The distaste that I have recently developed for my previously chosen field of work originally stemmed from the realization of just how superficial restaurant work really is.
There is a constant struggle to make each plate look appetizing and taste amazing. People have devoted their whole lives, sacrificed relationships for this pursuit of aesthetic perfection. Each step of every preparation, every final execution is meticulously planned in order for the fine dining extreme of restaurants to survive, and at the very least, for every other restaurant, someone needs to care very much about day-to-day operations in order for that restaurant to survive. The main focus of dining out, I feel, is so that you don't have to cook the food you want to eat. Someone else does the hard work, you do the enjoying. Part of this American-consumerism ideal, money gets you any/everything.
The part I like the least about the food-service industry is that no one I've met in the industry is in the industry to seek wisdom, or truth. Not that morals, ethics, or other metaphysical concepts don't exist there, it is merely that folks I've met in the industry haven't told me that they care if they exist or not.
Wisdom does exist in the industry though. It is a different kind of wisdom however. It is very specific to the subject at hand, and mainly pertains to keeping senses and sense-objects from being overwhelmed. An example would be utilizing wisdom while doing your prep-work. You don't want to prep too much or else you'll end up wasting product, and the boss will get on your case for essentially throwing away money. But you also don't want to prep too little, or else you'll be scrambling throughout service to catch up, and will more than likely have a lousy service, which again the boss will be on your case about. The same concept works for purchasing. You don't want to place an order for food without taking an inventory to see what you have on hand, or else the boss will be on your case because the restaurant will now have too much, or too little of something. I'm not trying to say that restaurants are stand-alone in the regard of "the boss getting on your case", it is simply the only experience I have had with that situation. I am 100% positive that people in other lines of work deal with the same problem.
In the first case, scrambling to catch up creates a lot of negative stress, and anxiety which could potentially become overwhelming (sense), and the wasted product, and therefore wasted money, is the sense-object. In the second case the over/under ordered product is the sense-object, and the anxiety created by having too much or too little is the sense. This is the wisdom within the industry that I am talking about. And after looking at it, one might come to the conclusion that it isn't really wisdom, but balance that must be achieved. And it is a very delicate balance at that. Many restaurant owners spend lots of time and resources to find that balance. Chain-restaurants will utilize daily prep-sheets, and establish par-levels of product to have on hand, and devise complex algorithms to predict how much food they should order from day-to-day. But which came first? The sense of balance, or that there is a balance? I'm inclined to say the fact that there is a balance had to have come first, and in order to realize the existence of these particular balances, one would need wisdom to perceive it.
What I am not trying to do with this post is say that restaurant workers are a bunch of big dumb animals, because anyone who has worked in the industry knows that that is not true. Quite the contrary, I've met a great number of people in my experience who are very intelligent and quite deep, what bugged me is that no one talked about it unless I were to bring up the subject. Wisdom within, or without, the restaurant just isn't talked about, and I think that is very unfortunate, because a lot can be learned by simply opening a dialogue or asking what some call "dumb questions" like when speaking to your boss, or purveyor, "do you know where this bag of mixed greens came from?" or "do you know how the workers were treated at this farm?" There's no such thing as a "dumb question" only a dumb answer.
To sum this all up, I feel that this industry (and in many ways contemporary American Society as well) has become complacent and set in the ways of thinking that costs, and aesthetics are everything. I can no longer comfortably remain part of a group that does not and will not question the norms and doctrines of our times. There is such overwhelming evidence that this way of life, whether it be the way we get food, or the consumeristic ideal, or the cars we drive, or the services we use is horribly destructive to the planet, to other living things and ultimately ourselves.
Not to be all doom and gloom however, because if we focus on the bad, only the bad will manifest itself around us. There are solutions to the myriad problems that we see everyday, whether societal problems, work problems, personal problems, car problems, bad hair day, etc. But in order to identify any solution, we must all first identify the problem. More on that to come . . .
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