In a Starving World, is [cooking] well unethical?
Responding to Ligaya Mishan's latest "Food Matters" column
Just a few days ago, I sat in a squishy black chair while a nice man tattooed the word “Chef” into my palm. “Where do you cook?” he had asked me. I had said nowhere right now, but, of course, that isn’t really true — I cook in my kitchen, mostly for myself and the people I love. “But I used to cook at a restaurant in Brooklyn, and then on Long Island. I stopped mostly because of money, I guess, but I would still like to be cooking. Who knows what will happen.”
I left restaurant cooking for a lot of reasons but a big one was that I have two college degrees and I knew I could make more bullshitting in a cubicle, sending emails and writing grants, than I could cooking. This is a huge privilege. But everyday I miss cooking — I miss working with my hands, I miss the quiet hours and the loud Abba Marisol used to blast while she gently pleated the ravioli before service, and I miss watching a plate of food I just made land in front of the father and daughter who come by every Monday night, always with the same order and always stopping by on the way out to thank the chef for another perfect meal.
Ligaya Mishan’s latest Food Matters column for The New York Times, “In a Starving World, Is Eating Well Unethical?,” raises the ethical and moral quandaries of eating well when so many people, at any given moment but especially at this moment, are going without. Mishan does it without ever being moralistic, careful to never betray herself to a position of superiority. The questions she raises — “It feels wrong to spend freely on something so ephemeral as a fancy dinner while others languish in hunger, but is it?'“ — are important ones, the kind worth asking all the time even if there is no answer to be found, or not one that we can do something with right now. They are the same questions that led me to eventually leave work as a line cook (for now).
During the interview for my current job with a nonprofit working to address structural racism and oppression on Long Island, I explained my departure from restaurants as having been triggered by a particular point of aggravation: my hourly wage couldn’t afford me an entree at any of the restaurants where I had worked. I wanted to address the structural conditions that sustained this gap.
In retrospect, though, my concern with the gap between my wage and the restaurant’s average entree price had as much to do with my income (which is definitely important) as much as it had to do with the fact that this gap meant every person I was serving could afford that entree. A huge group of people — wage-earning, hard working, etc. — have been systemically excluded from the restaurants where I have worked. Another huge group of people, for one reason or another, could afford to sit down for a $25 piece of chicken on a Tuesday night. Is this a reason to stop cooking for them?
I think not, but that doesn’t mute my reticence. I find it hard to want to cook for someone knowing that the meal is marked by its exclusivity to a particular tax bracket. And I can’t emphasize that enough — the meal is marked, not necessarily the person consuming it. A tax bracket doesn’t foreclose someone from deserving a steaming plate of cacio e pepe that costs upwards of 20 times the ingredient and labor cost. What it does is carve a space for asking questions about who is able to access the thoughtful food that is being cooked, plated, and served in so many restaurants? And when the people cooking the food constitute so much of the people who can’t access the food as a consumer, how do we reckon with that?
To no one’s surprise, the only answer I can imagine is a revolution. I’m not the first to see that a radical restructuring of restaurants is the only way through, and in spite of capitalism, some brave and beautiful people are already building food spaces grounded in equity and access. I hope that these restaurants and food businesses trigger the wildest dreams of chefs and managers, which is not to say that I’m hopeful. But I hope, still.
Near the end of her essay, Mishan writes:
“To take another angle, the perhaps undesirable truth is that food should be expensive, or at least more expensive than it is, given the toll agriculture takes on the environment and the labor required for planting and harvesting. Typically, a third of restaurant revenue goes toward ingredients and another third toward paying workers what should be at least a living wage. There is also the question of the value of truly exceptional food, testament to the mastery or ingenuity of a chef — is that not worthy of reward?”
Mishan’s sole reference to the cooks, dishwashers, servers, et al. is coded with idealism: “what should be at least a living wage” [emphasis mine]. But we know that, in truth, so many restaurant workers do not earn a living wage, even if a third of the restaurant’s revenue does go towards paying workers and even if management does their very best to provide a living wage. Restaurants run on notoriously thin margins and the cost of living is getting worse, not better, while wages stagnate.
How do we quantify the labor that goes into a plate of food? What is an appropriate price and is it possible to have your cake and eat it too? Who is left out when food is priced according to its human cost? It is worth it to ask what a living wage even means — the amount of money a person needs to live? What about to live well?
Mishan’s article brought me back to Gabrielle Hamilton’s article from the earliest throes of the pandemic. Hamilton asks, powerfully and frighteningly, if the world needs her restaurant anymore. She highlights the pay disparities between front-of-house and back-of-house, the increasing rents, the tight margins, and how to make sense of the awareness that “one of [her] workers [was] a 21-year-old who already owns his own apartment in Manhattan, while another lives with his unemployed wife and their two children in a rental in the Bronx.” All of this to say that being a cook can be a labor of love as much as it is a labor of necessity.