I got involved in the Portland food movement when I moved to the city in 2005. I had aspirations of someday opening my own little restaurant. I also wanted to run an organic farm, where I might hold workshops in butchery, cheese making, culinary fundamentals, or wild mushroom foraging. To many people this list of classes would fall under the heading of the trendy “urban homesteading” movement. But for me, these practices are elements of a way of life I’ve always participated in. I grew up in the Coast Range of rural Oregon. My family raised chickens for eggs and meat and butchered lambs. My mother cultivated a large organic garden. In the fall we foraged for chanterelles, and in the spring in the woods behind our house we picked nettle shoots and miner’s lettuce. My nearness to the land and the food it provided defined my cooking ethos and set in motion my cooking career.

That career has spanned eleven years, during which I’ve worked as a prep cook, fry cook, pantry cook, grill cook, pastry chef, and baker. The least I’ve made was $7.50 per hour; the most was $13.50. To be a line cook and eventually a chef you must submit to the hell that is the professional kitchen: long hours, low pay, no breaks, no respect. As you advance up the line, the work gets harder and the responsibility increases while the pay does not. An entry level line cook job starts at as low as $8 an hour and tops out at around $15. (In 2011, the national median wage for line cooks was $10.61, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) If you want to make more, you have to advance up to a management position such as sous chef or chef de cuisine. Even then, the pay is going to be around $16 to $18 an hour and is not likely to top $23. I never advanced to the top of the pay scale, mostly because the added hours and stress those jobs demanded never seemed quite worth the pay. The last sous chef I worked under was all-consumed by work. You could see in his leering eyes that he was in a constant state of caffeinated fatigue. I didn’t want that.

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Restaurant workers are perpetually exhausted because it’s to the advantage of the restaurant to treat the kitchen in a mechanistic fashion, to get out of its cooks the most output with the least amount of input. Trying to extract the highest return from its workers, the restaurant looks after its own best interests, not those of its employees. I learned this early on. The first position that I held at a more upscale restaurant was as a prep cook. For the first six months I seemed to mangle everything. If I wasn’t burning the parsnips I was breaking the aioli or making a mess of the soufflé. After a while I became faster and more proficient, but I was still getting ridden hard by my sous chef. One day at the end of a long shift that I thought I had done well on, he took me out back. My level of production was unacceptable, he said. I needed to “fucking step it up” or I wouldn’t have a job anymore. This stung. I was caught off guard, and so emotionally invested that I choked up. “I got most of the prep list taken care of today,” he told me. “What did you do? Soup, house dressing, ravioli? You need to get your shit together.”