Pan de Yuca and Brown Rice:

Abstract

Efforts to provide “good” food to vulnerable populations in the United States are proliferating, and one major set of venues for these initiatives is publicly funded foodservice. While some aspects of these initiatives are well studied, the work that cooks do under new healthy food initiatives is often overlooked. Cooks shape what ends up on the plate and what is eaten, and thus their work influences the success of these efforts. At the same time, their work in these new regimes contributes to their own labor experiences and lives in important ways. Examining this latter issue, I study the experiences of cooks implementing a healthy meal program in childcare centers, afterschool programs, senior centers, and shelters in New York City. I find that healthy meal programs teach cooks new skills and offer new avenues for caring for clients and family members. However, these programs also place additional demands on and create new anxieties for cooks, particularly in terms of in how they communicate their work to the leaders of “good” food initiatives. Cooks’ communication challenges and silences provide insight into the functioning of racial and class inequities within the “good” food movement.

Keywords:

• Institutional foodservice
• cooks
• nutrition training
• care
• inequities

Notes

1. In all cases where names appear, they are pseudonyms.

2. Institutional foodservice can be defined in different ways but typically refers to settings in which food is cooked in large quantities by organizations that in the course of fulfilling other functions also provide food (or that provide food as a public service). Such institutions can be publicly or privately funded, though our focus in this article is on institutions that are primarily publicly funded.

3. While these are not technically poverty-level jobs, given the general understanding that the US poverty thresholds are flawed and underestimate what resources are needed to live (Allen 2011), given the high cost of living in New York City, and given how close these salaries are to the poverty line, I feel confident in classifying them as “low-wage.”