Free Best Food Writing 2014 by Holly Hughes Page A

writer and chef, played there, and because my eyesight isn’t so great, I wondered, perversely, whether the black woman ferrying what appears to be a pot of tea to the table was Lewis.
    Edna Lewis was the most respected African-American cookery writer of the twentieth century. Over the course of a long and varied career, she set type for the Daily Worker and labored as a dressmaker for clients like Marilyn Monroe. After working with Johnny Nicholson, she began to write and publish the cookbooks that earned her recognition as the grande doyenne of Southern cookery. Foremost was The Taste of Country Cooking. Published in 1976 and re-released in 2006, it was an homage to the land and larder of Freetown, the Virginia community where she grew up. In the foreword to that thirtieth anniversary edition, Alice Waters wrote that Lewis, the granddaughter of freed slaves, was an “inspiration to all of us who are striving to protect both biodiversity and cultural diversity by cooking real food in season and honoring our heritage through the ritual of the table.”
    If Lewis could go unnamed in a picture that foretold the promise of America in the postwar era, I figured that image might serve as a metaphor for the lesser role Americans have long ascribed to African-American contributions to the culinary arts. Telling that story might be a way for me to pay down the debts of pleasure, both culinary and other, that a privileged white son of the South like me has accrued over a lifetime. This spring, I attended a conference on food andimmigrant life at the New School in New York City. Speakers from as close as NYU and as far away as UC Irvine talked about “gastronomic cosmopolitanism,” defined “neophilia” and “neophobia,” argued for the recovery of the “fragile orality of recipe exchange,” and predicted that, for those of us who study food, “epistemological implosions” are on the horizon. (I’m still not sure what that last one meant.) But what really walloped me was a speech by Saru Jayaraman, director of the UC Berkeley Food Labor Research Center and author of Behind the Kitchen Door: What Every Diner Should Know About the People Who Feed Us .
    The people who put food on our tables, Jayaraman argued, often can’t afford to put food on their own. Primary among the contemporary culprits she identified was the National Restaurant Association, which she called the “other N.R.A.” Jayaraman said that when Herman Cain, the Republican presidential candidate and former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza, was running the organization in the 1990s, he brokered a deal that has since kept the federal minimum wage for tipped workers like waiters and bartenders artificially deflated at $2.13 per hour.
    Wages for non-tipped workers like line cooks have risen, she said, but not at the pace of other professions, nor have they earned benefits enjoyed by other workers, like paid sick days. Workers of color suffer the most. A four-dollar hourly gap separates them from white workers, she reported, citing two primary reasons. Within a single restaurant, workers of color are more likely to be hired for back-of-the-house positions that pay less, like busser and runner, and they rarely get promoted from those positions. Within the industry as a whole, workers of color are more likely to get jobs in fast food, which generally pay less than fine-dining jobs. She was speaking, for the most part, about new immigrants. But listening to her talk on that early spring evening in New York City, I heard what sounded like an old Southern story of the black housekeepers I knew in my Georgia youth, who suffered under the burden of coercive social pressures while scraping by on substandard wages and hand-me-downs, retold in this modern American moment.
    Jayaraman’s tales gave me a new reason to dig into the story behind Bissinger’s photo and the circumstances surrounding Edna