Why Do We Hate The People Who Handle Our Food?

Promo still from the award-winning 2007 indie film Waitress

Why are food service workers paid so poorly? Everybody eats. Nearly everybody would rather eat well than eat some mush slapped mindlessly on a plate. Yet not only is food service among the most poorly paid work in America, it's among the least likely to offer paid sick days and comprehensive health insurance from one's employers. Meaning the likelihood you've been served steak with a side of pneumonia is high.

The Fight for $15 has banded together food service, healthcare, and childcare workers with other groups historically poorly paid, and provided a massive public voice for paying America’s most despised workers a better living wage. We’ve heard the moral arguments for why these groups deserve a better wage. But we, or anyway I, haven’t really heard the argument against paying these people better, except some vague mentions of supply-and-demand theory.

So I spent some time thinking furiously about the reasons we refuse food service workers better wages. It’s easy to dismiss some of the more commonly trotted-out counterclaims. The argument, for instance, that food service is a starter job for teenagers, runs immediately aground on the fact that we can order food at noon on weekdays, and other times teenagers aren’t legally allowed to work. Let’s discard those arguments immediately.

(Let’s also discard recent evidence that our economy holds doors open for certain teenagers while slamming them on others. That’s an entirely different ballgame.)

By keeping focus on the work itself, and the social context in which the work takes place, two arguments made themselves available to me. Then they fell apart. First, supply-and-demand tells us that very common jobs are priced poorly, and food service is one of America’s few growing industries since manufacturing collapsed. There are too many food service jobs. Except those jobs are ubiquitous because demand is high, so oopsie!

Where I live, I’ve seen entire communities which basically exist to sell food, gasoline, and hotel service to travelers on the highway. Since the agricultural economy has dwindled, and growing crops doesn’t bring money in like it once did, servicing the very high-demand traveling business remains the only wealth generator in much of the heartland. Classical economics would say this demand would make the supply very valuable, but economics fails.

Edmonton, Alberta-based chef Serge Belair at work

If supply-and-demand doesn’t work, the other classical economic argument for poor pay is that food service is a low-skilled job. Skills are valuable, and therefore create wages. Except, as I’ve bounced among industries after college, I’ve observed that there’s no such thing as “low-skilled jobs.” Some jobs demand skills workers bring with them, from machinists to physicians, and other jobs require skills learned while working. Food service is the latter.

So simple arguments don’t work, and classical economic arguments don’t work. I’m left with one approach: what moral attitudes do people have toward food service workers? Here I run into something more complex, and more disgusting.

On one hand, we glamourize food. We court potential future spouses over food, especially food somebody else made, to showcase our ability to splurge. We clinch important business deals over food—and, if you’ve ever watched a “business lunch” in process, you know that food mostly doesn’t get eaten. Most of our important religious and secular celebrations, like holidays and weddings, involve conspicuous overeating. We love showing off our food.

On the other hand, food is slightly icky. We enjoy eating certain kinds of food, like roasted meats or rich desserts in sauce, for their intense sensual pleasure. But we eat other foods, like starches and cruciferous vegetables, because we need the nutrients. We’ll even invent cooking methods, like drizzling them with sauce, to make them less nasty. We must eat these foods in order to survive, to withstand death.

Food memorializes human mortality. Eating reminds us how perilously close even the wealthiest and most successful among us, remain to dying. Food forms a key link in a continuum: we eat food to survive, and convert it into poop. That poop becomes nutrients for future food. This reminder of mortality disgusts industrialized Westerners so much, we break the cycle, chemically treating our poop and dumping it outside the food chain.

Food service workers handle our future poop. They remind us, by simply existing, that we’re going to die, that we could die tonight. Our dependence on food service workers challenges the Western technological myth that we’ll eventually beat gravity, physicality, and death. Food is, in essence, gross. So we punish the people who provide food by denying them better wages. Because how dare they remind us we’re going to die.