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211 April฀2004 Waretta, who completed the Food Service Training Academy program and graduated in December 2003, was the last of her cohort to find employment. As a student, Waretta never missed a day and never shirked a task. She earned a standout grade of 95 on the national certification exam. School was Waretta’s oasis. After two years in prison, she was assigned to a halfway house, where she shared a dorm room with twenty other women. In those crowded quarters, someone was always stressed and making trouble for the roommates. At the Food Service Academy Waretta found peace and a purpose. Through Chef Jimmy’s network, Waretta obtained a job at Kean University in their on-campus “diner.” A break, at last! It was “good money,” she says, $8.50 an hour, and, once she settled in, she thought she might be able to take a course or two—on business management and entrepreneurship. Waretta worked for five months, she tells me on a visit to the school, and managed to save $1,000. It’s for the car she plans to buy in August 2004 when she is released from the halfway house; she says having a car will make her more employable. But there’s a hitch: the university diner is closed from May 1 to September 1, a detail no one seems to have mentioned to Waretta when she was hired. Most employees collect unemployment during the summer; but in order to fulfill the conditions of her parole and avoid returning to prison, Waretta needs to work. “I don’t need much,” she says. “Maybe I’ll try Burger King. That’s $5.50 an hour, and I’m outta the dorm”—away from the halfway house during the day. In the three-plus years since the food service academy opened, its leadership has changed four times. As a consequence, employment records for graduates are flimsy, even for those graduating during the past year, when Jimmy and Robert have alternated as executive chef. The chefs estimate that the school has placed roughly three-quarters of its graduates (about a hundred all told) in at least one position, a decent record for any training program. Unfortunately, there is little D TRAINING฀AND฀CHANGING COOKING FOR A CHANGE 212 hard data about where most graduates are currently employed, at what salaries, or how they feel about their lives in the industry. Clearly, Waretta, Jerome, and Justice belong to the program’s target population . Jerome, the former inmate and recovering addict, has embraced God, sobriety , and cooking. Justice is a dangling man. He’s the ex-con without work experience in the “straight” world: a guy with the wit—although not necessarily the will—to benefit from job training and certification. Whether Justice can forswear the financial benefits of drug dealing for the safety of legitimate, poorly paid work is an open question. Waretta, prior to her one-time conviction, worked in casinos in Atlantic City. She raised and educated two daughters who enjoy stable jobs and relationships. Her work ethic made her a strong student. Her modest expectations are well matched to a labor market of abundant low-wage opportunities. Cooking enthralls both Nelson and Tracey. It challenges their creativity and ingenuity. Were it not for family and financial constraints, they might have applied to the Culinary Institute of America or Johnson and Wales University. Instead they each used the free course to jump-start their dreams. High motivation, self-confidence, initiative, research skills, and workplace savvy identify them as the academy’s best and brightest. However, if they mean to compete with their better-trained peers, they could use a sequence of advanced courses—on subjects such as stocks and sauces, butchering, plating, and restaurant management. The Food ServiceTraining Academy benefits from a mix of students: the fast starters who set a standard for the others, the uncertain who catch fire, the dropouts who return, and the slackers whose poor performance provides another kind of object lesson. Competition is the way of the world, Chef Robert likes to say, and it’s built into the training program. Competition is the other side of the comfort that his students experience in cooking. Watching Tracey and her team of bakers step back to admire the Black Forest cakes they have carefully decorated, I envy their satisfactions: handwork and headwork coming together, along with patience and planning, precision and collaboration. The kitchen...

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