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.After hearing Jayaraman speak, and after tracing the reception of the Bissinger photo, I recognize that my real complaint is that too much of the attention now focused on food skews toward natural resources instead of human resources—and that imbalance has proved more egregious when it comes to people of color.Recent victories, won by groups like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which fights for the rights of tomato pickers in Florida, watermelon harvesters in Georgia, and others, have begun to right the wrongs in the fields.But precious little work has been done to address the plight of restaurant workers.The “meal that arrives at your table when you eat out is not just a product of raw ingredients,” Jayaraman wrote in Behind the Kitchen Door.“It’s a product of the hands that chop, cook, and plate it and the people to whom those hands belong.”It’s a product too, of the men and women who serve that meal.Base wages for waiters and waitresses have not risen in more than twenty years.The notion that servers should be ill-paid conjures too easily a time when a permanent American underclass was defined by skin color.Today, the restaurant industry remains one of the last bulwarks of a system in which nameless workers of color labor out of sight, and often out of mind.Readers with better eyesight than mine probably recognized on first glance that the woman in that photograph was not the same woman who appeared on the cover of The Taste of Country Cooking, wearing a lilac dress, picking tomatoes in a summer field bordered with sunflowers.Virginia Reed served the crowd that day.She wasn’t a metaphor.She was bone and flesh.Scott Peacock, who co-wrote Lewis’s fourth book, The Gift of Southern Cooking, published in 2003, and is now finishing a solo book about their relationship, told me that Nicholson and Lewis both called Reed a “character,” which I take to mean that she was a woman with a quick wit and a bawdy humor.She was also the cook with a clock in her head, who had an uncanny ability to divine the exact moment when the Café Nicholson chocolate soufflé was ready to pull from the oven.Not much else is known about her life, which was often the case with the black workers who ran Southern restaurants in the twentieth century, and is now often the case with the twenty-first-century immigrants who have replaced them on the cooking line, at the dish bin, and on the dining room floor.I’m pretty sure that Bissinger did not intend that his photograph be read as a metaphor for the exclusion of black labor from conversations about excellence in the culinary arts.Along the path of my argument, Bissinger was a fellow traveler, which is to say that he, like Lewis, had once been a member of the Communist Party, focused on workers’ rights, the sort of thinker who would have owned up to a sin of omission.But I’m the petite bourgeois fellow who forced this issue.To do good work in the world of Southern food, I’ve come to believe, we have to start by paying down the debts of pleasure we owe to the men and women who sustain our society.For me, that means acknowledging Virginia Reed, the woman with the glowing smile and the clock in her head who brought that pot of tea to the table in 1949.For restaurateurs of today, that means renouncing the lobbying work of the other NRA, paying employees a working wage, and as Jayaraman puts it, taking the high road to profitability.THE DIGNITY OF CHOCOLATEBy Eagranie YuhFrom Edible VancouverEagranie Yuh is definitely a chocolate expert—a pastry chef with a master’s degree in chemistry who teaches chocolate-making classes, as well as being a copywriter, blogger, and freelancer for Northwest Palate and Edible Vancouver.Chocolate may be a luxury indulgence to most of us, but here she discover another side.This was supposed to be a story about chocolate—specifically, an unlikely chocolate shop in the Downtown Eastside.It was supposed to be about where chocolate comes from (it grows on trees), how it is made from cacao beans (through many complex steps requiring chemistry, physics, and a bit of alchemy), and how it becomes confections and truffles.I soon learned that this story has everything and nothing to do with chocolate.I first met Shelley Bolton in the fall of 2012.Shelley’s the director of social enterprise for the Portland Hotel Society (PHS), which runs several single-resident-occupancy hotels in the Downtown Eastside.Shelley’s job is to start businesses—more precisely, social enterprises.PHS operates a few, including a thrift shop called Community, and an art and sewing shop called The Window.These social enterprises provide training and work for people with barriers to employment.Over coffees at Nelson the Seagull, Shelley shared her plan to open a chocolate shop and coffee roastery next door at 319 Carrall Street.And not just any chocolate shop: one that would source its own beans and turn them into chocolate, often called bean-to-bar chocolate.The shop would use the chocolate in confections and drinks.Shelley and I met through a mutual friend—one Nat Bletter, co-founder of Madre Chocolate in Hawaii.Madre Chocolate is one of the companies that comprise the bean-to-bar chocolate movement in the United States.Since 2008, I’ve been connecting with these small-scale chocolate makers to help share their stories.The more I’ve learned about their work, the more I’ve realized that it’s a labour of love, and often of heartbreak.I’ve learned that making chocolate is expensive and risky, and that it’s hard to make good chocolate.What I hadn’t yet learned is that where Shelley goes, magic follows.Leading up to the shop’s opening in April 2013, Shelley hired eight women, collectively called “the ladies.” Since East Van Roasters is on the ground level of the Rainier Hotel, it’s fitting that the ladies, at least initially, were residents of the Rainier.Shelley also recruited Merri Schwartz—former pastry chef at C and Quattro, and founder of Growing Chefs!—to teach the ladies how to make bars and bonbons.Merri was skeptical.Could culinary novices really create fine, polished products? But the class went well, one thing led to another, and Merri agreed to be the shop’s head chocolatier.East Van Roasters gets its cacao beans directly from farmers.The beans, which arrive astringent and ghostly in enormous burlap sacks, are coaxed into their burnished, full-flavoured selves when roasted
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