As I read the beginning of this article I thought, Hmmm…Chef is a little bit arrogant. But as I read more that quickly change.
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Oat milk … topped a list of fastest-moving grocery items nationwide, with sales up 353 percent over last year… The slow movers? Sunscreen and vegetable party platters. … In the past month, Mondelēz International has increased snack production in the United States in response to double-digit sales growth of its brands, including Oreos and Ritz crackers.
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Undocumented and working in food service:
Direct link to the non-profit helping to feed these families:
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Vernon sure is a weird town. 112 residents, 100,000 workers at local businesses.
"… Julia, known as “Nan the Point” to her grandchildren, delivered their daily bread — probably boiled potatoes, cabbage, mackerel. Keeping her distance, she set the pot on a rock upwind of the house, then returned to her own home, a quarter-mile away on a finger of land that pointed into Kenmare Bay.
Nan the Point was back the next day with more.
Listen again.
By 4:30 a.m. over the past nine weeks, Glenda Charles, 58, has risen from bed and dressed in her black uniform slacks, a white chef’s top. Wearing comfortable black shoes she bought online for her hard-to-fit size, she walked four dark blocks to a hospital on Fort Washington Avenue in Upper Manhattan, part of the campus of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center.
At 5 a.m., a half-hour before her shift officially began, she was in the ninth-floor kitchen to count the eggs she would scramble, measure the oatmeal she would stir, lay out the French toast on the griddle.
Although her title with 1199SEIU, the health care workers union, is “first cook,” the Covid-19 pandemic pared her crew to about a third its normal size. She cooked. Cleaned. Washed dishes. Fixed trays. The work days ran 12 to 14 hours.
How many days a week? She considered. A vacation scheduled in March to her homeland of Georgetown, Guyana, was canceled.
“I was off last Saturday,” Ms. Charles said. “And this Saturday. Two days since the pandemic.”
Walking home, she prayed for strength. Every other day, she skipped the elevator and climbed four flights to her apartment. “To leave the stress in the stairs and don’t bring it into the house,” she said. At home with her is a disabled son. She has three other children, and eight grandchildren who fretted about their nana.
“The first week, I had a panic attack, I said, ‘Calm yourself down, there’s nothing you can do about this,’” Ms. Charles said. “Just do what I love to. Make sure the patients have the right nutrition.”"
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And another L.A. Times article worth reading:
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A longer article on farmworkers in Salinas; very much worth a read:
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Food insecurity, food banks, farmers unable to sell their produce, and Covid-19.
Gotta say I’m going to miss the make-my-own-waffle (extra crispy!) option:
I’m finding myself buying/ordering a “little extra” when it comes to shelf-stable foodstuffs; trying to be methodical, practical, and not obsessive, but definitely have a heightened sense of wanting to know we’re in okay shape should things get worse.
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“I can always make money later, but I just want to keep helping people for now and then we will see how it goes,” she said.
"Tyson had to halt operations at its pork plant in Storm Lake, Iowa in late May - a month after the president’s order to reopen - partly because of “team member absences related to quarantine and other factors,” the company said in a statement. The plant restarted limited operations on June 3.
The company said that 591 workers, or 26% of its workforce, had tested positive. Surrounding Buena Vista county, where many workers live, has one of the nation’s highest infection rates, with 1,257 cases, a fivefold increase over the past two weeks.
Tyson warned in an earnings report last month that worker shortages were expected to contribute to more production slowdowns and plant shutdowns. The company said in a statement that it is continually working to improve safety and social-distancing protocols."
(Tangentially related: this book, about Storm Lake, Buena Vista County, and this region of Iowa, is fascinating, though a bit messy.)
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"“Each tree here has a story to tell,” said Dave Goto, whose great-uncle was held at Manzanar and served as its doctor. “It’s an honor to preserve them, and really tough to lose one.”
For Goto, preserving the pear trees is part of a larger mission — of not letting the country forget how Americans of Japanese descent were deprived of their civil liberties and shipped off to camps during World War II.
Now, the trees face another test."
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