Food writing snarktacular! (For Christine) 30 October 2008 8:18 am
Posted by Tracy in : eugene,food safety,food snobbery,friends,oregon,school,work , trackbackI sent this article to my Sugar Momma and her favorite Englishman in Davis, and she said nice things about it, like “Can I forward it to my family?” Flattery rules, and so I am posting this to show off (and so Christine has the option of sending a link instead of all my text).
Possible titles for this piece, depending on who I’m selling it to (in which case there’d be appropriate tweaks, blah blah), include: “Ex-Sundance Employee Tells All!” and “Confessions of a Cheesemonger.”
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“She’s got a note from her psychiatrist, she needs the dog for emotional support, I’m going on break.” My job interview at Sundance Natural Foods in Eugene, OR was interrupted by an impromptu lesson in hippie customer service. An exasperated manager stalked through the back office, and we all turned to look at the security monitors. Out front a dog-lover continued to carry her pet in a store shopping basket, which would have to be sanitized to prevent further health code violations.
At the time, I was relieved to be applying for a job in the kitchen, far from such madness. But soon enough, I would learn about the front of the house first-hand, as head of the Sundance cheese department. Some days I would hide in the walk-in fridge to avoid talking to customers. Now, almost two years since my last sanity break between the backstock mozzerellas and muensters, I can look back on my shivering self and laugh.
The Sundance employee handbook reads like a manifesto: individuals nurturing community and each other and all that good hippie stuff. Unfortunately, the manual lacks a section on dealing with customers who can’t be bothered to look in front of their faces for the biodegradable compostable spoons made from corn which just happen to be placed at eye level. The advice on customer relations mostly prescribes patience; mine was often in short supply.
The Sundance deli features a hot buffet, soup and salad bars, and the cheese department, which includes vegetarian- and vegan-friendly substitutes for animal products, and nondairy refrigerated items like nuts, seeds, and olives. The latter inspired many questions, most from raw foodists. In case you didn’t know (and I’m sorry to end your blissful ignorance), some people believe that heating food above certain temperatures is unhealthy, even immoral. The definition of “raw” varies — more liberal practitioners may accept foods that have been heated as high as 120 degrees F, but others insist that anything above body temperature destroys precious enzymes.
Never mind that humans have co-evolved with fire for millions of years, and we all probably owe our lives to ancestors who avoided starvation and foodborne disease by learning to cook. Never mind that even raw vegetables are still unsafe to eat in many parts of the world. Or that lots of produce is grown at temperatures above 100 degrees. Olives, for example. And for that matter, straight off the tree, olives are almost inedible, so by any reasonable standard, there is no such thing as a raw olive in a food market. Never mind any of that — about once a week, someone would ask which of our olives were raw. With varying degrees of patience of politeness, I would try to convey the information ranted above, but to no avail. Nothing mattered to the raw foodists’ minds but the temperature at which those olives were processed — which, alas, I did not know.
One exception to the raw-olive questions was a woman who wanted to know which olives had the least salt. Once again, I did not know. Maybe the oil-cured ones, I guessed, since they weren’t soaked in brine. Or — a flash of inspiration — maybe the sun-dried ones over in the packaged food section. These sometimes satisfied raw foodists, and in any case got them out of my department. But no. Pound for pound, she reasoned, the non-brined olives might have a higher concentration of salt, because they contained less water. Next she lectured me about my failure to know more about these products, the danger salt posed to us all, and that I was going to burn out my thyroid gland. “Ma’am,” I finally told her, “I come from a long, proud line of ocean fish-eating Northern Europeans. If anyone is genetically predisposed to eat as much salt as she wants, it’s me.” Well. That was the wrong answer; she left in a huff.
Most popular questions were health-inspired, like “Which cheese is low-fat?” Ah, dieters. Unwilling to eat less, let alone none of the foods they’re advised to avoid, instead they look for a processed solution. Changing eating habits is hard; substitution is easy, even if the substitute is processed and foul. “Try Gruyère,” I’d suggest. It’s really strong, so you can’t eat a lot of it, so you’ll eat less fat. It’s also really expensive, so you can’t afford to eat a lot of it, so you’ll eat less fat.” There I’d gone again, giving the wrong answer.
Physicists have a great put-down for arguments based on flawed assumptions: they’re not even wrong. The problem with questions that are not even wrong is that they have no good answers. What could I say to the woman who wanted to know the origin of the cheddar in the macaroni and cheese on the hot buffet? Her husband wouldn’t eat it if it was English, for fear of mad cow disease. Here’s the thing, I tried to explain: Mad cow is a brain disease. It comes from the brains and spinal cords of cows. To get it from cheese, it would have to be made from milk taken while the cow was being slaughtered. If it’s getting into milk, we have bigger problems than mad cow disease. None of this information seemed to register.
But that wasn’t the only question that made me doubt my sanity. Once, two frat-boy types made a slow circuit around the salad bar before turning to me, perplexed. “Do you have bacon?” one asked, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking. “We have two kinds of fake bacon,” I answered. “But Sundance is pretty vegetarian. There’s canned fish, organic chicken stock, and I think some of our cat food is non-vegetarian. But bacon from pigs, no.”
Like everyone at Sundance, I tried to forward weird phone questions to the vitamins department. Unfortunately, they were only staffed until 8 PM, leaving the rest of us reluctant to answer the phone late at night, and with good reason. Imagine the following:
The phone rings, right at the end of a shift. Nobody answers. Our manifesto-handbook says to never let the phone ring more than four times. Two more rings — I’m too far away from the registers to see if all the cashiers really are busy — so I give in and pick up. The voice on the other end of the line is young, female, confused. “Um, my friend really craves peanuts. What nutrient does she need?”
Damn.
I take a deep breath. “Um, protein? Or maybe fat?” The phone is silent, and I know I’ve given another wrong answer. Who cares about macronutrients? Those don’t come in pills. “Maybe she’s just hungry,” I suggest. “Maybe she should just eat some peanuts. As long as she’s not allergic, it’s really not a problem.” Holy mother of wrong answers, Batman. I don’t remember how I got out of that conversation, but I avoided the phone for days afterward.
“Hippie, please.” In six months, I never said it to anyone’s face, but not for lack of wanting to. Nor did I ever tell anyone “You’re wrong, and your mama dresses you funny,” though it might have been appropriate in the case of a dreadlocked six-year-old who proclaimed, “Cooked food is dead food, and dead food is poison.”
Cooks work in kitchens because we love food and hate people. That’s my partner Peter’s theory, based in part on what he saw of me when I worked customer service. He says I was much easier to live with after I got back to line cooking, and I believe him. Not dealing with customers made it easier for me to live with myself.
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http://idlehandicrafts.com Ellen
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http://www.allchiara.com Chiara
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http://e2grundoon.blogspot.com/ chris o’grundoon
