The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table by Tracie McMillan

Author:Tracie McMillan [McMillan, Tracie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nutrition, Diet & Nutrition, Social Science, Cooking, General, Health & Fitness, History, Poverty & Homelessness, Agriculture & Food
ISBN: 9781439171967
Google: OZ-C-2QhS1sC
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2012-10-02T21:22:49+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Kitchen Spy

I end up in the prep kitchen by making a deal with Freddie. After a couple weeks, he’s begun talking about making me a “Neighborhood Expert,” so I can train other people on expo. This comes after last week’s staff meeting—held at 10:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, everyone standing awkwardly around the prep table—when I was among the dozen “Applestars” for the month, taking the not-terribly-competitive prize of Best Newcomer. (There were, by my count, two others eligible.) I figure this gives me some pull with Freddie, so I make a proposition: I’d like to learn how the kitchen works. He’s mentioned wanting me to train people on expo, so I should know more about the kitchen, right? And since I typically work Friday to Sunday, racking up about thirty hours, I still have another ten before I hit overtime. Can I do some work in prep? Freddie doesn’t hesitate. Can you come in on Wednesday at 9:00 a.m.? Definitely, I say. It’s a deal.

I’m paired on my first morning with Denzel, a skinny kid who immediately sets me to scrubbing Idaho russets for baked potatoes. These go into a steamer, a metal box resembling an oven, along with a half-dozen redskins destined to be quartered and steamed with a sprinkling of spice powder for Weight Watchers herbed potatoes. As we load the potatoes into the steamer, Denzel tells me not to eat the mashed potatoes here because they only rinse those potatoes, they don’t scrub them. They can’t usually scrub every potato, he explains; the dust gets washed off, but the dirt stays on the skin.

About half my work for the day involves measuring out individual portions of food. I stand over a bin of cooked rice and divide four-ounce portions into plastic baggies. When I finish, I take a sticker gun and label each bag with the date when it should be thrown out. While I’m at it, one of the lunch cooks hands me a half-full tray of expired bags of rice and asks me to change their use-by date from yesterday to tomorrow.

Isn’t that kind of gross? I ask Denzel.

You’ll see all kinds of things here, he says. Throwing it out wastes money.

After the rice, there’s linguine to portion out, and then penne pasta—all of it slightly undercooked, so that when the cooks on the line throw it in the microwave it doesn’t get too soggy. Later on, there are endless trays of mashed potatoes that get divided into ten-ounce portions and bagged. Most of what we portion into baggies, I realize, is bound for the microwave.

Everything we make gets dated according to a chart on the wall that denotes the number of shifts before it should be thrown out. Followed closely, these directions remove the need for anyone to know what happened in the kitchen even an hour ago, or to be able to gauge whether food has rotted or not. The chart, the stickers, and the dates mean we don’t have to know anything, really, other than how to read.

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