in 1999. The restaurant showcased Ezgulian’s creativity and playfulness in the kitchen, bringing new life to Lyonnais cuisine, which had a reputation for being stodgy and bourgeois. The local papers quickly touted Ezgulian as a new mère lyonnaise, a particular sort of domestic-turned-professional female cook.

Lyon, the third-largest city in France, has a long history of women cooking professionally. At the turn of the 20th century, many women worked as cooks in bourgeois homes there, but as the economy in France entered a downturn, many of them lost their jobs as domestic laborers and went to work in restaurants where they perfected dishes such as poularde en demi-deuil (truffled braised chicken) and fonds d’artichauts au foie gras (artichoke hearts with foie gras). These were simple, hearty dishes that exalted prestigious ingredients, the hallmarks of bourgeois cuisine. The women’s reputation for excellent cooking grew, and gastronomes such as Curnonsky, an early restaurant critic, began to call these women les mères lyonnaises (“Mothers of Lyon”). These cooks did not recognize each other as a unified group, but the growing genre of gastronomic literature about their food created a movement of sorts.

Sonia was befuddled by the mère label, because she did not see her cooking as part of the tradition of stodgy cuisine that had come to define Lyon. She was a woman in a restaurant kitchen. Was that all it took to be a mère?

The quintessential mère lyonnaise was Eugénie Brazier. Born in the countryside near Lyon, Brazier worked in a bourgeois home before apprenticing under the renowned mère Fillioux. Fillioux was as famous for her terse attitude toward her customers and staff as she was for her tableside service of whole chickens, which would fall apart at the tiniest cut from her dainty knife. Brazier went on to run two three-starred Michelin restaurants of her own in the 1930s, an accomplishment no other woman has yet replicated.

Eugénie Brazier died in 1977, and while she is an important cultural figure in Lyon, her memory largely remains relegated to the dusty annals of local gastronomic history. The rest of France and the world associates Lyon’s food with the recently deceased, homegrown, super-star chef Paul Bocuse, whose image graces the city’s murals.

French society charges women with being the central caregivers at home. Women who choose to pursue careers instead—as well as those who shoulder the double weight of professional careers and motherhood—face a robust glass ceiling in many professions. The culinary arts are no exception: The professionalization of cooking in France has largely focused on keeping women out of kitchens. The figure of the chef in popular culture is almost always represented as male. Starting in culinary school, women encounter structural barriers, gender stereotypes, and sometimes even sexual harassment. Many women report having their culinary instructors pass them over for top apprenticeship positions in favor of their male peers. Others are channeled into areas such as pastry, often referred to as the pink ghetto of the kitchen, which are seen as more creative and feminine. These problems are not uniquely French. But given the centrality of the culinary arts in French culture, the problem of gender inequality in the kitchen should be of national concern.

Ezgulian recalled her own feelings of exclusion during her apprenticeship at Michelin-starred Les Terrasses de Lyon at the Villa Florentine hotel. Everyone in the kitchen referred to her as “madame,” a sign of respect for her age but a dismissal of her place in the kitchen. “It’s definitely a boys club, and I knew I did not fit,” she said. At Les Terrasses, Ezgulian learned the ins-and-outs of haute cuisine. She also decided there that she would do things differently when she opened her own restaurant—the patriarchal hierarchies of the existing system were counterproductive to the creative work of cooking.

But discrimination continued even when she was in charge. When trying to hire male cooks, “there was one man who I interviewed and he kept asking me when he would get to meet the chef. I guess I did not fit his idea of a chef,” she said. Another male cook “quit one day right after the dinner service. He threw his apron on the floor and exclaimed, ‘I can’t work like this. You just don’t yell enough!’” Ultimately, Ezgulian decided she wanted to work alone. She simplified dishes so they required less labor and did away with heavy kitchen equipment like unwieldy oversized stockpots.

In her writing and media appearances today, Ezgulian gives women their due. While male chefs often nod to their mothers and grandmothers as the progenitors of their cuisine, they rarely give women’s domestic cookery credit for being foundational. Further erasures abound, particularly at the upper echelons. Currently, only one woman in France, Anne-Sophie Pic, heads a kitchen with three Michelin stars, and just two women, Andrée Rosier and Virginie Baselot, have ever been awarded the top accolade of Meilleur Ouvrier de France. Although more women than men enter culinary school, they are underrepresented in all areas of the culinary arts.

Ezgulian is working alongside Eugénie Brazier’s granddaughter, Jacotte Brazier, to promote women’s contributions to French cuisine. In 2007, Brazier started the nonprofit organization Les Amis d’Eugénie Brazier, which grants scholarships to young women attending culinary school; Ezgulian also worked with Brazier to create a series of literary prizes to promote women’s food writing. Every year Les Amis holds a ceremony at the lavish Lyon town hall to honor annual scholarship and literary winners. For many of the young scholarship winners, it is the first time they have been validated publicly. Most importantly, Les Amis d’Eugénie Brazier creates a much-needed support network for women in the culinary arts—the connections and opportunities to learn from people at the top of their field that can make or break a career.

Equality is possible in France’s kitchens. But first the nation must recognize that the professional and domestic settings are complementary. Sonia Ezgulian is not an outlier—but the exclusion she faced belongs in the past.

The post The Female Cooks Who Shaped French Cuisine appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the current disruption in the restaurant industry, for all the pain and economic loss it’s caused, provides an opening to disrupt the established models, and reckon with both the decline of hospitality and the reality of restaurant inequality. To recover and thrive in the years ahead, this essential American business will need to bring its time-honored cultural traditions into greater alignment with the social movements that define our times.

To start with, consider the slew of new options to purchase commercially prepared food that have flooded the marketplace in the last year. These options include delivery platforms, meal subscriptions, and online storefronts with offsite “ghost kitchens.” Takeout and delivery sales have skyrocketed, as have lines at the local drive-thru. Clearly, those who can afford to eat out occasionally are still buying and consuming food that they do not make themselves.

A shadowy army of workers has sprung up to staff these operations. Many are precariously employed, armed with some combination of a vehicle, a mobile app, a mask, and hand sanitizer. By connecting people to food through wordless hand-offs or drop-offs of plastic-wrapped edibles, these people are doing the human labor that Silicon Valley would rather automate than improve.

It’s paying work, but we should be alarmed by this trend, which represents the decline of hospitality.

Hospitality is not only about restaurants. It reaches into nail salons, spas, and hotels; it is the beating heart of the tourism trade. For customers, hospitality can be an immersive consumptive experience, the ineffable pleasure of a well-earned night out or trip away. For workers, hospitality is a form of interactive labor that requires subtle interpersonal skills. Hospitality is about customer service, which means that it is about affective and aesthetic forms of labor: the careful use of one’s emotions and bodily appearance to create a desired experience for others.

Precisely because hospitality is an infinitely more textured and sensory-rich experience when it is in-person rather than in a virtual environment, settings of hospitality are uniquely vulnerable to retreats in public life, be they from contagious viruses or new technologies.

While it may be easy for some observers to dismiss hospitality as “non-essential,” this overlooks just how deeply embedded hospitality is in our culture as well as our economy. Hospitality imbues otherwise ordinary activities (think: eating, resting, relaxing, going somewhere new) with special value and collective ritual. In restaurants, it elevates food consumption to the level of romance, laughter, discovery, scenery, identity, and status. We may not like everything that gets packaged together in restaurants, but picking restaurants apart and putting their constitutive parts back together as delivery handoffs and “ghost” kitchens sucks the life out of these operations.

When restaurants are allowed to re-open in full again, however, they will have to do far more than restore hospitality. They—and the larger society—will have to reckon with an issue long left to simmer on the back burner: social inequality within restaurants.

Even in the best of times, restaurants have been engines for social division and hierarchy in our society. These inequalities go beyond the well-known distinction between server and served—that is, those who have the resources to inhabit restaurants for leisure versus those who are compelled to be there for labor.

Less visibly, restaurants produce and reproduce social hierarchies of race and class within their workforces. As I explore in my recent book, Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers, everyday forms of inequality get threaded into the very fabric of restaurants. Particularly in higher-end establishments, class-privileged, white men and women get channeled into front-of-house and managerial jobs while working-class people of color, especially foreign-born Latino men, toil behind the scenes.

This social division of labor is the result of both management decisions and the worker inter-relations that bosses help to structure. Management sets the stage for this dynamic in restaurants through discriminatory hiring and supervisory strategies. Workers then play out the scenes each and every day, coming to understand their colleagues as members of distinctly unequal “teams” tinged with race, class, and gender differences.

As a cruel irony, these inequities will get more pronounced, not less, as restaurants return to full operations (as I hope that they do again very soon). This is because serving more customers means very different things for different groups of workers. For those in the front of the house, a busy shift means more cash tips; for those in the back of the house, a busy shift means more sweat. Tips thus function as racialized and classed forms of income because they flow primarily to front-of-house workers who are often young, white, and highly educated and stop short of the Brown and Black workers in the kitchen. Under the hood of hospitality, the reproduction of social inequality feels—and looks—like business as usual.

Restaurateurs, given their numbers and all the lives they touch, could play an outsized role in bringing about organization and industry-wide innovation along these lines. The question they will need to address is, how can their establishments become more equitable spaces of employment while still managing to fill seats and pay bills? Upholding the exploitative and racially unequal norms of the past may become increasingly bad business, especially in an era when social-media savvy diners have trained their attention on these topics.

Using this moment to figuratively “turn the tables” on restaurant practices could represent a boon to business rather than an undue burden. This involves rethinking unspoken industry practices in order to widen the pool of people that find stepping foot in restaurants to be a rewarding experience. Because hospitality is about enacting finely crafted relationships with guests, the behind-the-scenes craftwork that goes into this should be made transparent to both customers and workers. The swift and silent busser, the jack-of-all-trades line cook, the bar back who is a master of anticipating needs; these workers invest daily in the production of hospitality. It is time for their employers to celebrate them in meaningful ways, such as by recognizing workers publicly while also expanding their training and advancement opportunities, or by soliciting worker input on best practices and providing these individuals with a pathway to acquiring a stake in ownership (or at least a cut of recent business successes they helped achieve).

Restaurant management should communicate these efforts proudly to members of the public as a selling point. Helping create a more inclusive workforce channels our moment in history in the most positive way possible, connect conversations in the community with conversations around dining tables—and among those walking the floor and working the grills, too. As we have seen from the rise of social and political protest in the sports world, restaurants could look to partner with foundational movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo in their efforts to empower workers of color and women and propel them into prominent roles within the industry. Restaurants are still businesses, and businesses must make money in order to survive. But they can and should do so as value-driven brands—third spaces for a new era—that tap the cultural milieu and refract it back outwards in the form of concrete practices.

Customers need to be able to support restaurants that make these concerted efforts. A worker advocacy center called Restaurant Opportunity Coalition United (ROCU) has launched an app call ROC National Diners’ Guide aimed at bringing consumer awareness to restaurants that are practicing “high road” employment standards, such as by offering livable wages, racial equity, and opportunities for advancement. The app’s interface is designed like Yelp, the widely used restaurant review app, except with a rating system for employment standards and a corresponding map of restaurants in the area (though it has limited coverage).

The Diner’s Guide is but one of a growing number of efforts to realize change in an industry that is at a crossroads. The road forward is to make going to a restaurant to be an act of supporting a new movement to infuse our dining experience with both expertly crafted hospitality and concerted efforts to advance social justice.

If we build such a movement, restaurants should thrive again in the post-pandemic era—as the engines of opportunity, not inequality.

The post Can Restaurants Become Drivers of Opportunity—Not Inequality? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Over their long history, diners have been a subtle part of our built environment and also our inner landscapes. They are as familiar as the language we speak and the comfort food we eat. Everyone loves diners.

There really is no other building like a classic diner: long and low, sheathed in glass, gleaming stainless steel, and colorful porcelain enamel; often ringed in neon and punctuated by a flashy, sometimes flashing, sign; going and glowing at all hours, day and night.

The first diners showed up 135 years ago when Walter Scott served affordable fast food out of his horse-drawn wagon in Providence, Rhode Island. Patrons stood on the street to eat their lunches in the same manner as the customers of today’s ubiquitous food trucks. These eateries were constructed by wagon builders; gradually a specialized industry developed to mass produce diners.

These classic diners were factory-built, from the 1920s onward, and thus conformed to regular dimensions and proportions in order to be moved—by rail, barge, and truck—from where they were manufactured to where they would operate. As a result, diners have a generic similarity to one another. But, because they are mostly individually owned, and made by different manufacturers, they have distinct personalities, based upon the people on both sides of the counter.

The diner interior is all business, where form follows function—“as utilitarian as a machinist’s bench.” The customer can see the short order cook reach into the icebox, work the griddle, and deliver the food in an astonishingly short amount of time. The back bar of the diner, beneath the glass-fronted changeable letter menu boards, is a tour-de-force of stainless steel or colorful tile, with a line of work stations filled with grills, steam tables, sandwich boards, coffee urns, multi-mixers, drink dispensers, and display cases.

From 1955 to 1957 waitress Joan Hepner Wentzell constantly snapped photos of customers at the Pole Tavern Diner on Route 40 in Salem County, New Jersey. These sweethearts sharing a Coke remain anonymous. Photo courtesy of Richard J. S. Gutman.

The “counter culture” inside diners is a reflection of their wide appeal. Commentators have long fixated on this, describing how this spirit manifests itself.

A 1932 article in World’s Work depicted the all-inclusive range of patrons:

“The lunch wagon is the most democratic, and therefore the most American of all eating places. Actors, milkmen, chauffeurs, debutantes, nymphes du pave, young men-about-town, teamsters, students, streetcar motormen, messenger boys, policemen, white wings, businessmen—all these and more rub elbows at its counter.”

Five years later, there was a one-page story in The Literary Digest:

“If you joined diner devotees at a quick ‘cup o’ java,’ you’d find, if it were daytime, that you were rubbing shoulders mostly with horny-handed men in denim. If it were before dawn, you might be rubbing shoulders with men in tails, homeward bound from a night of revelry.” (I love the fact that in 1937 there were people described as “diner devotees.”)

Just as important as the diners’ look and feel is their chow: Always affordable, it has continuously adapted to fit the public’s desires. The norm is home-style cooking, breakfast anytime, and food that is real, local, and sustainable.

C. Oakley Ells in 1932 supplied his diner in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, with fresh eggs, milk, and vegetables from his own Ells’ Sunnyside Farms, a stone’s throw down the road. In 2017, Champ’s Diner, in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, identifies on their menu the name of the local farm that provides their eggs.

In San Diego, California, Ray and Herb Boggs operated the Airway Diner. Their July 1942 menu included an avocado cocktail appetizer (35 cents), a natural since San Diego County was the source of most avocados in the country. You wouldn’t find that on a diner on the East Coast at that time. The seafood of the day was grilled Catalina swordfish (85 cents), caught off nearby Santa Catalina Island.

Today the Silver Diner is a locally owned and operated chain of 14 units that set out in 1989 to create a diner for the 21st century. They have continually tweaked their offerings to serve the food that people want to eat. In 2006, Silver Diner was the first chain in the Washington, D.C. area to completely remove trans fats from their menus. Now they feature local farms that supply all-natural, antibiotic- and hormone-free meats and provide non-GMO produce in season.

I’ve studied the world of diners for more than 45 years, beginning when these classic stainless-steel eateries were believed to be a dying breed. But, to paraphrase the supposed Mark Twain quote: “The report of their demise is premature.”

Every year there are articles and TV news magazine stories that proclaim either the death or the rebirth of the diner. I admit I once believed that diners might go extinct. One of my earliest articles was “Diners are declining, but great ones remain,” published in The Boston Globe, in 1974. Truth be told, more than half of the diners I profiled in that story have been demolished.

But the other half have survived. What accounts for their longevity?

In 1975, the National Trust for Historic Preservation included a session on diners and gas stations in its yearly meeting. The Christian Science Monitor noted the tension in the discussion with “Roadside architecture: is it treasure or trash?”

By the 1980s, the Henry Ford Museum, in Dearborn, Michigan, was restoring Lamy’s Diner, a 1946 streamliner, built by the Worcester Lunch Car Company. This became the first of many diners to be installed as icons of our culture in museums. Also notable, vintage diners were resurrected, and new old-style diners—like the Silver Diner—began a comeback.

This was largely fueled by Baby Boomers seeking the comfort and nostalgia of their youth. The diner was put on a pedestal as an exemplar of what’s good about America: mom-and-pop businesses; fresh, home-style food at a good value; and an individual experience that contrasted with the cookie-cutter fast food chains.

Now, the diner is clearly safe and here to stay. With great regularity, my Facebook feed will advise me of “The 21 Best Diners in America,” according to the Huffington Post; “The Top 12 New England Diners,” says Boston magazine; “13 Picture-Perfect LA Diners You’ve Never Heard Of,” proclaims EaterLA.com (and of which, I might add, none are actual diners); and “These Are the Cutest Diners In Every State,” in the eyes of Country Living.

Social media keeps diners in the headlines, in our stream of consciousness, and constantly reminds us why we love these places. There’s a magical something in that word that conjures up a place where you feel at home, can have a great meal for a good price, and walk away satisfied and with a smile on your face.

The diner of the future will continue to change subtly and dramatically simultaneously: an American trait that makes it “feel the same” while ever accommodating the evolving tastes of its customers.

The post Why Americans Love Diners appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Like everyone, food for me starts with my family story. My parents, both vegetarians, came from India to the U.S. in the 1960s; I was born here and grew up in Boston in the ‘70s and ‘80s. My parents wanted me to fit in as much as possible, so they let me adopt a standard American diet that revolved around meat and dairy.

My mother, a dietician by trade, told me to limit my consumption of red meat, but poultry and dairy became part of my daily routine. As an athlete in high school and college, I wasn’t concerned about my weight or health. My two-plus hours a day practicing basketball, baseball, or soccer kept me in shape without having to think much. My wife, a vegetarian who grew up in India, asked me after we got married if I could ever give up meat and my answer was a quick “no.” It was something that was hard to fathom. When she made a veggie-based meal like lentils and rice, it felt like something was missing, so I’d heat up chicken wings to satisfy myself. I realize now that my mind had been programmed to desire meat, and without it, meals didn’t seem as satisfying.

But getting back to my evolution, by my mid-30s—which I hit in the middle of the last decade—I fit the profile of an average 37-year-old health-conscious guy. I rarely ate red meat and started most days off with a bowl of Raisin Bran, sliced banana, and 2 percent milk. Lunch usually consisted of a turkey sandwich with lettuce, tomato, cheese, and mustard. Dinner varied—chicken burritos were a staple, pizza here and there, eggs and toast, tuna sandwiches, and various chicken dishes all made their appearances at different occasions. I tried to have fruit every day and indulged in desserts on the weekend.

Guacamole with peas from Veggie Grill.

I still worked out three or four days a week and ate no red meat, so I thought I was living a healthy lifestyle, but I was 20 pounds above my college weight. My cholesterol was above 200 (the danger zone for heart disease). At first, I chalked up my cholesterol warning to the greasy scrambled egg breakfast from the hospital cafeteria I’d eaten right before giving blood. My run times were getting slower and slower—old age, I thought. My “healthy” diet surely couldn’t be a factor.

Coincidentally, my professional life was in a state of transition. In 2004, I stepped away from an Internet technology company I had co-founded. That gave me a blank slate to start thinking about the next chapter of my business life. It struck me that there were no healthy, convenient, and delicious dining options out there. After some research, I became convinced the country really needed this. So I set out to see if I could figure out a solution (as an MIT engineer by training, I like to solve problems).

I decided to visit every healthy restaurant I could find, some of which happened to be vegetarian and vegan. I had never set foot in a vegetarian restaurant—a reflection of my standard American diet and outlook. While some of what I tried fit my stereotypical view of unsatisfying veggie fare, I also really enjoyed some hearty and flavorful plant-based meals. I took friends to these restaurants to confirm my judgment. Who knew veggie-based foods could be this good?

So I started doing more research. I read several books and reports from major health organizations that highlighted the benefits of following a plant-based diet. The studies were astonishing to me. Plant-based diets prevent chronic diseases, reduce cholesterol, and provide more than enough protein.

I decided to make the transition. Cereal with soymilk. Veggie burritos, no cheese or sour cream. My wife’s meatless Indian dishes of rice, beans, lentils, and veggies without the supplement of chicken. Meat-alternative versions of “comfort food” like burgers satisfied my cravings for my old American favorites. Within a week of initiating my new diet, I started feeling lighter and more energetic. Pretty soon I could see a difference in my midsection. I was getting leaner, but not losing any strength. My workouts were getting easier. After three months, I was down 20 pounds, back to my college weight, and my cholesterol reading was below 140. I also learned more about the ethical and environmental issues surrounding industrialized animal agriculture (“factory farming”). My passion and belief cemented, I wanted to help more people discover the beauty of plant-based foods. A little more than a year later, I helped launch the first Veggie Grill.

Soup and asparagus from Veggie Grill.

At first, I saw it as my role to evangelize for plant-based diets. I didn’t win many converts—it was like trying to change somebody’s religion. That was a crucial lesson for the business: I learned we had to make the food and experience as delicious and fun as possible. Show, don’t tell. That worked well. Veggie Grill now stands at 28 restaurants across the West Coast, and we’re about to start heading eastward. Personally, I follow the same approach: if friends want to learn about my eating approach and success, I am pleased to inform them. But I refrain from telling them what to do.

Fortunately for the health of Americans and the planet, I think the future is bright for plant-based eating. We’re past the tipping point for millennials on plant-focused eating being considered a smart and thoughtful approach. The transition is harder for GenXers and Baby Boomers, who have spent their lives eating in certain ways. Some will be able to re-program their eating habits and mindsets, other won’t. It’s a hard challenge. Veggie Grill is here to help without any preaching or judgment.

People often ask me what I think of paleo, low-carb, gluten-free, and other diets that gain popularity. While I am a believer in and can make a strong argument for plant-based eating for both health and environmental reasons, I have come to accept that there are different strokes for different folks. Family, culture, habits, genes, etc. all play a role in what eating pattern you can adopt, stick to, and thrive on. If something gets you to eat more good stuff and less bad stuff, and you can stick to it, that is a step in the right direction.

Part of the reason there are so many approaches is that there is no one proven, definitive way to eat. I always point to Dan Buettner’s book The Blue Zones, about the places where people live longest. People in these different locales eat a variety of different things. The one commonality, and what I’ve adopted as my “truth” to healthy eating, is that the diets common in these regions all primarily feature whole foods and a plant-based approach. Mostly plants. Truth is one, paths are many.

The post The Long, Hard Road to Fast, Fun Vegetarian Fare appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So when we went out to eat with my grandparents, we invariably gravitated to a Jewish deli. It was the deli, of all places, where they seemed most at home, where my grandmother could wrap her mouth around a tongue sandwich, and my grandfather slurp up his mushroom barley soup, before proceeding, with renewed gusto, to sweet-and-sour stuffed cabbage. My younger sister and I, far more Americanized, preferred open-faced roast beef sandwiches, blanketed with bland brown gravy.

In interwar New York delis, comedian Harpo Marx exulted, he found “my people, speaking my language, with my accent.” The deli was a place for New York Jews to articulate a newfound but potent sense of secular, rather than religious, Jewish identity. What their immigrant parents had experienced in the musty precincts of the synagogue they found by fressing salty, spicy, smoky flesh on crusty rye bread.

No matter that their half-starved, persecuted ancestors had almost never eaten pastrami and corned beef—these lower-middle-class children of immigrants “learned to think of them as traditional,” as historian Hasia Diner puts it, retroactively endowing the deli sandwich with a Jewish pedigree.

In her seminal study, The Invention of the Restaurant, historian Rebecca Spang finds that restaurants were founded in pre-Revolutionary Paris for the aristocracy to repair their delicate constitutions by sipping bouillon; the broth itself was known as a restaurant (restorative). Elaborate eateries were places of respite; in the words of Dr. Louis Véron, a patent medicine entrepreneur and opera manager quoted by Spang, they promised “silence and solitude in the middle of a crowd.”

In inaugurating the deli, New York Jews created a noisy, crude establishment that turned this original notion of a restaurant on its head. While it had roots in the take-out gourmet shops of Paris, Rome, and Frankfurt, the deli mutated in New York into a venue for eating out, and a remarkably laid-back one at that. The deli was a place where Jews could disregard the perceptions of the majority society and let it all hang out, like the sausages dangling enticingly in the plate glass window.

They could dress down, joke, and talk loud (including with patrons at neighboring tables) and eat with their hands, in a casual and convivial atmosphere with no candles and tablecloths. They were no longer, for the most part, speaking Yiddish, but much of their boisterous style of behavior was carried over from Eastern European Jewish culture, characterized by flights of impassioned, free-wheeling argument and debate.

Indeed, if, for the German-Jewish sociologist Norbert Elias, becoming “civilized” in Western society meant learning to repress one’s bodily functions, then the deli was a place to flout the standards of polite behavior in a safe space that was largely, if not exclusively, populated by other Jews. Other ethnic groups had their own particular, similarly indispensable gathering places: Irish pubs, Italian social clubs, and black barbershops (or beauty parlors).

But the Jewish deli was different in two senses: It was oriented around bodily pleasure, and it was dedicated to an extravagant form of visual display. (Little wonder that the most notorious deli scene in pop culture, from Rob Reiner’s 1989 rom com, When Harry Met Sally, involves a histrionic exhibition of a normally very private moment of pleasure.) Particularly in the glitzy, glamorous kosher-style delis in and around Times Square, Jews—mostly male—showed off to each other how much meat they could commandeer and eat.

Morris Wepner and his deli in East Harlem, 1920

Served in an entertaining fashion by sneering, wise-cracking waiters (“Is anything OK?” they demanded, sarcastically), who were frequently failed performers on the vaudeville, Yiddish, or Broadway stage, the overstuffed sandwich—one of the first types of fast food in the metropolis—was elevated into a towering, skyscraper sign of affluence, a multi-layered symbol of the American Dream.

Before long, however, deli meats were demonized for having too much fat, cholesterol, and sodium to fit into the diet of upwardly mobile Jews. As they spread to the suburbs after World War II—and sought to join the country clubs that went with them—Jews reshaped their bodies according to prevailing notions of fitness and beauty, and revamped their diets to embrace more “exotic” fare like Chinese food. The deli inevitably lost its purchase on American Jewish identity.

Yet the gestalt of the deli lives on in myriad ways in our culture, from the Borscht Belt, schticky humor of Billy Crystal and Mel Brooks (“Got pastrami?” Brooks quips as his tagline on Sirius XM radio) to Subway’s brash “Big Hot” pastrami sandwiches. Political pundit Bill Maher tweeted that the recent Democratic debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders was “gonna be like an elderly Jewish couple arguing in the deli.”

Furthermore, while greatly diminished in number, Jewish delis are not yet extinct, nor have they evolved. Walk into Brent’s in L.A.’s Northridge neighborhood, Manny’s on Chicago’s Jefferson Street, or Katz’s on New York’s Houston Street and you’re transported back into an era when the deli still functioned as a stark counterpoint to the rest of society, a place where courteousness and gentility were ejected in favor of relaxation and ribald humor.

Zarkower’s Deli in White Plains, New York, 1962

The irony is that few of the patrons eating in these delis are Jewish; they are Asian-American, Latino, African-American, you name it. So, rather than Jews paying tribute to a tradition that they have long ago transcended, non-Jews are—as, ironically, Jews did with Chinese food—adopting aspects of a once-vibrant ethnic heritage and incorporating it into their own unfolding experience of urban life.

Indeed, a potato knish by any other pronunciation tastes as good, especially if you slather it, as my grandparents did, with thick and spicy mustard—a three-dimensional edible canvas ripe for painting and repainting however you like before stuffing it swiftly and unceremoniously down the hatch.

The post I’ll Have What She’s Having appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You’re about to eat some of the “food I love in this city, especially this part of town,” said Cabral. “This part of town” was the section of the San Gabriel Valley from Pasadena to Monterey Park served by Metro’s 260 bus line, which begins in Altadena and terminates in Compton. Cabral, who grew up in East L.A., graduated from high school in Alhambra and attended Pasadena City College, knows the area’s food and public transit intimately. He said that after he turned 21, he frequented Lucky Baldwins for after-class drinks.

The group would be eating the pub’s “very traditional” fish and chips (made from Icelandic cod) as well as Craftsman Poppyfields Pale Ale. Lucky Baldwins general manager Jaime Brokken told the group that the restaurant and Craftsman, a local Pasadena brewery, had been teamed up since the pub opened in 1996. Cabral called the Poppyfields a “crispy, food-friendly beer,” and participants agreed.

Carrrah Flahive praised the batter on the fried fish and explained that she lives near Lucky Baldwins and had been coming here since college. Less familiar to Flahive was the coming bus journey; Flahive said she does not take Metro often. Fellow participants revealed a range of experiences with Metro’s system. A number of them had ridden years ago but not recently. Others generally stick to the train. TAP cards in hand, the group headed south along Fair Oaks Avenue and South Atlantic Boulevard on the regularly scheduled 260 bus, sitting amongst their fellow Angelenos (some of whom were napping) making their way around town in ample air conditioning.

About a half hour later, the tour disembarked in the heart of Monterey Park, amidst strip malls where every business was advertised in both English and Chinese characters. The destination was Tokyo Fried Chicken Co. (122 South Atlantic Boulevard), where American Southern meets traditional Japanese cuisine.

As the group feasted on truffle butter edamame, fried drumsticks, curry creamed corn, chicken rice, yuzu lemonade, and fried drumsticks doused in house-made ponzu and spicy ponzu sauces, Cabral explained that the plastic gloves next to everyone’s place setting were there because Japanese fried chicken, karaage, is typically served in small pieces and meant to be eaten with chopsticks. The gloves were there to keep hands from getting greasy (or burned by the piping hot chicken).

Between bites, participant Ira Klein said that while everything was delicious, it was the citrus-based ponzu sauce on the chicken that was his “killer discovery” of the day so far.

For Joni Yung, it was the truffle-flavored edamame. “I wanted to take that bowl with me,” she said. “That was the biggest surprise for me, because I’ve never had that combination before.”

And then it was back on the bus and heading north a few stops away to Ba Le (1426 South Atlantic Boulevard) in Alhambra, a no-nonsense Vietnamese bánh mì shop whose one nod to pretension was the Eiffel Tower silhouette featured in the lettering above the storefront.

“This place is really close to my heart because I’ve been coming here probably for 15 years,” said Cabral, who has never written about Ba Le because he didn’t want people finding it. He said that in high school, he would head there after school and “stuff myself with $2 bánh mì” made with homemade bread, mayonnaise, and charcuterie. “Not many places make their own mayonnaise,” said Cabral. “It’s pretty hardcore.”

Bánh mì have become a hot item today, with trucks across the city peddling more effete versions. At Ba Le, the sandwiches are a bit more expensive than they used to be (now they’ll run a hungry high school student $3-$3.50), but the place remains “really old-school,” said Cabral.

Participants enjoyed an assortment of sandwiches with meatball, barbecued pork, barbecued beef, and cold cut fillings along with passion fruit juice. One participant was overheard saying that if she were ever going to give up meat, she wouldn’t give up the pork at Ba Le.

“I love the fresh sandwiches and bread here,” said Liza Tucker, who was not only eating her first Ba Le bánh mì, but was also riding the bus in L.A. for the very first time. “It was quite comfortable, it was cool enough, and I rather enjoyed it,” she said.

“This is such a fun way to get to know L.A.,” said Joanne Kim, who lives in Koreatown. “I don’t come out to the SGV very often. This was such an eye-opener for me.” She was already plotting a return trip.

And then it was back to the welcomed air conditioning of the 260 and the final destination of the afternoon—dessert at Blockheads Shavery (61 South Fair Oaks Avenue) in Pasadena. Down a small alley off a main drag in Old Town, this location of Blockheads opened four months ago, joining West L.A. and Alhambra stores.

“We chose this place for dessert because this is a unique creation,” said Cabral. “It’s not quite ice cream and not quite Hawaiian-style shave ice. It’s its own thing.”

Blockheads owner Evan Lew called it “snow cream,” and explained that all Blockheads’ ices and toppings are made from scratch, and detailed how delicate shavings of ice are carved off blocks to form light, fluffy, snow-like shavings. Participants enjoyed original (lightly sweetened milk), green tea, black sesame, chocolate malt, and cantaloupe flavors of ice topped with everything from cereal and cookies & cream to lychee and mochi.

Participants agreed that they couldn’t eat another bite, but that they would be back to the places they had been—and on the bus, too.

“I loved riding the bus. It puts you more in contact with what’s going on, and it gets you out of your silo in the car,” said Diego Guerrero, who grew up riding Metro but hadn’t been on public transportation recently. He said that he appreciated the “holistic” nature of the tour. “It’s not just about food or Metro,” he said, but about “pushing your boundaries of what you believe to be the city of L.A.”

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