Meal kits were a means of survival for London restaurants in 2020. If restaurants reopen in summer 2021, they could take on new meaning — or fade away as fast as they arrived
https://london.eater.com/22300712/restaurant-meal-kits-uk-when-restaurants-reopen-after-lockdown
One year into the pandemic, grocery store workers still face major resistance to getting the hazard pay they deserve
This story was originally published on Civil Eats.
Nearly a year into the pandemic, a new battle is brewing over grocery workers’ right to hazard pay.
Earlier this week, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to give grocery workers a short-term $5 per hour pay increase, following the city of Long Beach’s approval in January of an ordinance that would require grocery stores with at least 300 employees nationally to provide their employees with an extra $4 an hour on top of their established hourly wages for a minimum of 120 days.
The same day Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia signed the city ordinance into law, the California Grocers Association (GCA), a trade group representing the industry, filed for a preliminary injunction against the city of Long Beach. The group’s complaint claims that the ordinance preempts federal labor and equal protection laws, and violates both the U.S. and California constitutions. Arguments were heard in court yesterday and a decision is expected soon.
The lawsuit is likely the first of several to make its way to court. After the Long Beach city council amended the municipal code with their ordinance, other California cities and counties including Santa Clara, Montebello, Oakland, San Leandro, and West Hollywood passed their own “hero pay” ordinances. Each was immediately sued by CGA, and the Los Angeles measure will also likely be challenged in court.
In Washington State, leaders in Seattle and the neighboring city of Burien have also passed hazard pay ordinances, and both have been sued by industry groups there.
“A disproportionate number of people of color are essential workers, and Seattle must continue to lead the way to provide relief and respect to those that have served our community throughout this pandemic,” Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan said in a press release prior to that city’s law going into effect.
These ordinances are shining one more spotlight on long-standing inequities exposed by the pandemic. While a number of companies provided their employees — who have faced unprecedented risks at work — with hazard pay last spring, most took it away a few months later, despite record breaking profits.
Other tensions between the food industry and labor have also recently made the news. For instance, Albertsons (which owns Safeway, Vons, and other grocery stores) announced that it would eliminate in-house delivery and personal shopper positions in favor of third-party gig workers in California at the end of February. And fast food workers across the country went on strike last week to demand a hike to the minimum wage.
This week’s trial could set an important precedent. If the ordinance stands, the practice of giving workers hazard pay could spread, and possibly fuel a widespread push for higher wages and better working conditions. But a decision against the Long Beach ordinance could put a stop to the practice.
“These policies are critical,” says Sylvana Uribe, a communications specialist with the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE). The organization works alongside community and labor groups to protect workers’ rights and dignity, in an area hard hit by COVID. “[W]ith new variants of the virus emerging, we need some sort of policy, and some sort of financial compensation for workers who are risking their health every single day.”
Although rates of COVID infections are falling and vaccinations are picking up, Uribe doesn’t think that the hazard pay ordinances have come too late. “This virus is here to stay for a bit longer. There’s some uncertainty around that, but having some sort of safety net is something that these workers and communities can count on.”
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Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
The hazard pay ordinances vary slightly from place to place. In addition to the Long Beach ordinance, one in Oakland would offer a bonus of $5 an hour, applicable to employees at stores larger than 15 thousand square feet owned by companies with at least 500 employees nationally. That ordinance will remain in place until Oakland drops into the lowest “yellow tier” of California’s COVID-19 risk assessment.
The Oakland ordinance also includes a waiver for collective bargaining agreements. However, the CGA lawsuits specifically cite federal labor laws as evidence that these local ordinances are illegal.
While the ordinances differ, proponents see them as necessary and justified. Large supermarket chains have profited handsomely during the pandemic. According to a November 2020 report analyzing top national grocery and retail companies released by the Brookings Institution, the big three grocery chains — Walmart, Kroger, and Albertsons — took in $6.8 billion more during the first three quarters of 2020 than the year previous.
But those profits haven’t gone to frontline staff. The report also found that the big three grocery chains averaged only $.76 an hour in bonus payments to their employees.
Regardless of their pay, grocery store clerks are working in high-risk environments. According to the United Food and Commercial Workers International (UFCW), a union representing some 835,000 grocery store employees in the U.S. and Canada, 109 of their members died, and more than 17,400 were infected with COVID by the end of 2020.
When he was photographed while signing the Long Beach ordinance into law, Mayor Garcia tweeted support to grocery store workers: “You have earned this hero pay. Thank you for your hard work.”
Many national grocery chains voluntarily paid hourly hazard wages early in the pandemic. But the trend began to lose steam in the late spring and early-summer as company after company quietly eliminated their bonuses. Grocery store employees continued showing up to work in increasingly dangerous and challenging work environments as cases surged across the country during the devastating fall and winter months. Their paychecks didn’t reflect the new reality of widespread infections and deaths.
Local UFCW chapters have been leading protests, drawing politicians to their cause up and down the west coast. UFCW Local 324 is named in the lawsuit filed against Long Beach.
The chapters have also worked to paint a picture of profitable corporations capitalizing on a beleaguered workforce. And the bonus pay ordinances are a sign that local governments are slowly responding to the political pressure.
“[W]e are urging CEOs of major food and retail companies to finally accept their responsibility and provide hazard pay for these brave workers,” UFCW president Marc Perrone said in a statement. “The pandemic has created windfall profits for these companies and those profits were earned by these brave workers. Now is the time for these companies and our elected leaders to act and do what is right.” (The UFCW did not respond to requests for comment.)
The CGA lawsuits aren’t the only sign of opposition to the union’s push for hazard pay.
In a statement, Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce CEO Jeremy Harris said, “While we applaud and appreciate all efforts by Long Beach grocery workers throughout the coronavirus pandemic, the premium pay for grocery workers ordinance has been rushed and inadequately studied.”
A Los Angeles Times editorial called bonus pay ordinances unfair for favoring grocery store workers at large chains who are more likely to be unionized, excluding those at smaller stores, and essential workers in other industries.
In a letter to Long Beach Mayor Garcia after mandated hazard pay was first recommended by the city council, CGA Director Tim James questioned the value of mandating bonuses only for grocery workers. He wrote, “The recommendation limits its scope to only a small subset of essential critical infrastructure workers and ignores all other workers interacting regularly with the public in the same manner. As we all sadly know, COVID-19 impacts do not discriminate in any way.”
The day the Northwest Grocery Association (NWGA) jointly filed a lawsuit against Seattle’s bonus pay ordinance, the organization issued a press release. In it, President Amanda Dalton took a similar approach, suggesting that the ordinance was unfairly leaving out some workers. She said: “[O]ur expectation was a well-earned priority position for all essential workers when vaccines became available. Instead, the city council singled out some grocery workers for an increase in pay, while ignoring all other essential workers.”
Opponents have also argued that mandatory bonuses would ultimately hurt grocery workers, and their home communities. In a statement CGA President Ron Fong said, “[T]here will be significant potential negative consequences and would likely result in higher costs for groceries and increased food insecurity that disproportionately hurts low-income families, seniors, and disadvantaged communities already struggling financially. These proposals could also harm grocery workers themselves if stores are forced to reduce jobs or hours for employees due to higher costs.”
A study funded by CGA and conducted by Capitol Matrix Consulting supports that statement. It found that following a profit spike in the middle of 2020, grocery industry profits began trending downward. Researchers claimed a $5 hourly bonus would increase an average family of four’s grocery bill by $400. Alternately, if the increase in wages were not passed onto consumers, the study said that a 22 percent cut to staffing would be required to offset the new costs.
Uribe of LAANE doesn’t buy the argument that grocery store companies can’t afford to cover hazard pay bonuses themselves. “It comes down to corporate greed, putting profits over people,” she says. These companies have brought in enormous profits throughout the pandemic and they have the means to pay their workers a $5 hazard pay.”
The fight over compulsory bonus wages took a dramatic turn on February 1, when Kroger announced the April 17 closures of one Ralph’s location and one Food 4 Less location in Long Beach in response to the local ordinance. According to the company, some 200 employees will be reassigned or laid off between the two stores.
Long Beach Councilwoman Mary Zendejas, who proposed her city’s ordinance, saw the move as a political ploy. “Our Long Beach grocery workers are disproportionately low-income residents of color and oftentimes immigrants like my family and I,” she posted on Facebook. “[The fact] that corporations, who are making record profits, would rather use their health and livelihoods to make a point than pay them is just despicable and destructive.”
In an emailed statement from Kroger indicated that the two stores were “underperforming,” and that the anticipated 20-30 percent increase in operating costs could not be sustained. Six other Kroger-owned markets will remain open for business in Long Beach, however.
“These shutdowns place the blame on the cities passing hazard pay, place the blame on workers who want a few dollars’ increase for their labor during a pandemic,” says Uribe. “Companies aren’t willing to take responsibility for being able to actually provide this pay. They’re just placing the blame and using this as intimidation for asks that are quite warranted.”
“To be clear, we’re not opposed to wage increases,” a Kroger spokesperson told Civil Eats. “We’ll continue to operate stores in both cities, and our associates will receive the additional pay as mandated by the local government.”
Andrea Zinder, president of the UFCW Local 324, is quoted in the Long Beach Post as saying, “Sales at both these stores increased 30 percent during the pandemic.” She goes on to accuse Kroger of closing the stores to send a message to other cities considering similar ordinances.
Kroger recently announced that they will also be closing two “underperforming” QFC locations in Seattle, noting that the average hourly wage for Seattle QFC employees is already roughly $20, and that Kroger is offering $100 incentives for employees to get vaccinated as well as a $50 million rewards package of store credits and points.
The Seattle ordinance was signed into law on February 3 by Mayor Jenny Durkan. Employees of grocery stores employing 500 worldwide and larger than 10,000 square feet, or retailers over 85,000 square feet with at least 30 percent of space set aside for groceries, are now entitled to an additional $4 per hour until the city ends its COVID state of emergency.
That same day, Seattle and neighboring Burien, which is mandating a $5 hourly bonus, were hit with lawsuits by the NWGA and the Washington Food Industry Association (WFIA). In a press release, WFIA President Tammie Hetrick said, “If the City Council had requested input from grocers, they would have seen real data that almost all the individual stores in Seattle experienced significantly decreased sales and profits compared to the year before.”
The lawsuit mirrors those being filed throughout California — it claims the law is unconstitutional and supersedes federal labor laws. But this is not the first time that Seattle has legislated wages, which began an incremental increase back in 2014 after a successful Fight for $15 battle.
The ordinances target large-scale national chains which are more likely able to absorb increased labor costs. But in Seattle local co-op PCC Community Markets, a 15-store chain spread throughout the metro region, also falls under the mandate. Just before the ordinance was to go into effect, company CEO Suzy Monford wrote the mayor asking that the ordinance be revised or stricken altogether, claiming that PCC would be unable to offset bonuses, citing that the company incurred almost double their 2019 net income in COVID expenses.
But, in an about face illustrating the tricky politics of local business, PCC announced that it was negotiating with its workers representative with UFCW Local 21 over extending the bonus pay to roughly 700 hourly staff employed outside Seattle city limits. A deal was struck February 10, with the union agreeing to consider implementing curbside pickup.
Not all national supermarket chains have responded to the increasing demand for compulsory hazard pay bonuses with store closures or political pressure. For instance, Trader Joe’s hasn’t stopped paying the $2 hourly bonus it implemented early in the pandemic. On February 1, the company doubled its existing “thank you” premium, paying an extra $4 an hour to all non-management workers.
“[I]t’s clear that some companies are stepping up to do the right thing for these essential workers,” UFCW president Marc Perrone said in a statement.
But it is not yet clear whether other companies will step up if local hero pay ordinances are defeated in court. If they do pass these first legal hurdles, pressure will grow on the private sector to act of their own accord.
Although not mentioned publicly, a letter to staff obtained by The Seattle Times, and purportedly signed by Trader Joe’s executives, cites the local ordinances passed in California and Seattle as reasons for the increased bonus. The company concluded that not providing raises where ordinances go into effect would be unfair to employees working in those cities.
But even if the Long Beach court rules that hazard pay bonuses are illegal, Uribe believes that there’s still a lot of energy and support behind them. “Communities have stood by workers, so I still anticipate some sort of push back to in some way bring dignity to these jobs,” she says. “I don’t know that the fight would be over.”
• Grocery Stores Continue to Push Back Against Hazard Pay for Workers [Civil Eats]
Horn Barbecue is the chef’s highly anticipated pop-up-turned-permanent restaurant
“At Horn Barbecue, we have the opportunity to create something where we’re not specifically stuck with one tradition,” says Oakland pitmaster Matt Horn. That’s because instead of sticking to just one barbecue style, Horn combines his Bay Area roots with Central Texas barbecue and traditions from the deep south to create what he calls “West Coast-style” barbecue.
Horn fell in love with barbecue from a young age, when he learned how to make juicy brisket, tender oxtail, fall-off-the-bone-ribs, hot link sausage, and other meats using his grandfather’s cooker without even using a thermometer. “Everything that we do here is by feel. You can use thermometers but we like to teach that technique and that instinct of relying on feel,” he says. “That’s how I taught myself to cook, by feel.”
Now, at his anticipated pop-up-turned-permanent restaurant, he makes all of those dishes and more for long lines of eager patrons.
“I believe barbecue is magical. Anytime you take raw cuts of meat and create something that turns into memories for our guess, I believe that there’s magic in doing that.”
Restaurant workers are still not eligible for the vaccine
https://boston.eater.com/2021/2/25/22301611/capacity-caps-removed-massachusetts-restaurants-march-1-2021
Portland’s Lex Grant has cooked in the NBA bubble and for Oprah Winfrey. Now, she’s making the food she grew up with for anyone who wants it—rain, shine, or snowfall
https://pdx.eater.com/2021/2/25/22299388/lex-grant-private-chef-miss-winnies-kitchen
The responses are part of a new One Fair Wage survey outlining an overall drop in tips during the pandemic
https://ny.eater.com/2021/2/25/22301118/nyc-restaurant-workers-tips-reduce-coronavirus-surcharge
Give it a try the next time you have leftover rice
Frustrated by both the recent violence towards Asian Americans and its lack of coverage in the mainstream media, a small coalition of New York City’s top Asian-American chefs and restaurant owners have formed a grassroots initiative called #EnoughIsEnough. Its focus is to donate meals to homeless shelters that serve largely Asian-American, Black, and brown populations while raising awareness. In addition to the meal donations, the group organized a virtual cooking class held on February 22. All of the 22 restaurants involved are small, beloved local places, many with no more than 30 seats, but together they are making good on the initiative’s mission: to show the power of collective action.
While Enough Is Enough has met its goal of raising $25,000, any donations made past that mark will be given to charities that help Asian communities in need, such as Send Chinatown Love, and Welcome to Chinatown, and Yin Chang and Moonlynn Tsai’s Heart of Dinner. “By showing up, using our voices, and standing up against against hate in the Asian American community, we can hopefully lead by example,” says Fish Cheeks co-owner Jennifer Saesue.
Fish Cheeks is a seafood-focused Thai restaurant in New York’s NoHo. One of its most requested orders is crab meat-studded fried rice; made with dried-out jasmine rice, it has been on the menu since the restaurant opened. Below, Fish Cheeks co-owners Saesue and Ohm Suansilphong share its recipe in full. Give it a try for yourself at home the next time you have dried-out jasmine rice,; you’ll find that the recipe is uncomplicated, and will no doubt enjoy the extra layer of flavor added by the chicken powder.
Ingredients:
1 1/2 ounces canola oil
2 eggs
1 cup cooked jasmine rice that has been dried out over night
1/4 tablespoon salt
1/4 tablespoon sugar
1/4 tablespoon chicken powder, preferably Knorr
1 teaspoon soy sauce
4 ounces crab meat
1 bunch scallions, chopped
Cilantro to garnish
Step 1: Heat a large pan over high heat. Once hot, add the oil. Lower the heat to medium, and add the eggs. Scramble them until they’re almost cooked through.
Step 2: Add the rice, making sure to break it up so that it heats evenly.
Step 3: Add the salt, sugar, chicken powder, and soy sauce. Mix well.
Step 4: Add the crab meat. Once it’s heated through, remove the pan from the heat and add the scallions.
Step 5: Garnish with cilantro and serve.
J. Ranji Smile served Indian food and tall tales to a hungry American public. Was he the first “celebrity chef” or a crook? The truth is complicated.
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22158105/ranji-smile-celebrity-chef-indian-food-sarah-lohman
Between calls for racial justice and an industry-devastating pandemic, the traditional role of critic is adapting to the times
The image of the traditional restaurant critic — an older white man, surreptitious in appearance yet hearty in appetite, issuing snobbish judgments from behind a white tablecloth— was out-of-date long before the pandemic hit. White men aren’t the only ones who have worthwhile opinions on restaurants; upscale iterations of French or Italian cuisine aren’t the only foods worth talking about; and anonymity, the sacred shield of the restaurant critic, doesn’t necessarily work the way it used to. (As the San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic Soleil Ho put it, “I am a millennial and I’ve been on the internet for 15 years — it’s really hard to cover up my tracks at this point.”)
Such shifts in the world of criticism and food writing broadly were already underfoot; then came the pandemic, which rocked the entire restaurant industry (not to mention media) to its core. So we invited Boston Globe restaurant critic and food writer Devra First, New York Times restaurant critic Tejal Rao, and food writer and host of the podcast A Hungry Society presents Boundless Horizon Korsha Wilson to discuss how criticism has changed in the past year and where it’s headed.
Below are lightly edited excerpts from the conversation, part of our Eater Talks event series, as well as a full video recording. For more ways on how to help the restaurant community, check out Eater’s How to Help guide.
Tejal Rao: “Around March, I had a conversation with my editors [at the New York Times]: Should I keep filing weekly reviews? Should I rethink the restaurant review? And I decided I didn’t want to write straightforward reviews at all. So I did more, like, weird essays and policy reporting and just a mixture of pieces — like first-person stories about how to think about takeout in this moment, or how my relationship with cars has changed. Just looking at it from every possible angle.”
Devra First: “At the beginning, when indoor dining shut down and it wasn’t clear what was going to happen, I was like [to my editors at the Boston Globe], ‘Hey, what if we do a daily newsletter about cooking right now?’ And we just banged that out into the ether. We didn’t know what to do or how we were going to cover it; for the first month or so, it was a lot of guesswork and figuring out what what does it all mean for restaurants and for us. It was pretty tumultuous, but it’s settling in now. Where I work, at the Boston Globe, they’ve also really deeply sympathetic to the situation with restaurants. We started this thing called Project Takeout just encouraging readers to get takeout as much they’re able to. It’s been an interesting see us do sort of like boosterism on behalf of the [restaurant] industry, which was a stance that we never would have taken before.”
First: “It was really sad to lose Chicago Tribune dining critic Phil Vettel and Detroit Free Press restaurant critic Mark Kurlyandchik this year as voices — both Phil and Mark have been such important voices for their cities. I think it’s frightening for Chicago and frightening for the Midwest, but also, it’s a bellwether for what the country might look like down the road, because so few publications are investing in this kind of coverage. It is expensive to do.”
Wilson: “When the pandemic started, there was this very scary constricting of freelance opportunities, because people [in media] were unsure about ad budgets and if they even have freelance budgets going forward.”
Rao: “The loss of alt weeklies and blogs and a lot of those spaces — I am just forever devastated about that. Those spaces are so vital for local reporting, but also, for me, that was my journalism school. I wouldn’t have I wouldn’t have become a critic if I hadn’t gotten a job at the Village Voice.”
Wilson: “I have the very fortunate position as a freelancer of being able to look at the [food media] landscape and say, ‘Okay, what stories do I wish existed in the landscape right now?’ and then pitch those to the places where I think it makes the most sense. That’s the same thing I do with my podcasts... For me, it’s really important to highlight people of color that don’t get a lot of attention. So it’s been a refocusing or a doubling-down on what I cover already, which is: really talented folks who are adding a lot and not getting the attention they deserve.”
First: “I think that we need to look toward different pipelines. I do think that the people writing nationally who get information from local critics on the ground have cultivated other sources as well, and maybe more different kinds of voices. I hope in some ways that that pipeline, while getting constricted in some ways, will then broaden in a different way to make up that difference. Certainly, we’re going to see fewer and fewer restaurant critics around the country. So I guess we need to ask what that means, what readers want, what the public needs, and how do we look towards the future and think about how are we going to get this to people going forward?”
Wilson: “For [restaurant coverage] to be dynamic, a lot of different people need to have their voices included. You know, America isn’t just white men. That’s not a newsflash. But for a long time, restaurant critics have been cisgendered white men. So what perspectives are left out of food criticism when that happens? In order for restaurant criticism to continue to grow, different voices have to be at the table and talking about why restaurants matter, and why their food is good, or the service is good. As restaurants change, the people covering them needs to change too.”
Wilson: “An Eater Chicago op-ed about the loss of the food critic there referred to food critics as ‘arbiters of taste,’ and I disagree with that a bit. I think food critics are journalists, essentially, and they’re covering the food beat in whatever region that they’re in. And then national food critics are looking at the landscape of America’s restaurant scene and talking about the changes and important players and different cuisines that are available. I think looking at it holistically like that — instead of just ‘this is good, or this is bad’ — is really where criticism needs to go.”
Rao: “Should critics consider all the vital issues of their moment, like labor, inequities, exclusion — all the forces that we don’t immediately see and how they shape our culture and our restaurants and all the spaces we move in? Like, yeah, that has to be part of the job, even if it’s not part of every single story. That has to be part of what’s driving the work. I don’t think of myself as an ‘arbiter of taste.’”
First: “It’s really important for critics to continue to point out what needs to change, where there are weak points, where culturally there are problems — to really wrestle with the issues of American culture through the dining lens.”
Rao: “So much of what has been illuminated this past year wasn’t new, it has been around for a long time, and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere — the racial injustice, the physical costs to workers, the structural inequalities running all along the supply chain, the environmental costs. Our food system is so broken and so dysfunctional, and people are suffering because of it. And I think criticism can serve many roles, including continuing to shine a light on these issues.
That’s not its only role; but I’m thinking a lot about the power of that attention now. Like, where do I keep the reader’s attention when I have it? What do I want to make them think about? Pleasure is a way in, this delicious food is a way in, hopefully good writing is a way in — and then you have the reader’s attention, and what are you gonna do with it?”
Watch the entire panel conversation:
City officials expect indoor dining to resume on March 3
https://sf.eater.com/2021/2/24/22299438/san-francisco-indoor-dining-reopening-coronavirus
People are using credit card disputes to get free meals and it’s putting restaurants out of business
The restaurant industry might be in dire straights, but that’s not stopping some people from scamming small business to get free food. According to a report in the LA Times, an increasing number of customers have been filing credit card disputes on meal charges, falsely claiming that their order was missing items or that it never arrived. Credit card companies typically favor cardholders in these incidents and will issue refunds that the restaurants then must pay for, or in instances where the delivery person is blamed, someone might lose their job.
The most egregious story comes from the restaurant Spoon by H, whose owner, Yoonjin Hwang, says she will have to close at the end of the month because she’s lost so much money to this kind of scam. In one instance, a customer put in an order for more than $700 through Tock, and then claimed fraud. Hwang sent photo evidence of the order being prepared and the customer’s confirmation, but still lost her appeal with Visa. She started taking photos of every interaction, but was told by Tock, “Despite presenting supporting evidence, the issuing card company often sides with the consumer, even in cases that may be fraudulent.”
It’s unclear how many of these orders are people engaging in fraud (say, using someone else’s credit card), and how many are customers pretending that they didn’t get what they ordered to try to get a delivery for free. Credit card fraud is on the rise in general, and because of the pandemic, more orders are taking place without direct contact between the restaurant and customer. Third-party delivery apps like DoorDash and Postmates widens that gap and provides other opportunities for scams, even with apps that employ safeguards to ensure honesty from both the customer and the driver. DoorDash, for example, allows restaurants to press a button to confirm an order has been picked up, but other apps only let a restaurant acknowledge if an order has been received.
Drivers for third-party apps have also complained of facing repercussions, such as their accounts being suspended, by customers falsely claiming that an order wasn’t delivered. With contactless delivery now available, drivers are sharing stories on Reddit of times when they were asked to leave meals at the door, only to have them reported undelivered. “I followed the delivery instructions when I got there, left it on their door step, took a picture of the food, then knocked on their door and left,” wrote one worker two weeks ago. “Well, I get a message in door dash saying that they reported their food ‘not delivered’ but I definitely did, and now my account is facing deactivation.”
There also seems to be little recourse for delivery personnel who find themselves accused of not delivering an order. In a video recently shared by the Daily Dot, a Doordash driver accuses a CVS employee of marking her food as not being delivered when it was. “I get in trouble and have to pay for it and lose my job,” says the driver in the clip, allegedly providing proof on the app that the delivery was made. According to Doordash, drivers are responsible for photographing drop-offs. “When a customer reports that you have not delivered an order, we will review the delivery details to ensure that the above actions were taken,” says Doordash. “In cases where you have not completed these steps, your account will be eligible for deactivation.” Because of the CVS confrontation, the Doordash driver lost her job.
For what it’s worth, customers have experienced the reverse, with a driver claiming an order was delivered when it wasn’t, or missing food from an order. But in those cases, the delivery app typically awards a refund or a credit, operating — as with credit cards — under the assumption that the “customer is always right.” That ethos has always enabled the disenfranchisement of food workers, and now automatically siding with the customer can cost people their livelihoods and businesses.
The pandemic has led to one in four households experiencing food insecurity over the past year, which could mean that some of these examples of fraud are being committed out of desperation rather than greed. If that’s the case, it highlights just how tragic it is when a base human need like staying fed becomes a matter of capital (especially while grocery stores are dumping thousands of pounds of food and refusing to let activists redistribute it to those in need). Everyone in this situation — restaurant owners, workers, customers — is pitted against each other. “It took a huge toll on me mentally, because I found myself becoming more skeptical of large orders,” Hwang told the LA Times. “It pains me to think that I would grow so suspicious of our customers, and that is not how I want to do business.”
The rush to purchase heat lamps for outside seating has led to a lucrative secondary market — and a surge in stealing
On the Thursday before Valentine’s Day, in the early hours of the morning, McGillin’s Olde Ale House had its heat lamps stolen. In a time when outdoor heating can be the difference between a restaurant surviving the winter or shuttering for good, these lamps, as the thief likely knew, were more valuable than cash.
Footage from a nearby security camera showed a person slowly driving a white pickup truck down the street by McGillin’s outdoor dining setup, which is a block and a half away from the pub. It was after 1 a.m. and a cold, snowy night; the street was empty. Still, says McGillin’s owner Chris Mullins, who reviewed the camera footage, it looked like the culprit was taking their time to avoid attracting attention. After first doubling back on foot to cut the bike locks securing the heaters, the thief then pulled up in the pickup truck and threw four heaters in the back before driving off. Between the cost of the heat lamps and the propane gas fueling them, it cost the restaurant about $1,500.
Heater theft has emerged as yet another problem plaguing restaurants and other businesses that are now reliant on outdoor service while the indoors is off limits, as a result of COVID-19 safety measures and restrictions. There have been thefts reported from Portland to Sacramento to Aurora, affecting ramen shops, breweries, tapas restaurants, and more. Restaurant operators are aware, thanks to talk within the industry, that this is happening across the country.
“If it’s not locked inside your building, it’s almost open game for criminals,” says Mullin, who knows of two other businesses near McGillin’s that have had their outdoor heaters stolen. “They’re just everywhere, and every restaurant needs some right now to survive.”
To restaurant operators, getting their heaters stolen right off the patio or street adds insult to injury during what has already been an excruciating year, caught between trying to survive COVID-19 as well as the financial devastation it has caused, without much help from the government.
“We were pretty gutted that … with restaurants being such a beleaguered industry during the pandemic, that people would even think to rob a restaurant,” says Ping Ho, owner of Detroit butcher shop and restaurant Marrow, which had six heat lamps and propane gas tanks stolen off its patio when the restaurant was closed for Thanksgiving. “It just felt like a double whammy, given everything that we had already been trying to get through.”
Many restaurants already had to buy heaters at inflated prices, given the increased demand as temperatures started dropping last fall. Marrow’s stolen property was valued at about $1,400. Saginaw Old Town Junction, a restaurant in Saginaw, Michigan, lost approximately $1,100 from the theft of three high-power heaters — two of which were almost brand new — on February 1. Insa, a Korean barbecue restaurant in Brooklyn, suffered a loss of $1,400 from the theft of eight heaters in late January.
But the financial burden extends beyond just the cost of the equipment itself. Left with fewer heaters, restaurants are unable to accommodate as many outdoor customers. For restaurants that are restricted from indoor service, or that don’t have robust takeout or delivery options, that essentially takes away the majority of revenue. Filing an insurance claim — which requires a police report — can help make up for some of the lost income and stolen property cost. But between the insurance policy’s deductible and the resulting increased premium next year, what’s recuperated is typically a fraction of the actual loss, or for some restaurants like McGillin’s, not even worth pursuing.
“That was extremely bad for us in terms of outdoor dining revenue, which is very critical,” says Insa chef and partner Yong Shin. Although outdoor dining came with its own challenges, including staff having to deal with cold weather and customers who often wouldn’t put their masks on around servers, “any revenue is critical for us at this point,” says Shin.
For Saginaw Old Town Junction owner Tony Krasinski, the prospect of losing out on business due to the lack of heaters was not an option. “If you don’t have some kind of heat, you’re not gonna have customers, and I’ve got to keep my employees working,” he says. “We all need money; we all need to survive.” Within a day, he had acquired two more heaters to replace the stolen ones, although he had to drive to a city 30 minutes away to buy them.
Even finding replacement heaters can be difficult. Many big-box retailers, like Walmart and Lowe’s, had completely sold out of heat lamps by early fall, remembers Ho. Mullins says he had to place orders months in advance with multiple sellers; even now, he says, there’s a limit to how many outdoor heaters customers can buy at his local Home Depot, like when stores were rationing toilet paper and paper towels earlier during the pandemic.
Naturally, a market has emerged for heat lamps with inflated prices on sites like Facebook Marketplace, eBay, and Craigslist, according to restaurant operators. “Those people probably saw, in my impression, an opportunity,” says Ho. “It’s kind of the same type of people who went out and bought as many face masks and hand sanitizers as possible … I feel like there were a lot of people who made money during the pandemic.”
Those secondary marketplaces may be the final destination for some of these stolen heaters, some operators conjecture. “They’re a hot commodity in high demand,” says Mullins. “You go up and down the street, you could probably sell them right off the back of your truck.”
The replacement heaters that restaurants do eventually purchase will have to be better secured in order to prevent repeats of the same crime. For some restaurants, that means buying stronger locks and chains. For others, that means storing the heaters inside at the end of service each night before bringing them back out the next day. But while that may be more secure, it’s also more work for teams that are already overextended.
“We’re chaining them up differently, we’re having to move them every night, we’re having to store them. We have to do more work so it doesn’t happen again,” says Krasinski.
One silver lining, some restaurant owners describe, is feeling the support of their communities, which have rallied behind them. After posting about the theft on social media and asking patrons to buy gift cards to help the restaurant, Marrow sold more gift cards than it ever had before in a given two-day period. Between those purchases and some donations, the restaurant was able to pay off the cost of three replacement heaters, which friends drove out to the suburbs to get for them after seeing a Facebook listing.
Mullins and Krasinski also expressed thanks for the support of friends, customers, and peers in the industry. Other restaurants even reached out to offer them the use of their outdoor heaters — a generous gesture that says a lot about the restaurant industry, per Mullin.
Whether or not any of their stolen heaters will ever be recovered remains to be seen, but for some restaurant operators, it’s better to accept that whatever happened happened, and to put the past behind them.
“This is just a reminder that there are people out there who are perhaps more desperate than us,” says Ho, generously. “By thinking about it that way, it made us feel a little better — that the person who stole from us probably needed it more.”
While unfortunate, the theft is just another example of the hand that restaurants have been dealt during the pandemic. “We’ve been through so much, but we’ll get through it,” says Mullins. “Within months, hopefully this will just be a nightmare that we’ve slipped past.”
The rapper’s newest venture, called Cacti, is set to hit shelves next month
https://houston.eater.com/2021/2/24/22299168/travis-scott-cacti-agave-spiked-seltzer-launching-spring-2021
Join a discussion with food industry experts on where the traditional world of criticism stands, especially during the pandemic
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Miguel Gonzalez delivers the fruit to 120 top restaurants around the city
Miguel Gonzalez has become the go-to avocado provider for restaurants around NYC and Brooklyn. His meticulous process and attention to detail have made his avocados stand out as the best you can get in the city. “I’m very picky about every piece, I guess I’m a bit obsessive,” he says.
Daily, his process begins with sorting through every box of avocados he receives, looking for over-ripening, dents, and bruises. “It begins with the right unloading times, the proper checking of what comes in. It’s very important for me to understand what I’m receiving so I can plan accordingly.”
As he sorts by ripeness, those that are ready to be in stores and homes within a day get sent out, and others that are hard or “turning,” get sent to another temperature-controlled area to wait until Gonzalez deems them good to go. “My real idea is that if you have five avocados, you will enjoy five avocados. Perfection on every single one of them,” he says.
Gonzalez makes a delivery stop at to two-Michelin-starred Daniel. “Look how perfect it is, how beautiful” says chef Daniel Boulud of a freshly cut avocado in his delivery. “It’s the hardest thing to have a perfect avocado, and we receive the perfect avocado every time, with each delivery.”
Eating a grilled avocado salad made by Boulud, Gonzalez laughs, “With this in mind I don’t have room for failure anymore, I guess.”
Demand for seeds is up this year, and many hope this is the sign of a longer-term shift toward people growing their own food
This story was originally published on Civil Eats.
Annastasia Mullen has been expanding her home garden in Des Moines, Iowa, since 2015. After starting with three raised beds in her backyard, she rented three more in a community garden nearby and started planting flowers in addition to produce like tomatoes, peppers, leafy greens, and root vegetables.
When COVID-19 caused food system disruptions last spring, Mullen felt driven to grow more food than ever before and share it with her neighbors. “In a small way, it was something I could do to contribute at a time when a lot of things were feeling uncertain,” she said.
But she was shocked to find some of the seed companies she regularly ordered from had shut down ordering, and others had long shipping times. One order she placed at the end of February, for row cover to protect tiny pea plants from squirrels, took six weeks to arrive. By then, it was too late.
This year, Mullen placed orders two months earlier, at the end of December, and things went more smoothly. But many like her had the same idea, and some varieties were already out of stock. Interest in gardening — in backyards and community gardens and on kitchen windowsills — skyrocketed last March. Then, many first-time gardeners planted out of panic. Now, a year later, the interest persists. And while most gardeners no longer fear food shortages, they’re drawn to the sense of stability and control that producing food provides during still-uncertain times.
“What we’re seeing now is akin to what we saw immediately post lockdown. We expected demand would be strong again, but we didn’t expect it to happen so fast and so [intensely] in January,” said Doug Mueller, co-founder of Hudson Valley Seed Company, which sells heirloom and open-pollinated seed varieties from its home base in New York and is known for the artwork that adorns its packets.
Seed ordering among home gardeners generally peaks in February and March, Mueller said, and as that moment sets in, companies that cater to gardeners are hustling to keep up with volumes that are double, triple, and in some cases five times as high as typical years prior.
While demand is extremely high, five popular companies all told Civil Eats they did not anticipate seed shortages. But many are having to adjust their processes to handle the rush, causing alarm among customers. For example, some companies are turning off online ordering to allow time to restock. And Johnny’s Seed Company, a Maine-based seller that is the go-to source for many small-scale vegetable farmers, is limiting sales to gardeners to prioritize commercial producers. Additionally, shipping is delayed all over, due to both demand and a slowdown at the U.S. Postal Service.
Despite the chaos, many say the seed scramble — combined with an increased interest in saving and sharing seeds — are evidence of an American vegetable garden renaissance, ushered in by the food and health scares of the pandemic.
“Judging by the volume of interest we’re seeing now, it does make me feel like maybe it wasn’t a temporary response,’” Mueller said. “There might be social change [happening].”
Head to any online forum or Facebook group for gardeners, and the challenges they’re facing procuring seeds are immediately apparent. “I have never seen so many warning messages on websites. Like, ‘Do not call. Do not. Do not call and check on your order,’” said Carmen DeVito, a gardening guru who is currently working on a new project, Garden Cult, that will offer her expertise to home gardeners virtually. “I think they’re just so overwhelmed.”
DeVito’s right. Most seed companies buy their products from a network of farmers or from “seed houses” (essentially the middlemen of the industry) around the world. While the companies generally run out of a few varieties due to hiccups like crop failures, they plan years in advance and can usually fill gaps in supply by contracting with new growers or looking elsewhere for the same seed. Currently, most “out of stock” messages reflect the fact that they have not had time to put bulk seeds into packets.
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds is based in Missouri and specializes in rare heirloom fruit and vegetable varieties. “We have shut our website down three different times. When we do that, we post on our Facebook page to give us a chance to basically pack seeds and catch up with orders,” said Kathy McFarland, who handles public relations for Baker Creek.
The company’s orders were up about 300 percent last spring. And this January, McFarland said they were 500 to 600 percent higher than a typical year. “Even with machines, we can’t pack them fast enough,” she said. And the continued threat of COVID-19 infection exacerbates the situation, since companies are enforcing social distancing measures and other safety precautions in warehouses.
Given last year’s unexpected jump in seed sales, many companies planned ahead and made changes, including procuring more seed and updating processes. At Burpee Seed Company, owner George Ball said the high demand has persisted and increased since the spring. “We have increased our resources and capacity, so we are fully prepared to accommodate a sustained surge in demand,” he said.
Hudson Valley Seed Company converted to a new inventory system that would allow the team to keep better track of how many seeds were already packed so they didn’t oversell, which in the past resulted in delays. “Our turnaround times are somewhere in the three- to seven-business-day range right now. Last year, at our worst, we were at about three to four weeks,” Mueller said.
Many gardeners, especially in urban areas, where homes and apartments are smaller, prefer to buy seedlings rather than start their own plants indoors. Those purchases generally happen in the spring when it’s warmer, but some farmers are already seeing increased interest.
Elisa Lane runs Two Boots Farm, a flower and vegetable farm in Northern Maryland, and has always sold vegetable seedlings at farmers’ markets. Last spring, she moved sales online for the first time and was shocked by how fast she sold out. “I saw the trend — people want to be growing their own food,” she said.
So this year, she started pre-selling vegetable seedling collections that provide gardeners with a mix of plants to populate a garden, all from varieties that Lane knows grow well in the region. She’s offering pick-up and delivery and will provide growing tips along with the plants. “I’ve been surprised by the interest, given how early it is,” she said.
While most of the increased demand is coming from people who are picking up a trowel for the first time, more experienced gardeners are also going deeper by experimenting with seed saving.
At Seed Savers Exchange, executive director Emily Rose Haga has been documenting that phenomenon on several fronts. Seed Savers Exchange is a nonprofit dedicated to preserving heirloom seeds, and it has published a Community Seed Sharing directory since 1975. “It’s like a phone book of seed savers throughout the country, and also other countries, who list what kind of homegrown seeds they’re willing to swap with other people,” Haga explained.
In 2020, the number of new listers increased at three times the rate of the year before, she said, with new members producing nearly 1,400 new listings. Requests for samples from the seed bank were up 30 percent, and the organization had to reprint its seed saving books twice, “because our distributors were selling them like hotcakes,” she said.
The moment presented Seed Savers Exchange with an opportunity to advance its mission like never before. “These are such critical times for people to connect with their garden heritage and traditions that have really been at risk of declining over the last several decades,” Haga said. “We wanted to rise to the occasion and do everything we could to meet this demand and help out all these new gardeners and seed savers.”
In August, Haga and her team offered their annual Seed School virtually. While the event is normally limited to 25 participants — who learn about growing, harvesting, and saving seeds at the organization’s heritage farm headquarters in Iowa — this year, 250 people attended.
Carmen DeVito said she’s also seen more interest and participation in seed swapping groups, and people who have been coming to her to design gardens in urban spaces increasingly want edible plants instead of flowers. They also seem to be hungry for more than what they produce.
“I get the sense that one of the things that this pandemic has done is . . . made people feel out of control — and I’m speaking personally, too. Here’s this invisible thing that can kill you or someone you love or make you really sick,” she said. “And what is more powerful and liberating than putting a seed into the ground, watching it grow, and then eating a part of it? Than feeding yourself and your family or your friends? It’s so tangible and so visceral. I think people want that, and I think a certain percentage of the population will stick with it.”
Back in Des Moines, Mullen’s thinking has shifted in a related way, from panic planting to community resilience. Within the limited garden space she had, she began attempting to save more of her own seeds throughout 2020, starting with peppers, lettuce, and kale. While she’s not sure if they’ll sprout, she’s got plenty of other seeds she ordered ahead and is confident she’ll grow enough food to share.
“In this world, where it feels like anything that can be commodified is commodified, to be able to grow your own food and save your seed and then grow more of your own food — it feels like a revolutionary act,” she said.
• The COVID Gardening Renaissance Depends on Seeds — if You Can Find Them [Civil Eats]
A bread drawer frees up more space and offers better protection for your secret stash of starch
It’s one of my clearest sense memories from childhood: I’m standing in my grandparents’ kitchen, surrounded by the smooth, white (probably Formica) countertops, and pull out a seemingly unremarkable drawer to reveal an unusual interior sliding cover. Peeling back the plastic sheath reveals a hidden trove of breads, bagels, and assorted crusty treats, which blast the room like a scent cannon. The smell of bread still brings me back to that moment (I’ll spare you the Proust reference). But the real power of the memory isn’t the food; it’s the design of the bread drawer.
Like a bread box, a bread drawer helps maintain a dark, dry environment for preserving baked goods. But unlike a bread box, which can add a dash of aesthetic pop to a counter, the design benefits of a bread drawer are more practical and subtle. The counter is freed up (a big bonus for anyone working with limited counter space), crumbs are contained, and there’s room for snacks and packaged goods alongside your loaves. But what really pushes the bread drawer above all other drawers is its sliding cover, which provides shelter against rodents and other pests that may access the space from the back. Many versions also feature small ventilation holes in the cover to release moisture, keeping mold out along with critters.
Where built-in bookshelves declare a bibliophile’s wealth of knowledge, and stacks of records give away any melomaniac, a dedicated bread drawer is a more subtle flex. Having one shows true dedication to the floury arts, but from the outside, that drawer could hold silverware or it could hold cupcakes. It’s a shibboleth for a lover of baked goods.
The design has proven to have staying power, too. My grandparents’ plastic drawer fit in well with both their original midcentury International Style home and sleek ’80s kitchen revamp. In the ’40s, Ohio’s Republic Steel Corporation turned out insertable steel drawers, while Terence Conran featured a version emerging from a wooden cabinet in his famed 1974 guide The House Book. To anyone unfamiliar, the drawer’s design gives off an indisputable vintage vibe, but the idea has remained flexible through the ages.
There’s no reason to relegate it to a relic now. In fact, the bread drawer is perfectly tuned to the current pandemic moment. It’s a smart storage solution for anyone interested in remodeling to optimize their domestic space. It can also fit a fat sourdough boule that would overwhelm a slim countertop bread box, and it can properly maintain any specialty loaves you might pick up to support a local bakery. My grandparents had the drawer installed during a kitchen remodel, but you can buy a simple sliding cover to transform any existing drawer or dig up a vintage model that inserts within the drawer for even greater coverage.
Homeowners who prefer flashy upgrades will spend their stimulus checks on an air fryer or Our Place pans, but the bread drawer offers a quieter boost for a certain type of kitchen inhabitant. It can improve life in a small utilitarian way, while promising the charm of discovery. It’s a hidden treasure worth digging for.
San Mateo and Marin counties are expected to enter the red tier on February 23, with SF to follow in March
https://sf.eater.com/2021/2/23/22297493/indoor-dining-reopening-california-marin-sf-san-mateo
Black people are foundational to the culinary identity of the United States. This is the thesis of African/American: Making the Nation’s Table, a virtual exhibit from the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD). With text, historic artifacts, and a series of virtual events, the MOFAD exhibit traces this influence throughout all spheres of our food system: from agriculture and distilling, to the movements that spread food traditions across the country, to the individual chefs, cookbook authors, and inventors who have had an undeniable impact on the way we eat.
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The scope of these contributions is immense, and provides ample inspiration for the stories you’ll find here — stories that outline the myriad ways Black people, despite their expertise and innovations in the food space, have had to fight for recognition and support. Among these, there are stories that question the erasure of Black people from the discourse around some of its most celebrated food and drink, as with James Bennett II’s piece on why it’s “disingenuous, factually incorrect, and socially irresponsible to peddle that lily-white narrative” of craft beer, along with stories that celebrate the undersung pioneers of the African-American culinary canon. “Black people were embedded in every aspect of society in this country. We’ve always been there,” says Osayi Endolyn in a discussion of the first African-American cookbook author, Malinda Russell, “but stories like Malinda’s give us permission to really lock into that even more.”
And as we hear these stories, our perception of American cuisine can evolve. The notion that African Americans are responsible for Southern food, which in itself is perhaps the most American food, is now well established to the point of oversimplification — but taken in sum, the stories contained here and within the MOFAD exhibit should convince anyone that Black folks made the nation’s table, full stop. So, as Dr. Jessica B. Harris, the lead curator of the exhibit, writes in the following introduction:
Editorial lead: Monica Burton
Creative director: Brittany Holloway-Brown
Editors: Erin DeJesus, Rebecca Flint Marx
Contributors: James Bennett II, Osayi Endolyn, Dr. Jessica B. Harris, Nadra Nittle, Nicole Rufus, Jaya Saxena, Elazar Sontag, Toni Tipton-Martin
Photographers: Chelsea Kigano, Michelle K. Min, Neal Santos
Copy editor: Emma Alpern
Fact checkers: Olivia Exstrum, Kelsey Lannin, Dawn Mobley
Engagement: Esra Erol, Milly McGuinness
Project manager: Ellie Krupnick
Special thanks to Matt Buchanan; Amanda Kludt; Jesse Sparks; Jenny G. Zhang; the MOFAD exhibition team: Catherine Piccoli, Jean Nihoul, Alexis Fleming, Myriah Towner, Shuan Carmichael-Ramos, Dave Arnold, Peter Kim
The overwhelmingly white image of beer culture erases a much longer, far-reaching narrative of Black brewing
In a 1995 article in the Journal of Black Studies, Kenneth Christmon describes an interaction between the French ethnographer Marcel Griaule and a Dogon elder and priest named Ogotemmeli. Griaule, who was doing work in Mali, told Ogotemmeli that he was confused by the occasional ramblings he had heard from older, apparently drunk men who repeated what he believed to be a curious phrase: “The dead are dying of thirst.”
Ogotemmeli explained the phenomenon thusly: Death, he said, requires certain rituals to be performed before the departed can join the ancestors in peace. These rituals included a costly amount of food and drink; to economize, a family might wait until they could be performed with other families. While they waited, the spirits, caught between two worlds and in search of something to quench their thirst, would gather at the vats of fermenting beer that the families traditionally prepared for religious and secular purposes. They imparted the beer with their energy, giving it its intoxicating qualities. When an older man consumed it, Ogotemmeli continued, his ensuing state of drunkenness was the struggle between his own life force and that of the departed. So what sounded like incoherent nonsense to Griaule — “the dead are dying of thirst” — was actually the drinker’s attempt to expel the foreign energy. It made people take notice. The spirits are getting restless; it’s time to give them peace.
The Black American cookout is a sacred institution. And just like church and discussions about the Obama White House, it has its own set of sacred rules. They govern every aspect of the function, from who can make potato salad to how to deal with your dietary restrictions to the variety of drinks you’ll see: juices, teas, Sprite, “sprite,” and — if you’re grown enough — brown liquor. Beer, though, is another question entirely.
I’m not saying you won’t find any beer at the cookout. I’d place a sure bet on Heineken, a solid one on Corona, and a possible one on Bud heavy. But if you arrive with only craft beer, all who see you will scorn you, and I can’t say I’d disagree with them. This culinary and social event is not for your Ahab’s Shanty Sea Salt Ale or Bobo Brazil Coffee Stout. That’s because the Cookout operates with a grace afforded it via a social contract. And while any number of things could be written about its governing rules, I’m eternally fascinated by ones concerning beer.
Before I continue, let me offer a simple acknowledgement: The ways that Blackness is lived and expressed are myriad, but sometimes you’ve got a hunch that your massive mental file of anecdotes might be part of a record that illustrates a larger, shared experience. As such, the question of how my melanated companions consume beer has lately been an ongoing topic of conversation between me and Christopher Gandsy, the chef, brewer, and owner of Flatbush, Brooklyn’s Daleview Biscuits and Beer. “I remember going to cookouts at my family’s house and men were always drinking beer,” says Gandsy, who named his brewery after Dale View, his hometown neighborhood in Columbia, South Carolina. “Only Budweiser, the tallboy cans.”
Regardless of how we do and don’t drink beer, there is, I believe, a widespread assumption that Black folks don’t drink — or make — the stuff. Beer, as it appears in American pop culture, is hilariously white. The idea of craft, as critic Lauren Michele Jackson has observed, is steeped in that whiteness. Of craft breweries, she writes, “the founders, so many former lawyers or bankers or advertising execs, tend to be white, the front-facing staff in their custom denim aprons tend to be white, the clientele sipping $10 beers tends to be white.”
You know the image: an hirsute white guy swilling beer in specialty stemware, in an “authentic” bar riddled with fugazi bullets in a gentrified neighborhood, frequented by patrons who read far too deeply into hip-hop lyrics.
To be fair, this is an exaggerated idea of craft beer, but that overwhelming whiteness colors the macro stuff too. White America has a monopoly on the stereotype of college-aged students crushing a 30-rack of Natural Light, and I dare you to find me a Coors Banquet TV spot featuring Black people.
The dominant image of beer culture in this country has always been predominantly white, or more specifically European: German lederhosen and Oktoberfest, English and Irish pubs, kitschy “authentic” biergartens. While beer certainly has a place in many European cultures, these images monopolize the collective imagination.
But it’s disingenuous, factually incorrect, and socially irresponsible to peddle that lily-white narrative, because it discounts the Black brewers and entrepreneurs deep in the beer game. Take, for instance, Sacramento’s Annie Johnson, who in 2013 became the first woman in 30 years — and the first Black brewer outright — to win the American Homebrewers Associations’ Homebrewer of the Year award. In Pittsburgh, Day Bracey and Mike Potter co-founded Fresh Fest, the nation’s first beer festival with a focus on brewers of African descent. Up in Harlem, Celeste Beatty runs Harlem Brewing Company, the first brewery in the country owned by a Black woman.
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CORBIS via Getty Images
The overwhelmingly white imagery of beer culture erases a much longer, far-reaching narrative, too, as you’ll learn if you journey to Washington, D.C., where Kofi Meroe and Amado Carsky run the Sankofa Beer Company. Sankofa takes its boozy cues from ingredients and fermentation practices back home — “home” meaning Nigeria and Ghana for Meroe, and Nigeria and Benin for Carsky. Something Meroe told me revealed the presence of a cultural equation that was begging to be balanced. “It’s not necessarily that we’re bringing African beers or beer styles to America,” he said. “It’s more so that we’ve adopted American and European beers but [are] looking at West African fermentation, processes, styles, and ingredients as well.”
Beer, in other words, occupied a central role in pre-colonial West African religion and social life — and still does. From Africa to Colonial America to The Birth of a Nation, Black folk were no strangers to beer. But something had to happen to explain where we’re at now: a largely monochrome craft brew economy, macrobreweries that have historically neglected to market their core products to a Black demographic, and — in the instances when beer is around in Black homes — a fridge full of Heineken.
To understand why, it helps to begin in Africa: The more you learn about the role beer played there, and the practices and social norms around it, the easier it becomes to draw parallels to the lived experience of Black America.
“The ancestors of African Americans, they were fermenters. They were really good at making their own liquor and making their own beers and also making wine from fruit,” says the culinary historian and writer Michael W. Twitty. “One of our Africanisms, in fact, was producing all these things, and one of the reasons why we did that was because it was related to our traditional spirituality.”
Libation, Twitty adds, “is the heart of African spiritual worship.” He recounts seeing this firsthand on a trip to a Tikar village in Cameroon. “They pull out a big ceramic vessel full of their traditional beer,” he says. “And even though a lot of Tikar are Muslim, this is one of the traditional religious practices they kept alongside Islam.” While beer drinking may be nonexistent on Friday, Twitty notes, you better believe that at social functions to honor youth, celebrate a marriage, or put the deceased in the ground, alcohol is poured out and passed among the elders.
When trying to account for Black America’s apparently absent relationship with beer, hearing about this ritual consumption explains a lot — at least for me. When I was a kid, for instance, beer was never a presence in the fridge. It was limited to holidays and celebratory meals and functions: crab feasts, cookouts, and family reunions.
But if ritual and social mores might account for a great deal of why different cultures drink the way they do, climate informs it as well. And in the case of alcohol production and consumption, arguably no change in climate was more impactful than the Little Ice Age, a period of regional global cooling that stretched roughly from the beginning of the 14th century to the middle of the 19th.
While wine was no stranger to Northern Europe in a pre-cooled world, chillier weather devastated the region’s grape crop. “That Little Ice Age canceled grape growing in the British Isles and Scandinavia, and along the Baltic Coast,” Twitty explains. “Northern Europe went from being able to grow grapes to only being able to grow hops and grain.” On top of that, the historian Philipp Blom argues, the Little Ice Age ignited rapidly changing social, political, and philosophical movements across the world, fueling an age of exploration and the birth of capitalism. So from there, it wasn’t a big leap for white folks to build some big boats and then go a-sailin’ for spices, get crazy rich, engage in some casual acts of murder and land theft, then build even bigger boats and pack them to the gills with human bodies with the intent of forcing them to work as slaves to keep the economy alive.
The prevailing image of an enslaved Black person is that of someone laboring in the fields or being ordered around the big house, but American slavery built and sustained pretty much every aspect of this American life. And that included beer — again, the West African societies from which so many bodies were stolen were no stranger to the mechanisms of fermentation. “We know that enslaved Africans and African Caribbeans were brewing beer or were cultivating hops or other grains that would have been used in the brewing process,” says Theresa McCulla of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Black brewing skill was no secret, she adds. Advertisements for enslaved people who were skilled brewers? Absolutely. Wanted posters that identified fugitives as skilled brewers or otherwise involved in the brewing industry? As American as apple pie. Peter Hemings, enslaved at Monticello, was a master brewer.
I’m loath to call this knowledge “revelatory,” yet I’m having a hard time thinking of a more fitting word. Erasure is deliberate. Black folks’ labor and participation in the production of a craft product should be tied to that product itself. It’s a bizarre occurrence, really, that a niche economy obsessed with craft conveniently ignores the forced, unpaid labor that made those goods. Beer hardly stands alone in this conversation — think of the aesthetic and consumer culture surrounding barbecue or whiskey. Or, as Lauren Michele Jackson puts it, the “character of craft culture, a special blend of bohemianism and capitalism, is not merely overwhelmingly white — a function of who generally has the wealth to start those microbreweries and old-school butcher shops, and to patronize them — it consistently engages in the erasure or exploitation of people of color whose intellectual and manual labor are often the foundation of the practices that transform so many of these small pleasures into something artful.”
If a culture’s drinking practices are transmitted through generations, then the Black relationship to alcohol can be explored through a couple of factors. For one, there’s the complicated issue of temperance, which was far more tangled up in race than its name would have us believe.
Back in the 19th century, abolitionists combined their moral crusade to rid the nation of the evils of slavery with the goal of persuading it to abandon the perils of drink. The causes were intertwined to such an extent that it became an “every abolitionist was a teetotaler but not every teetotaler was an abolitionist” kind of situation, says H. Paul Thompson, history department chair at North Greenville University. Not only were many slave narratives and the contemporary fiction from abolitionist authors anti-alcohol, alcohol “was always associated with the oppressor,” Thompson points out. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Prue becomes an alcoholic and is whipped to death; in Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative, he recounts the free flow of booze for a week during Christmas, which he argues kept the enslaved from plotting an escape. And in 12 Years a Slave, Solomon Northup writes about how his “friends” offered him drinks in a saloon, culminating in a drugged dram that landed him in a slave pen. (For the record, I can’t help but think of Northup when I remember being warned as a kid to neither drink around white people nor accept boozy gifts in open containers.)
“Black people’s attitude toward alcohol in the 1800s was not ideological. It was strictly pragmatic,” Thompson says. Black America wasn’t anti-drink, we just stuck with what we knew. Alcohol only came around at Christmas? Cool. The only non-Blacks that are friendly to us are these Northern folks that say alcohol is bad? Got it. And then there are the implications of emancipation and the Thirteenth Amendment, too.
“The last thing [Black people] were were drunkards under slavery,” Thompson explains. “So when they get free it’s not like, ‘Oh, now we’re free to drink.’” At the top of the agenda were things like getting an education or a job or legally married, property ownership, and generally not being treated like garbage in a society where “all men are created equal.” Throw poverty in the mix? It’s counterintuitive to keep booze around when there are groceries to be had. Still, that doesn’t come close to explaining how beer culture grew in America among different ethnic enclaves. The chronicles of immigration are tightly woven into the country’s fabric, and of course they have something to say about the history of brew here.
For much of American history, beer and cider were produced in small batches for consumption at home, but as the 19th century chugged along, so did German immigration. Those immigrants both populated the beer trade and brought with them a bonafide beer culture that dramatically changed the way beer was made and consumed. Professional breweries were set up, and brewing became an increasingly profitable business with its own insular social and financial networks. “And so African Americans began to be shut out of the process of employment and breweries,” says the Smithsonian’s McCulla, “whether that was by the brewers themselves or eventually by unions who, because of discriminatory practices, would not hire African Americans into unions.” All to say: if you were a Black brewer trying to find work in the latter 1800s, good luck.
Exclusion, though, occupied two sides of the same coin. On one side, the German-American beer garden wasn’t necessarily shutting out “others” because of any racial animus. “That was their Sunday outing,” Twitty says of its patrons. “They had a culture, and they weren’t really fraternizing with us. It wasn’t because they didn’t like us or anything.” Tack on the fact that these beer gardens were in generally urban areas (and we’re talking about a pre-Great Migration United States here) and this checks out. If you’re Black person (or any non-German) in a Midwestern city, why would you spend your leisure time with Teutonic folk speaking German, as if you could even understand the conversation?
On the flip side, there was saloon culture. As beer became an increasingly mass-produced commodity, consumers became less inclined to imbibe their own homemade table brew. Saloons popped up seemingly everywhere, as did the social codes that defined them. If segregation in beer gardens was more passive, then in saloons, it took a more intentional form. “Suddenly beer was less consumed at home and more likely to be consumed in taverns or saloons, which would also discriminate against Black consumers,” says McCulla. “They would not allow them to enter the same spaces as European Americans or white Americans.”
With all this attention to the North, maybe it’s time to turn an eye to the postbellum South.
Not all temperance activists believed in stuff like “equality.” In the decades leading up to the national Prohibition, some of them were freaking out. The temperance movement did include abolitionists, and later social progressives and suffrage activists. But nativists and segregationists also counted themselves among the temperance crowd — what if alcohol destoryed the fabric of white supremacist society itself?
“There was always a tension between the industry, which wanted to sell product, and powerful local interests that wanted to control the use of the product,” says Thomas Pegram, a history professor at Loyola University Maryland. Below the Mason-Dixon, he explains, there was increasing concern about the idea of the saloon, because “it was one of a few places in Southern society where recreational mixing across racial lines was possible.” Up north, where dry activists were becoming increasingly suspicious of new immigrants congregating over drinks, temperance could take on an anti-immigration slant, too.
Many breweries were forced to shut down during Prohibition’s enforcement from 1920 to 1933. Those that did survive could not afford to go through a similar experience again. “[After repeal], the industry is working really hard to reestablish itself while simultaneously treading extraordinarily lightly with regard to federal regulation,” notes J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, diversity ambassador for the Brewers Association. As part of those efforts, big brewers like Miller and Anheuser-Busch recast their brand image as something definitively patriotic and “American.” “Beer [culture] just became this flag-waving, rah-rah-rah America type of culture,” she says. And yes, in this context, beer culture means “white” — although some breweries did go out of their way to court the Darker Audience. The Bushwick, Brooklyn-based Rheingold, for example, was the regional sponsor for Nat King Cole’s 1956 television variety show, as well as a sponsor of Jackie Robinson’s weekly radio show.
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While beer was increasingly “all-American,” not all Americans were drowning in suds. The alcoholic beverage industry that began to emerge after the repeal of Prohibition got a further boost by the white flight to the suburbs that followed the end of World War II. More space and disposable income to entertain helped to create a new cocktail culture — one whose sophisticated, cosmopolitan drinks made beer, the everyman’s brew, look flat by comparison. So how could the average beer company compete? By developing a high-ABV product to compete with the demand for cocktails.
If you’ve never seen a vintage malt liquor ad, there are few features you should look out for. First is the name: Country Club, Olde English, Private Stock. Classy stuff. You’ll also see smiling white folks having the time of their white lives. And you’ll notice the booze is served out of a bottle, in coupes, tumblers, or wine glasses. This was the drink of the future, targeted squarely at a cocktail-drinking white American. But, as Jackson-Beckham notes, “that product really just didn’t resonate with that audience.”
Malt liquor is, to put it lightly, an exceptionally acquired taste. So how did it go from garden party aspirations to Boyz n the Hood levels of despair? The exact why is a matter of lore, but Jackson-Beckham has a pretty good idea. “The best story I’ve been able to get is that there was some kind of persistent market research saying that urban audiences make more purchasing decisions based on ABV and that urban audiences tend to buy for volume,” she says. “The decision was made to market malt liquor not as an upscale product, but a specifically urban product and to put it in a large vessel.“ Boom: the 40.
Advertising has more to do with what we buy than most of us care to admit, and the malt liquor ads of the ’70s and ’80s were tailor-made for Black America — or at least, what brewers imagined Black America to be, thanks to some choice celebrity endorsements. During that time, Schlitz malt liquor had a loaded roster, featuring ads from the Platters, Kool & the Gang, Richard Roundtree, the Spinners, Teddy Pendergrass, and, singing what is easily a top-10 jingle of all-time, the Lockers. Colt 45 famously employed the cool of Captain Calrissian himself, Billy Dee Williams. And the talents of high-profile musicians provided a clear throughline to later campaigns, most notably the ’90s-era St. Ides spots that featured specially crafted verses from Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Wu-Tang, 2Pac, and Biggie.
The politics of malt liquor are conflicted and fascinating, largely because of the calculated exclusion of Black consumers by major brewers and their abstention from marketing more “respectable” beer brands to Black America. Pabst owns Colt 45. Molson Coors pushes Olde English. King Cobra? That’s an Anheuser-Busch brand. And yet the popular image of Black American drink does not include Pabst or Coors or Bud Light. I’m not saying it needs to, but I am saying it’s in part by design.
“There’s no kind of upward or lateral mobility through the brand portfolio,” says Jackson-Beckham. “You kind of get stuck in the 40 bubble. In a lot of other companies’ brand portfolios, you might try a product and go, ‘Oh, well, okay. I liked this one, maybe I’ll try that one.’” Such a consumer path doesn’t exactly lead out of the 40-ounce bottle.
The relationship of Black America to malt liquor continued its evolution at the same time the country experienced a moment of upward mobility (although our collective memory of a mass entry of Black Americans into the ranks of the middle class may be somewhat inflated). But that mobility informed respectability, too. “A lot of Black people were going through this kind of Cosby Show-esque upward social mobility,” Jakson-Beckham explains. “They did not want to associate themselves with the symbols of a kind of urban Blackness — that is for them like a bit of a danger of association.”
But that narrative — that being associated with “Black” things will make the white establishment think less of you — smacks of the worst kind of respectability. “This is a clearly infantilizing narrative,” says Jackson-Beckham. “It’s like, you are either incapable or too irresponsible to moderate on your own.” In Black America, that narrative went, malt liquor is beer, beer is bad, and that badness ruins communities. Beginning in the late ’80s, a number of episodes portrayed malt liquor as a symbol of Black community decay. Some were factual, like Black-led protests over malt liquor ads perceived to target a vulnerable Black community in Baltimore. And some were fictional, like the aforementioned 1991 John Singleton film Boyz n the Hood, or Michael Jai White’s Black Dynamite, a 2009 Blaxploitation send up in which a crime-fighting team uncovers a nefarious scheme by the U.S. government to “alter” the bodies of Black men by getting them to drink an aggressively advertised malt liquor.
Macrobrews weren’t marketed to Black people, and the one style of beer that was — malt liquor — was being rejected by some in the community. But there was one type of product that filled that void: premium spirits. Brands like Hennessy became the products of Black cosmopolitanism and upward mobility. Far more costly than beer, these mid- to high-shelf spirits imbued alcohol consumption with an even greater connotation of luxury. Sure, maybe Black people are saddled with a D’Ussé stereotype, and Hennessy may be the “Spirit of the NBA,” but these brands marketed to Black America when home-grown beer wouldn’t.
Still, it’s not like beer didn’t make a play — if you’re looking for a consistently referenced brew in hip-hop history, you’ll see Heineken again and again. The argument you could make for Heineken being a “Black” beer is that it came with the same cosmopolitan prestige that accompanied premium spirits. Ditto Beck’s (or Grey Poupon, for that matter). Similar to the way premium spirits functioned, Heineken may have occupied the role of “sophisticated” brew, worlds apart from the domestic blandness of Miller and Coors.
The story could end there, but that would erase the picture of the Black brewers making legitimately tasty craft beer, shattering old stereotypes in the process.
“We’re reclaiming beer because it’s ours,” Kim Harris says when I ask her what she wants people drinking craft beer to know about the relationship between the brew and the African continent. In 2018, Harris, along with fellow HBCU graduates Stacey Lee and Kevin Bradford, opened Harlem Hops, an uptown craft brew bar that’s taken up the mantle of reorienting the relationship between beer and Black America. Sometimes that means getting customers to try something new. Someone may pop in, apprehensive about the menu because of a bad experience with a particular alcoholic beverage. “Once we tell them why we like to sell craft beer and liquor, they really get to understand what it is that we’re doing, and they taste it,” says Lee. “And they actually end up liking it better than a beer they’ve had before. Better than the Grey Goose or Jack Daniel’s that they experienced.”
It’s equally about forging a connection to Africa’s beer past, too. “It’s all about history for us,” Harris chimes in. “Once we can have a better understanding of our history, it makes us a better group of people.”
But I had to ask them: Was alcohol a casual presence in their homes during their youth? It was for Lee and Harris, whose fathers preferred beer and whiskey. But it wasn’t for Bradford. Alcohol “wasn’t really a thing in my house,” he recalls. “Just special occasions. Mom would drink wine every now and then. It wasn’t prevalent in my home. I got interested in beer in college, and the rest is history.”
I can relate to this, and so can Daleview Biscuits and Beer’s Christopher Gandsy. Beer was around when he was coming up, he says, but the thing to drink was that brown. Gandsy didn’t stumble into the craft beer game until Father’s Day nine years ago, when his wife gave him a Mr. Beer homebrew kit. One kit turned into four, and that’s when Gandsy says he realized “beer wasn’t just that American lager that I wasn’t used to, like in college.” Today, his beer menu changes frequently, with brews bearing the name of friends and Black heroes alike — the Paul Bogle, a sorrel-infused pale ale named for the Jamaican national hero, is a neighborhood favorite. For Black History Month 2021, he’s lined up a slate of beers to honor civil rights leaders like Pauli Murray (a dark ale), Diane Nash (an IPA), and Claudette Colvin (a red wheat ale). “And a majority of the beers coming out are [named for] women,” Gandsy says. “My belief is that lots of movements that happened throughout history, especially during the diaspora, wouldn’t have happened without strong women.” Each beer will be accompanied by a bio, so if you don’t know, then you will know. That theme of education pervades much of Gandy’s work: Although he got into the beer game because he genuinely enjoys drinking the stuff, he also had a desire to inform and facilitate cultural conversation — all while turning Flatbush into a craft-friendly neighborhood.
But it’s through an internship program he’s piloting that he hopes to make the biggest impact. Called Lovibond, after the inventor of a device used to measure the color — and thus the quality — of beer, its ultimate goal is that the people of color who go through the training “can find a job in the brewing community, in the city,” Gandsy says. For an industry that has historically been so blindingly white, this is a move to inject some much-needed perspective.
The mere act of thinking about beer and Black culture feels, for lack of a better word, weird. There are a lot of assumptions and a lot of hearsay. But something that Michael Twitty told me assuages those uncertain feelings and legitimizes that most delightful feeling I get when I share details of my childhood or adolescence with another Black person who had a similar experience, despite living hundreds of miles away.
“Some aspects of our culture don’t fit the mold of Western scholarship, because Western scholarship demands that there is some kind of written transmission of information and culture that explicitly says that something occurred,” Twitty told me. “I’ve abandoned that to some extent, because I think it’s bullshit. I think that it’s a way of obfuscating our ability to reckon and make peace with our own story. Part of our story is not based on written words. It’s based on oral tradition, it’s based on intuition, based on imagination. It’s based on feeling, it’s based on stories. It’s based on anecdotes and it’s our job to weave them together, to create a nexus that gives us a sense of fulfillment and peace that we know who we are. That having been said, you know, Black folks were master distillers.”
There’s much to learn, and much to teach. And much respect and acknowledgment that’s long overdue. So tarry here no longer, and pour out a Heineken brew for your deceased crew on Memory Lane. The dead, after all, are dying of thirst.
James Bennett II is a writer and so-called “critic” who spends his days thinking about food and music.
Lead image photo credits: MOFAD, Martin Goodwin/Getty, Archive Photos/Stringer/Getty
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