Kitchens. Gary Alan Fine
of restaurants are not like the “display” kitchens that some restaurants use to entertain their customers.4
Coping with filth is a classic instance of what Everett Hughes (1971, p. 343) speaks of as “dirty work”: “Dirty work of some kind is found in all occupations. It is hard to imagine an occupation in which one does not appear, in certain repeated contingencies, to be practically compelled to play a role of which he thinks he ought to be a little ashamed morally.” To prepare food in a dirty environment is potentially identity smudging.
I asked all the cooks what in their kitchens would most upset the public. A strong plurality cited the mess and dirt:
There's times if you don't know the business and you don't have to do [things], you don't know what it's like to get hit. I guess I'd be upset if I walked back into the kitchen, and there was meat sitting on the board and a fish over in the sink, and the cooler door was open, and there was a couple of buckets sitting on the floor. That would upset me.
(Personal interview, Owl's Nest)
| DENVER: | Fifty percent of the American public, if they saw what goes on inside of the kitchen, they would never eat out again. |
| GAF: | Give me some examples of that. |
| DENVER: | Chicken laying out for a couple of hours while you're panning it up [for a banquet]. When it sits on the table and you're in the middle of doing something else when it came out, and so it's sitting there for a while.…As a matter of fact, my brother-in-law was in here the other night and was absolutely appalled that someone was cutting chicken on the cutting board and didn't sanitize the cutting board again, which the health department really would get you for.(Personal interview, Blakemore Hotel) |
These seemingly candid comments echo Hughes's insight that while this dirt is “structurally” necessary, it is undesirable and seen as embarrassing by the workers. In their values workers are not so different from their customers, except they eventually must take dirt for granted. As one cook stated explicitly: “You want it to look nice, but, you know, it's so busy that you can't possibly clean it” (Personal interview, Blakemore Hotel).5 The demands of the front stage limit sanitation: “[I]f those serving find it difficult to provide quick service and maintain standards of hygiene, it is poor hygiene which can be readily concealed. Many examples arise; for instance, reusing unwashed dishes, using spittle to clean cutlery, wiping china and cutlery with a serving cloth that is dirty through over-use, handling food to test how hot it is, and so on” (Mars and Nicod, 1984, p. 42).6 George Orwell's observation cited above does not reflect how food is treated in these restaurants. His horrifying “traditions” have been largely erased as governmental control over health and concerns about germs have increased; still, the challenge of cooking efficiently and pleasantly while maintaining standards of hygiene is a trade-off, even if it is not always explicitly recognized.
Observing kitchens, I became inured to sanitation “problems”—from not refrigerating sauces for hours—letting bacteria grow—to using filthy towels to wipe pans to touching food with sweaty hands. Perhaps the most salient problem is what to do when a piece of food gets “dirty.” People are fumblers, and food often falls from plates and pans. Food costs money and takes time and energy to prepare. While cooks do not want to waste, they prefer not to serve what they would hesitate to eat.
Among the criteria used by culinary workers in their decision to dispose of “dirty” food is whether it is prepared or “raw” (untransformed). The latter is less problematic—it is believed that heat cures all ills, particularly as the customer will never discover the mishap: “I get Bruce a dish of escargots from the freezer. One of the snails falls on the floor, and I ask Bruce: ‘Can we use that one?' Bruce assures me: ‘Sure. They won't know’ ” (Field notes, Owl's Nest). Even when prepared food lands on the floor, the cook must not be overly fastidious—wiping or reheating will solve any problem:
| DIANE: | Once when I was doing Sunday brunch [at another restaurant], and this was during the French toast day, [another cook] dropped a piece of French toast on the floor, and he picked it up and wiped it off and put it back on the plate. He didn't have time to do another piece. |
| GAF: | Does that ever happen here? |
| DIANE: | If it does, we usually wipe it off. A lot of people have dropped a piece of meat on the floor, and you pick it up and wash it off with hot water from the sink and throw it back in the pan, and it's fine. I really don't think that anything creepy-crawly got into it in that amount of time.(Personal interview, La Pomme de Terre) |
The fact that the customer never learns justifies the worker's doing what is easiest. Workers have too much work to do, and customers can rarely trace a flaw (or illness) to a hidden event. Doctors, for instance, like cooks, know that the iatrogenic illness that they cause cannot be traced.
The emotional tension of accepting sanitation standards below one's professed values is implicit in joking, grounded in a need for role distance, that takes place when food does fall on the floor and others notice:
Al drops a steak on the floor and serves it after quickly putting it back on the grill, warming both sides. He jokes to one of his fellow cooks: “What's that saying, Gene. You'll serve it off the floor, you won't eat it off the floor. That's how we professionals do it. I'd like to meet a germ that could live off that floor.”
(Field notes, Stan's)
Bruce drops an order of spaghetti on the floor and mutters: “Son of a bitch.” Roy, the maitre d', jokes: “Just pick it up and wash it off. Who'll know the difference?” They don't, but the remark suggests staff solidarity.
(Field notes, Owl's Nest)
Dropping food on the floor is a mistake, but one that, on account of work pressures, can hardly be avoided. Cooks must make the best of what they have despite shared values with customers. Customers are partly responsible for being served dirty food because of their desire for reasonably priced food, rapidly prepared. As I describe in chapter 6 when considering the aesthetic structure of food, temporal and economic constraints affect what is served.
Workers are frustrated in responding to those who do not know the “practical accomplishment” of the job—or who pretend not to know—professional outsiders such as journalists or government regulators. In the kitchen this is evident in the attitudes of cooks toward health inspectors, who are a source of annoyance and not taken seriously:
I ask Jon about the report of the health inspector who had been there a few days before. Jon says that he hadn't read the report, but “he always finds something to write. There's something sitting on the floor, the ceiling's dirty. They'll always find something.” Inspectors regularly complain about Mel's ashtray. He smokes in the back alcove of the kitchen, even though regulations require a break room.
(Field notes, Owl's Nest)
| DENVER: | [The health inspectors] and I have never seen eye to eye. If you did everything their way, you wouldn't be able to run your operation at all. I went to two of their seminars, and I was really appalled by their ideas because they just aren't working. You're taking advice in the kitchen from people who have never been in the kitchen other than to scream at you for doing something wrong. |
| GAF: | For example? |
| DENVER: | Like spaghetti sauce. They want you to put it into a two-inch-deep pan to cool it. If you're making fifty gallons of spaghetti sauce, do you know how many two-inch-deep containers you would have? A lot of them, and you don't have room to put those things.(Personal interview, Blakemore Hotel) |
Fortunately for cooks, but perhaps not for patrons, local governments do not enforce their rules effectively and do not constrain kitchen activity much. A smart restaurant can agree to change and then return to cooking as its culinary staff wishes. The loose structure of government oversight, in which visits are infrequent and often inconsequential, permits the cooks more leeway than would be possible with a government that took its assignment more conscientiously—and funded more inspector positions. Semiannual inspections, with options for corrections and appeals, permit kitchen workers latitude to cook as they wish. Thus, although government inspection could be a major concern, directing behavior, in reality it has little effect. The structure of government oversight