Kitchens. Gary Alan Fine

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      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 permits a range of activity that might not otherwise be tolerated.

      For governments as well as cooks, sanitation is a trade-off. In principle, everyone believes that kitchens should be clean, but keeping them clean may cost more than the cleanliness is worth, particularly in the absence of an immediate health threat. Epidemics of food-borne illnesses—such as hepatitis or salmonella—are infrequent. Responses to such threats occur only after rare, major, publicized food-poisoning scares. Routine poisonings, however often they may occur, are ignored by cooks, inspectors, and journalists. They are part of doing business and dining out, and rarely can be traced. Closing down an independent small business is not something that a government that embraces capitalism wishes to do. This oversight is similarly light in hospitals, nuclear plants, chemical refineries, poultry plants, and high schools, suggesting the limits to the intrusions of ideals enforced on dirty work practice by external agencies. Organizations depend on the trust of regulators and clients. This trust is typically well placed; but even when it is not, it is difficult to monitor without increased commitment.

      DIVIDING LABOR IN THE KITCHEN

      All occupational work is grounded in collective action and a division of labor (Becker 1974; Strauss 1991). Cooks in large kitchens are no exception, even when their work appears chaotic to the untrained eye. The haute cuisine French restaurant in this journalistic account differs only in degree from the restaurants I observed:

      The pressures mount to a peak. The orders are like a barrage of machinegun fire. One has the vague feeling of a crew of white coated seamen trying to keep their ship afloat in a hurricane. The blare of noise, the figures rushing hither and thither, the irresistible chaos of enticing smells, the heat and spitting of the frying, the clang of pots, the bloomp-bloomp of chopping knives all beat down with enveloping force until one feels dizzy. Yet, in reality, everything is proceeding normally, everyone is efficiently absorbed. A boy is quickly shelling a bowl of beautiful, pink crayfish. Michel is adding a shower of bright-green sorrel to a brilliantly yellow sauce. Andre is making patterns with peach halves on a tart shell. Pierre [the head chef] watches everything and misses nothing. He could take over any job, from anyone, at any moment, and do it better. Everyone knows this and the effect is both disciplinary and exhilarating.

      (De Groot, 1972, p. 246)

      The same system operates in modified form at the Owl's Nest as the head chef explains: “Everyone knows what everyone is doing. Because you work together, you begin to think alike. Three people become one person. The only time I go around the kitchen is if there's a problem or somebody calls for help. Otherwise, I work at the kitchen” (Field notes, Owl's Nest). This chaos consists of “the fitting together of lines of action” (Blumer 1969), particularly when cooks collaborate on the same plate (e.g., one preparing the meat, a second, the accompaniments, and a third, the garnish).

      An ideal-typical instance of the division of labor is the preparation for a banquet, which because of the number of customers to be served simultaneously requires fine-tuned organization, overseen by authority. The head chef at the Blakemore Hotel described the banquet setup at a large hotel at which he had once worked:

      I was in the banquet kitchen. It was a fantastic setup…. The people who worked in the evening would come in, and they would set up the entire breakfast and the entire lunch for the next day. And put their meals out for that evening. You came in the morning, your eggs were cracked, your bacon was set out, everything was ready to slide in the oven, to put on the plates. And then you would set up the dinner for them in the evening. So when they came in, their vegetables were ready to be warmed up, they may even be half-cooked. It was just a matter of putting them in the steamer for six minutes and get[ting] them back to temperature and out they'd go. The steaks would all be scored off and on a tray.⁷ Another example of banquet cooking: When you cook up a banquet with steaks, you go to your broiler which you have for a la carte, but instead of cooking it, you just score it, put the lines on it. You put them back on a sheet pan and put them back in the refrigerator. Then fifteen minutes before they're to be served, you slide them in the oven to finish cooking to get them back to the temperature.

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