This blog post is part of our new series, Perspectives on Food Insecurity in Wisconsin, in support of the Sesame Street program Growing Hope Against Hunger, and WPT programs Wisconsin Foodie (airing Thursdays at 7 p.m.) and Wisconsin Gardener (airing Thursdays at 6 p.m.).
Sesame Street Food for Thought: Eating Well on a Budget is a bilingual, multimedia program designed to help support families who have children between the ages of 2 and 8 and are coping with uncertain or limited access to affordable and nutritious food. Contact WPT to request a free Food for Thought tool kit with tips, strategies, and tools to help families with limited resources eat healthy.
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by Aly Miller
I once read an article that boasted that Madison has the most restaurants per capita in the US. Whether or not this claim holds true is a debate for statisticians, but something we can be assured of is that our Isthmus is bustling with locally owned restaurants and steeped in flavor. Our culinary culture, like our politics, might be described as “progressive,” – featuring made-from-scratch and locally sourced fare.
As an employee in our thriving restaurant industry, I take pride in serving such meals, “Forward” in every sense. Farm-fresh, locally sourced food moves us toward the more localized, fair and cooperative economic and social relationships that I envision for our food system.
Photo credit: Rick, Flickr.
The journey from stovetop to table, and from table to dish pit, however, can reek of injustices that overpower the smell of the slow-roasting pig. Encounters between servers and eaters, routines of scraping leftovers into the trash, moments of injuring oneself on the job, and the rituals of tipping and ‘tipping out,’ all indicate the uneven relationships of power between workers and consumers.
The most volatile divisions, however, exist between workers, where divisions between the front of the house and the back of the house can silently boil over. Only 20 percent of all available jobs in the restaurant industry offering a living wage, and most of them are found in the front of the house in fine dining establishments. Intense competition for these jobs keeps servers with the desirable table manners, appearance, language skills, and work experience at an advantage. Across all segments of the industry, workers of color report lower median wages and higher rates of employment law violations than their white co-workers. When the front and the back of the house are divided along class and race-based lines, the potential for solidarity within this workforce fades. The restaurant industry, “divided against itself,” cannot stand.
No one wants this division to continue, but when eating out is such a regular part of our culture (16 million Americans ate out on Thanksgiving day), the demands for fair working conditions get muffled by profit-minded managers and conscientious consumers alike. Where can Madison’s progressive, labor-rights-concerned citizens turn when deciding where to eat?
On December 1, the Restaurant Opportunities Center United, the only restaurant group organizing for workers rights, released their first National Diners’ Guide. Here, you can find out how America’s most popular fine-dining restaurants treat their employees. The guide ranks restaurants on workplace conditions, wages, benefits, and opportunity for promotion.
Slow Food USA founder, Josh Viertel, says, “No matter how good the food, how local the ingredients, no one wants to support a restaurant that takes advantage of its workers.” If going out to eat is a part of your life, you can make a systemic difference by supporting restaurants that pay workers fairly, provide them benefits, and allow sick days. When poverty wages (as low as $2.13 per hour), and benefits are ignored, an unfair and unhealthy labor model persists. Even if these costs aren’t printed on the bill, we all pay for it in health care costs, social assistance programs, and public health dangers.
Now is the time to expand our definition of “ethical eating” to include not only the farmers and the land, but also the processors, cooks, dishwashers, and servers behind it. Check out the Diners Guide, and share it with your friends and local policy makers – does your favorite restaurant make the cut?
Aly Miller is a recent graduate from UW-Madison who studied geography and organized partnerships between Slow Food-UW, Growing Power, and the South Madison Farmers Market. She continues to support Madison’s local food system as a youth educator for farming and nutrition, as a caterer in Madison’s restaurant industry, and as a member of Madison Community Cooperative.
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