Off the farm

the value of things

Besides being a farmer, I’m also a line cook. Not the most glamorous job title in the world. I’m also sometimes a waitress! Again not something the parents are necessarily bragging about. I work at a restaurant called Old Town Cafe in the farming off-season, and also for a day or two a week during the season. I’ve worked there, happily, for a decade.

At Old Town, everyone is cross-trained, and everyone shares tips equally. I’ve served, hosted, bussed and washed dishes, and, five years ago, I moved onto the line as a cook. (Last night I had a dream that a horrible customer came sneering into the kitchen, despite the polite remonstrations of the floor staff, holding a bowl of squishy blueberries and demanding they be replaced. I stopped flipping eggs and roared, “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” I walked out from behind the line, said in a customer service voice at normal volume, “I’m sorry for raising my voice,” and then was yelling again: “BUT IT’S MARCH. LAST MONTH WAS FEBRUARY. THE MONTH BEFORE THAT WAS JANUARY. THE BLUEBERRIES WERE FROZEN. YOU’RE LUCKY TO HAVE ANY BLUEBERRIES AT ALL! Please leave now.” Such are the dreams of a farmer-cook, though honestly, despite being worried I was about to be fired in my dream, I woke up elated at getting to educate such villain about seasonality.)

As a child, I would observe our servers whenever my family went out to restaurants, saw how they managed expectations, charmed or chided the table, influenced emotions, conducted the experience (or completely failed to do so). I thought of servers as social acrobats, their interactions with customers tightrope-walks of human interaction that I would watch with bated breath, tensed for a fall but ready for the elation of success. This sounds overblown, but, as an extremely socially anxious child (and adult), people whose whole job was social interaction were like enlightened beings bearing trays of food. I watched them like an acolyte.

Becoming a server myself helped heal my social anxiety, or at least helped me get it under control. It helped shape my best personality traits into something I could actually share with the world, rather than keeping them wrapped up tight and inaccessible in the ball of anxiety I was growing up. It taught me about hospitality as a mindset, generosity as a tenet of business, the power of genuine warmth.

Working at Old Town, I would watch the cooks on the line the same way I used to watch servers: with a shy, curious reverence. Besides my intrigue based on what the media had always said about cooks in commercial kitchens - packs of weirdos, misfits, found family - the Old Town cooks were obviously the restaurants’ linchpins. You can tell when a cook is feeling it and working well, both by themselves and with others on the line - the flow is almost tangible, the food looks more delicious, the movements are deliberate, and everything is fast.

Beginning to cook at Old Town was hard. You step into that invisible flow and are immediately swept away. Later, you can hold your own, but your presence is more of a boulder in the current, braced against onslaught, ruining the shape and pace of things. Later still, you not only ride the flow, but you add to the strength of it. One of the most fun and satisfying experiences I’ve had is flowing on the line. Both by myself, reveling in the ability to hold and execute all of the tasks needed to feed the restaurant in constant, quick succession. And with others, when you’re evenly matched and you can feel what they’re going to do or need next and they’re doing the same for you... It’s a dance, difficult and intricate and exhausting and exhilarating.

I don’t know why I’ve always been drawn to labor of this sort. I went to school briefly for music performance, and then ultimately got a degree in Sociology. My former good grades, my parents’ socioeconomic status, my degree, even my gender - they all say I should have a different career, outside a restaurant kitchen, off a field. Something involving a little less grease and dirt. But I’ve always dreamt of labor. As a child I wanted to be a construction worker, a ranch hand, a grocery store clerk, a welder, a dog trainer, a farmer, a waitress, a cook. I value this work; as I’ve grown up, I’ve come to resist the devaluation of the skills that labor-based jobs require, and I absolutely reject the construct that jobs that don’t require a degree are less important or worthy than those that do. As a child though, without class consciousness, I think I was so enthusiastic about careers like these because I thought the people who had mastered them were extremely cool.

In my mind, farming and food service are dovetailed - same-same but different - but people have a greater respect for people who grow food than for those who cook it and serve it. At the restaurant, I’ve been told, “You want a tip? Get a real job!”, and I’ve had people, the parents of friends, my own friends, imply that restaurant work is low-class and embarrassing, that I deserve no health care, no house, no security because I chose this line of work.

I lied, I do know why I’m drawn to labor of this sort, both farming and food service. I love the body-mind connection; that I am practicing a skill-set, but can feel the day’s work in my sore muscles, my aching feet, and my tired, contented mind when my head hits the pillow. I love the real-world results of what I’m doing; that I can see and hold the products of my labor. I love that my work is based around food, something that provides both pleasure and sustenance, that can be both frivolous and fraught. I love that my job has allowed me to mostly avoid the professional anomie that riddles our tech- and profit-driven workforce. I love that my work creates an easy connection to my community, as one whose anxiety has always made connecting a struggle.

When I started writing this, I was going to talk about farm-fresh ingredients and the farm-to-table movement and the symbiotic relationship between farms and restaurants, and how lucky I feel to have a hand in both. Maybe I’ll talk about that in the future, but I think I needed to exorcise the insecurities I obviously have around my work. Thanks for being here for it.

To sum up: I love farming. I love the food service industry. You probably love both as well, and for that, I love you. I’ll leave you with a quote I read today while I was spinning out about the work and labor and the rest:

“Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune. But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born, and in keeping yourself with labour, you are in truth loving life, and to love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.

And what is it to work with love? It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit. Work is love made visible.”

Kahlil Gibran “The Prophet”