Eating as I Go: Scenes from America and Abroad

INDUSTRY RULES AND ETHNOGRAPHIC ANGST

193 January฀2004 “You have to be here,” Chef Jimmy announces. “Every day. On time.” His booming voice, like a drill sergeant’s, fills the classroom. It’s January 3, 2004, the beginning of another cycle of the Food Service Training Academy’s free fourteen-week program. This is Jimmy’s third year at the school, and the fourth year of the academy ’s existence. Out of seventy accepted applicants, only thirty-five have showed up for the first day. Women, about a third of the group, are clustered at the front of the room. They sit behind black tables with their notebooks out. Most of the men, hanging back, slump in their seats, faces blank. “Three unexcused absences and you’re out,” the red-haired man in a white chef’s jacket continues. At 350 pounds, Jimmy is a physically intimidating presence . “These are the same requirements that an employer has. We teach you life skills as well as knife skills. Courtesy, teamwork, responsibility, and personal hygiene along with academics, menu planning, and sanitation. And we’ll do everything we can to help you get a job when you graduate. But listen up: We have a zero-tolerance policy for drugs. Our test can pick up a poppy seed. So if you’re using, consider yourself warned. You fail and you’re out. That’s the rule.” Jimmy’s eyes twinkle as he speaks. He’s an effusive thirty-five-year-old white guy warming to his role as the master of tough love. “We keep it formal here. I’m Chef Jimmy. I’m not Big Red or Jim. I’m here to train you—for the industry. I’ve been out there. I know what I’m doing. And I got eyes in the back of my head, I swear to God. So don’t fool around with me.” The chef pauses to let his message sink in. Like the FoodBank’s commissary kitchen, where most of the training occurs, the classroom is Jimmy’s theater, his bully pulpit. He’s got the attention of all thirty-five black and Latino students. Even the cool guys, with gold necklaces half hidden in their hooded sweatshirts, seem riveted. “I’m a fat cat,” Jimmy says, affirming more than his considerable girth. “We’re all about eating here. Eating and teaching.” Suddenly, the door opens and a bulky man with a shaved head enters. “You’re late,” Jimmy bellows, raising his loud voice another couple of decibels. The bluster INDUSTRY฀RULES฀AND฀ ETHNOGRAPHIC฀ANGST COOKING FOR A CHANGE 194 fails to obscure the chef’s pleasure-loving, Falstaffian spirit. “I won’t be late again, man,” the student responds, respectfully. A week before this opening session began, I had a distressing dream. In the dream, I notice among the sea of dark faces a white couple. They’re both from Georgia, in theformerSovietUnion,whereIhavelecturedandmadegoodfriends.ChefJimmy has fingered the two of them for stealing—stealing food from the FoodBank. The FoodBank looms large in my dream as site and symbol. The Community FoodBank of New Jersey, which houses the Food Service Training Academy, occupies a vast, gritty warehouse in a run-down suburb of Newark. The FoodBank is a nonprofit arsenal in the war against poverty. It recycles food from the banquet tables of the rich (including the U.S. Department of Agriculture) to the kitchen tables of the poor, distributing more than 20 million pounds of food and groceries annually to a half million New Jerseyans. The FoodBank’s resources, which the academy uses for its cooking and feeding programs, are not under lock and key. I ponder the connections between crime, the FoodBank, and the Georgians. Most of the workers in the FoodBank’s warehouse are ex-convicts and recovering addicts; so too are more than 50 percent of the academy’s students. The FoodBank offers hope (in the form of jobs and job training), which the criminal justice system destroys. It attempts to compensate for the moral crimes of capitalism: our indifference to the vulnerable poor and the machinations of powerful interests. The Georgian connection is illuminating. An economy that was buoyant under communism, with food and employment for everyone, is now dysfunctional under capitalism. Corruption infiltrates every sector of the society. Perhaps the Georgians in my dream perceive the FoodBank as state surplus, meant to be ripped off by them. My dream is a quagmire of ethnographic angst. Christina...