#10 | How to Solve a Problem Like No-Shows
Caribbean food history, life-changing encounters, and the human cost of a meal
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This is the tenth edition of In Digestion, a weekly survey of the best food media on the web, and why you should care about it. If you like this newsletter, please follow @in_digestion and @jameskhansen on Twitter, and forward it to a large number of people. It should feel like too many. It won’t be enough. Thank you.
No-shows — the practice of failing to honour a reservation without notifying the restaurant — are back on the table in London. This week it’s TV chef Tom Kerridge, famed for his kindness towards diners, and north London restaurant trio Jolene, Westerns Laundry, and Primeur. Both lay out how this practice costs money, and potentially jobs. The latter has increased its no-show charge; the former has not. This lays out one of the kinks of the no-show issue: while the “restaurant industry” unilaterally recognises it as a socially unacceptable ill, it is divided on what to actually do about it.
Some post in anger on social media; some they say will levy no-show fees; some actually levy no-show fees; some combine the latter with ticketing. While the middle option gets talked about every time there is an egregious instance of breaking the contract — or rather, every time a suitably high profile restaurant posts about one — its status as a solution at large is continually cut down by relentless handwringing over tragic edge cases so severe that they should simply not be part of a discourse about its viability.
What the restaurant world appears less interested in is understanding why customers have come to consider their service so disposable, and continue to do so after months of closure, fear, and disquiet about the future of dining. It always appears to come back to Good Old Manners, saying that customers are selfish and warning them to “use it or lost it.” At the same time, old, less easily talked about foes remain: there’s disintermediation — the introduction of booking apps to which customers hold no loyalty brokering relationships supposedly built on connection — and the gamification of restaurant-going occasioned by social media and consumer review platforms. But surely those mechanisms must hit different in a restaurant economy so fragile that critics aren’t even going to criticise it anymore? Having seen how fragile restaurants are, customers must finally understand?
It seems not. Just as a declaration of “positive reviews only” implicitly says that it used to be okay to hammer a fragile business model in service of a zinging simile, the reason customers are still no-showing restaurants is that the majority still prefer to be served, than to receive hospitality, and sometimes having their needs served means not receiving any hospitality at all. Mainstream media representation of the restaurant world can hardly be helping. Critics will both hammer restaurants for their prices and say that they don’t charge enough; they will claim that their first duty is selling papers while claiming to serve consumers; they will invent dogwhistling dystopias and treat dying from a disease that has killed restaurant workers like a joke. Cookery programmes imply that amateurs, celebrity or not, can swoop into a professional kitchen with no training and do a service with the most minor slip-ups despite not being able to fold a dumpling; a dumpling that one of the show’s two judges doesn’t even recognise by name.
In service of lifting up restaurants as a place for “all” in service of “value” that is really just cheapness with a smile that’s screwing someone, somewhere, these portrayals diminish the labour, skill, time, and money that go into building these places and keeping them open. In opening more and more, in going more and more, in reviewing more and more, the labour behind all of those mores fades further into the distance. But these media forces are the same ones that bring praise, renown, and customers — even the ones that don’t turn up — so restaurants aren’t exactly in a position where critique will be readily received. — Some — restaurants need them. The wheels keep turning.
It’s no surprise that, pandemic or no pandemic, the end result is a culture of socially acceptable disposability, when customers have been taught time and again that not only are they always right, but that being served at the cost of others’ financial, emotional, and social security is the same thing as hospitality.
Yara Elmjouie and No Muslim Ban Ever collaborate on a taseiyeh recipe for AJ+. Ramez Alghazzouli and Asmaa make taseiyeh in their Damascene way, a dish they make together every Friday morning with garlic, lemon juice, chickpeas, pita, and hummus. Filmed at home, it’s an intimate look into cooking, guided by Elmjouie’s informed, unintrusive commentary. But it’s no ordinary video: they were separated when Donald Trump signed his ban on Muslims travelling to the United States in 2017, with Asmaa denied citizenship for two years. The contrast between sharing a Syrian tradition and having that sharing manacled by white supremacist politics complicates food narratives more effectively than any celebrity-fronted show, and it’s another refutation of the lazy “food brings us together.”
Albert Samaha, Katie J.M. Baker, Ryan Mac, and Rosie Gray track the human cost of a 4 July meal for Buzzfeed. At its heart, the narrative is simple: “Take a typical summer feast: tangy ribs, a side of creamy pasta salad, and a slice of freshly baked apple pie. If you shop at a Walmart Supercenter, in, say, Massachusetts, the apples you’d buy would have been picked by workers in Washington state’s Yakima Valley, who live in a crowded labor camp with few protections in place. The fruit would then be sorted into boxes in an Allan Bros. packhouse, which for weeks failed to follow federal COVID-19 safety guidelines — even after employees started falling ill.” Interweaving stories of individual workers who have died with the scale at which food plants are failing to safeguard their employees, it’s another informed look at whether eating for pleasure is viable when it comes at the cost of someone’s life.
Rebecca May Johnson reflects on how a journey into eating Americana changed her view on eating forever for Elephant. While a sugar rush of “pancakes and syrup and fried chicken and pizza and refills—refills!—and a slice of pie with whipped cream” figures the enormity of culinary fantasy, it’s an encounter with Judy Chicago’s seminal installation, The Dinner Party — while “buzzing from the refills” — that is the catalyst for acknowledging reality: “see how women have made the world.” And, see how much of history claimed they did not. Johnson acknowledges the work’s limits as much as she extols its “image of history as cumulative and interconnected—no origin, no first, no most, no best, no biggest”; having “thought with it and against it,” the enormity of its impact is plain to see.
Catherine Ross and Lynda Burrell lay out the stories and resonances of “70 objeks and tings” for Museumand, The National Caribbean Heritage Museum. A digital magazine overlaid with music from Gareth Foy composed especially for its publication, its contributors lay out foods, dishes, and cooking methods central to Caribbean foodways, parsing granular divisions between islands and peoples while addressing the span of collective history. Whether once again castigating Jamie Oliver for his “jerk rice,” or situating sugar cane in the Soca music tradition, it shows how context is key to understanding where foods and preparations sit in the past and in the present.
An interview with Alicia Kennedy on her upcoming book, its resonances, her wider work, and its relation to food media will be the eighth paid post on In Digestion, going out 18 July. Thank you again for being here.
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