CHEFILEPTIC

11 (pt. 1). from serving Guests to feeding clients

Around springtime of 2001, things weren’t exactly hopping at the resort.  I had started in the spring of ’99, and we had always been plenty busy since then, but now the big banquet business was slowing down.

Thing was, as I came to understand, the .com ‘bubble’ was beginning to ‘burst’.  My job had largely been about feeding that bubble, and tickling its dribbling bloated appetite with whatever indulgences it demanded.  See, that resort I worked at was what liked to be thought of as a real classy operation—a four-star (oops, I mean ‘diamond’) situation, where customers were called ‘guests’ by staff and ice-swans graced banquet tables at lunch-times. 

I had begun in fast food, and had managed to work my way on up through the food industry to then be working right next to the ocean, feeding real live VIP’s. 

But then, I recall how I started seeing some familiar company names in the news.  I remember more like overhearing it from a distance as it got started—this company is folding, that company is done—and repeatedly thinking to myself, “hey, I feed them at work!”. 

See, the silicon valley is more or less about an hour and a half inland from there, and for a while there these companies were like trying to outdo each-other by indulging their upper tiers with pampering … so they rotated through the resort for both working and relaxing hours.  For all their breaks, the team I worked with fed them, and very well.  It was a big kitchen and I got to learn a lot.  Most of the people I worked with were cool, and some had even become friends.  And there was always plenty of work, until then anyways.

All of a sudden business slowed right down and people began to get scheduled for less hours.  When I learned that working too few hours would cause insurance to be interrupted, I threw my little tantrum and got my hours back, but then they’d start vanishing again and it became clear that the ice-swan lunches weren’t recovering—which made sense with the companies having their investors flip out about all kinds of overreaching and waste (that I helped feed).  It became clear I’d better start looking for something more solid; I had learned enough to know by then that I had damn well better not let my insurance supply run out.

A few months later I pulled up outside of the ‘HCSC’ for a job interview. 

I had followed up on an ad in a local paper, and somehow, even when I’d spoken with someone on the phone to set up the interview I hadn’t managed to learn exactly what the acronym HCSC represented—I had just seen a short, simple ad in a local paper that read something like “HCSC Cook needed. Solid hours/benefits” and that was good enough to interest me, so guess I just didn’t think to ask when I set it up.  It took till I pulled up in front of the facility for me to learn that I would be interviewing for a cooking position at the Homeless Center of Santa Cruz. 

I knew this was going to be a learning experience for sure.

When I began at the Homeless Center, I had already laid out a few guidelines for myself.  One of them I believe formed in my mind right as I walked onto the property: whatever my views or politics may or may not have been, I would have to leave them at home if I wanted to keep this workable for very long.

I learned to describe my approach to the job this way—”those people over there want to pay me to feed these people here in front of me, with whatever is in this budget.”  Now, why were these people here and hungry?  And why did those people want to feed them?  Not my job.

My main feat would become doing the best I could with the knowledge I was working with to feed our clientele the most safe and nutritious meals I could come up with on the most meager budget I could have ever imagined.  When I began managing the kitchen a short time after I started working there, that came out to being something in the neighborhood of 7.5 cents per meal.  Tellingly, it was a number I had to calculate, as apparently nobody had yet actually taken our meal count and crunched it into our food budget.

And sure enough, many times as I worked as this facility’s Food Service Director over the next three years, I found I had to keep lots of my own feelings internalized; it was all part of a larger test.

The area was then, and is ever-more so now, in a conundrum when it came to the homelessness situation.  I had learned more and more about this issue from the time I had moved there back in ’95, but not necessarily because it was particularly interesting to me or anything.  I had just gradually learned about it because living there in the Santa Cruz area puts the issue is in your face, especially when you go downtown.

Almost anyone who might visit or move to the area would very likely find themselves asking some pretty basic questions about the homeless, like: “Why are they here?”  “How do they stay alive?”  “Why are there so many?”  And (if the ‘outsider’ ended up staying around for a while), “Why does there always seem to be more and more of them?”

These questions really hadn’t plagued me every day before I arrived in that part of the world. Where I had come here from, I knew there were folks that weren’t ‘well off’, but these were less visible—largely because it’s much colder in Michigan, so if you don’t keep your ass inside for a good amount of the time, you’ll freeze to death.  There were some shelters and soup kitchens back there, but somehow the weather factor shielded the homeless community somewhat from obvious view, whereas there in California for a good part of the year sleeping outside meant you most likely would live, making this segment of the population much more conspicuous.  Warmer weather meant folks could usually make it through nights with some cardboard under bushes or bridges or wherever, as long as there was some food around.

And my job was now going to be feeding this community of people. 

Clearly there was some ironic lesson for me to learn along this twisted path that had moved me from making some Sunday-brunch-munching asshole “an omelet on a single egg-white with smoked salmon and cream-cheese folded in quarters”, to figuring out how to get a nutritious adult-sized meal together for less than a dime. 

I couldn’t help but make the joke more than once after the whole ‘.com-bubble’ popped, that sometimes I thought I saw some of the same faces I used to feed at the resort waiting in line for trays at the HCSC.  I know I would have enjoyed such a moment for sure if I had ever looked out there and saw that one omelet-guy  who had held up the whole line of Sunday-brunch resort guests waiting in line for their omelets as I had carefully crafted his little two-bite indulgence.

That never happened, though.  What did happen was that I realized that in this crazy place, I had found a hungry crowd that was more solidly dependable than those risk-taking indulgers I had formerly thought  would be the most likely to provide that me with a solid stream of food-work. 

There in Santa Cruz, the homeless were (and certainly still are) hungry every day, and that town was decidedly going to pay someone to feed them.  At that time, it was me and a kitchen staff of about three to four other cooks, aided by a varying number of volunteers.  I had started in a regular staff position, but let’s just say after a short time it became clear that I was best suited to be the administrator of the kitchen, so I was promoted.

It has expanded over time, but when I started, the facility was basically a paved lot area in front of a large converted warehouse building that had been remodeled to have separate areas providing various services for the homeless. 

At the front of the building was a small office section, and the first door beyond the offices led into to a kitchen area.  The next door led into the dining area, which was set up similar to a school lunchroom.  The next section of the building was a dry storage area (behind large roll-up doors left from the original warehouse setup).  Further down was the ‘hygiene bay’ where the ‘clients’ could sign up for showers and borrow lockable lockers. 

Across the lot was a facility called the Homeless Person’s Health Project–I didn’t completely learn the details about it then, but I know that volunteering medical professionals offered some basic health care services there.

The kitchen was actually really nice.  It had been built recently, so it was relatively easy to keep up, and overall, it really was a reasonably safe and clean place to work.

And, as would prove critical to me, it had a kitchen office upstairs and a lockable restroom in the dining area.  These features both came in handy more than once, and without them I probably would have lost the job even sooner. 

I don’t know how many times, but more than once at that job I felt that old ‘déjà vu’ feeling starting up, and I managed to get myself up the stairs to my office, or out into that restroom behind the locked door, and had managed to lie down in time–and somehow kept that job a-rolling.  And more than once after a seizure, I had awoken having to face that I was too torn up to finish my shift, and my brother was called to come get me (again).

At first, the admin had looked the other way, but eventually I simply had to be dealt with.  Even though I had ‘disclosed’ that I had occasional seizures at my interview, no one (including me) really knew then just how disruptive the problem would come to be.

As I got started there, one of the administrators had given me some real ‘scoop’ about how and why things worked the way they did in this environment I was soon going to be in charge of.  I’m very sure that his advice, along the way, helped me to work there as long as I possibly could have.

I don’t really know his history, but basically, he came across as a kind of low-key middle-aged-surfer-guy.  As I came to learn, he had a psychology background; he was therefore really good with his ‘people-skills’, and helped me understand some basic things about ‘how people tick’ that really helped out a lot in dealing with the community I was feeding, and working with the people that I was managing.  Also, he was very understanding, and aware of what my seizures could cause and involve–I was fortunate he was there.

One of the most valuable tools I picked up from the guy was a little thing he called ‘validation’.  See, I had moved from a job where you could ‘never say no to a guest’ to a place where clients came to get free food–and bitch about it.  I think he was aware of that, because as I got started, he explained that I was probably going to get frustrated from time to time in this environment (he was right, of course).  He warned sometimes I’d find myself busting ass, and a client would demand my attention to “share their feelings with the boss” and it would probably piss me off, which likely would happen pretty often. 

So, his recommendation was that I learn to use ‘validation’ like this:

First: they complain, and I act like I’m listening briefly, maybe make eye contact or rub my chin like I’m really considering their ideas or demands, then

Second: I hit ‘em with a line something like this: “well, we are an organization that is here to feed and serve you, and we are always looking for ways that we can improve, so I’m really glad you took the time to tell me about that, and I’ll see what I can do”. 

Then, third: they feel ‘validated’ (empowered) and walk away thinking “I told him!”. 

And, fourth: I go back to whatever I was doing, and probably totally forget whatever the hair up their ass was.

So, everybody wins–great advice.

Next, I had to learn how to cook (with whatever food I had) to please this crowd.  It wasn’t always super-simple.

I learned quickly that the best way to see if I had come up with food that the clientele had enjoyed was by lifting the trash can in the dish room after meals to see how heavy it was, and looking in it, to see what didn’t get eaten.  This was one of the first techniques I had developed when I was new on the job.

I got a good lesson from one of the first meals I made.  It was then late in summer, and a lot of donations had been coming in from nice people that had been dropping off totally gorgeous fresh veggies–usually the ‘extras’ from their home gardens.  New and naïve as I was then, I had chopped up a whole bunch of stuff all pretty-like and made them into a nice fresh stir-fry, served with rice. 

I remember that I was still out to prove to everybody there that I knew how to cook—and anybody that’s ever cooked up large banquets or done catering for a living will agree that putting out cooked veggies that aren’t totally limp and dead by the end of a meal is one of the skills that proves you’re a ‘pro’.  So, I had a totally nutritious, tender-crisp stir fry going on that I kept refreshing along the way for the entire meal.  Somehow though, every time I turned around and looked over at the dish window, trays were coming back from the clients with almost none of the main dish eaten. 

What the hell?

Then, at the very end of that service hour, a little old lady came up to the dish window as I was looking at my hard work piled up in the trash, and like almost everybody else, she had eaten like none of her stir-fry.  She looked at me and said “you gotta cook your veshtables more sho we can shew ‘em”. 

I realized right away that she talked that way because she had no teeth.

I immediately put another two-and-two together:  if something doesn’t get eaten, it is not nutritious. 

Maybe this community wasn’t eating my food because they were light in the tooth department, or maybe it was because they had never actually been taught what good healthy food is, but either way, if they didn’t eat it, they weren’t getting any nutrition at all.

The next night I had somebody open a ton of canned veggies and mixed ‘em all together and heated them up, and they were almost completely chowed–lesson learned.

As I took over the management and ordering, I took this lesson to heart.  Whatever I did with whatever purchased or donated food, I would have to prepare it in whatever way it would be eaten by this crowd, or it would be a pointless and futile failure.

At that time, the meals were served twice daily.  The crowd varied greatly in size, depending on the time of the month.  As my reality-deciphering boss had explained to me: at least back in those years, many of the people who were on whatever government programs routinely got checks at the beginning of the month.  Most would then check into local hotels, and spend up their money in whatever ways you might imagine. 

As their money began to run out through the month, more and more clients would then show up in the dining room line.  The numbers fluctuated from as few as forty persons at a meal to over four hundred in tandem with the cadence of this ‘tide’.  Once I had learned this, many fluctuations that were tied to this rhythm became obvious; the most notable to me being that there were clearly times when there were less or more people ‘panhandling’ on the city streets.

I had begun to watch the behaviors of the clients during meals (partially out of paranoia, admittedly), but also because I had noticed more than one crowd-control issue that was causing some clients to get away with greedy behavior that was depriving others. 

For one thing, before meal times, all of the people would line up outside, and while some of the folks might have been waiting for quite a while (clearly hungry and having really nowhere else to be), others would show up right before meal time and just cut right into the front of the line. 

Not cool.

Worse, some people would take an entire tray of food, eat only the dessert (cherry cobbler or jello or whatever), and throw away the rest of the food.  Then, they’d exit, cut back into the front of the line, get another whole tray of food, and do it again however many times.  By the end of the meal hour, we’d often be running out of food, while some of the neediest people were continually getting shoved to the back of the line.  By the time they finally got inside, we were scraping the bottom of our supplies.  Meanwhile, the trash would be filling up with completely good food these bullying assholes were throwing away, only interested in getting a sugar-fix. 

By then I had been doing food service long enough to have the math skills to prove that we should have easily had enough for everybody, but instead we were loading up the younger, meaner, tougher part of this community with however many servings of dessert they wanted, while those who needed us most were getting shoved to the back. 

But it was even more crazy—this bully-group was also often cramming food into their backpacks so they could head back out into the woods and ‘camp’ for a few days till it ran out.  This meant that they wouldn’t be coming back for however many meal periods.  We therefore couldn’t tally up our service to them–which could lower our funding, having an even-larger impact on everybody’s food. 

Of course, this definitely meant that days-old backpack-stored food would be consumed, away from the HCSC, well after it was safe to eat—and it would certainly be fed to whatever kids and dogs were being towed around by this part of the crowd.

Finally, as the Director, I put my foot down.

There was a security staff of several persons working on the property also—mostly guys, usually former clients, and they were in charge of breaking up fights, not letting people do their dope openly on-site, calling cops or ambulances when needed, and all that on-going crowd-control type-stuff.  When the kitchen staff had problems with clients that we couldn’t deal with easily, this was our go-to crew. 

I met with them and told them some new ways I was going to adjust how we did the food thing.  They agreed pretty quickly that a little enforcement of a few new rules would go a long way, and it would make the crowd easier to manage.  I explained that I was sure we’d not only end up with less security problems overall, but I’d be able to direct whatever money was being lost in the current format back into the food budget to improve the quality.

We agreed to a few rules:

1. no cuts or you’re out for the meal

2. all bags stay outside

3. no food can be taken from the dining room, or you’re gonna go hungry until you talk to Nate and promise not to do it again, and

4. (the big one)—all of the trays would get filled with all of the items being served (which was later referred as “every tray gets everything”), and only after we had fed everybody in line we would offer seconds… but NO MORE SECONDS ON DESSERT. So, if you had eaten everything on your tray but were still hungry, you could still get more food to eat, but this bullshit with throwing away everything but the sugar-treat was over.

One of the final modifications to service that I made was salt. 

I had been cooking long enough to know that for most people, being able to add salt, if desired, makes the food more likely to be eaten (and therefore to be nutritious).  I also knew that there was no way I could put out saltshakers.  (They’d disappear fast.)  So, I set up a cable-fastened metal shaker at the end of the tray service counter—a big metal spice container with a thread-on top.  I took a segment of rubber-coated clothesline-type cable, and wrapped it through the handle and attached it to some hardware I threaded into the counter underneath.  And sure enough, almost everybody salted almost everything.

It didn’t take long to get the results I had hoped for. 

Some people threw their little fits and bitches and the security crew had to deal with them, but overall, I think most of the regular clients really appreciated the differences, and it showed in a few odd ways. 

For one thing, as I started buying and making better food, it was getting eaten better (confirmed by a gradually less-heavy dish room trash can).  For another, it was usually quieter in the dining room, with less conflicts going on.  People were busy eating.  I remember one client freaking out about whatever rule he didn’t agree with and making a scene, and before I even needed security to help, a bunch of people who were already eating piped up and told him to chill out because the food was “way better now”.  He realized he was outnumbered, and simply succumbed to the peer-pressure and shut up and sat down and ate his tray of free food.

One event that really proved the success of the “everyone gets everything” rule to me was a meal that I served to an adult woman with her pre-school-age little boy. 

I’d noticed them eating there a number of times before—they were ‘regulars’.  I could clearly see that he was usually bored, always being towed around behind his mom as she chattered away at other clients, chasing whatever the hot  gossip was in ‘the lot’ while her kid just sort of always kept himself quiet as he stared at whatever litter he had picked up, or tinkered with whatever flowers or bugs he had been fortunate enough to find to educate himself with. 

At one point, even though the mom already knew the rules, she began to tell the person putting the food on the trays that her son “doesn’t like this” and “won’t eat that” and the server told her that “everyone gets everything” and then handed a full tray to her son. 

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget watching the two of them through the window in the kitchen door when they sat down with their food.  As usual, she was getting up and sitting down repeatedly, bantering away at others who were also used to her, and were clearly ignoring her as they ate.

Then I saw a magic moment—the little boy picked up a canned green bean, and looked at it with the kind of interest and fascination he might have had while he looked at the odds-and-ends he usually played with.  He turned it over and over, inspecting the foreign item–and then he put it in his mouth.  At first, he had his usual ‘blank’ look, but then he chewed up the bean, swallowed it, and smiled—and then he ate every single green bean on his tray. 

His mom was too busy, she didn’t notice. 

Then, the little boy got up with his tray and asked the server for more green beans.  It was the first time I ever saw him speak (not that I had been keeping track or anything).  I told the server to let that kid have as many of them damn beans as he wanted—it was clear he was needing them.

I headed up to the office.  I needed a minute alone, because I thought I might just cry, and I didn’t need the staff or the clients to see the resident ‘tough guy’ boss lose it.  As I sat in there alone in the office, I realized that this little boy had just proved to me that I was doing at least something right. 

I couldn’t help but wonder how many parents were out there dragging kids like that little boy around, feeding them whatever shuts them up for a minute because they don’t have enough of their own self-esteem intact to even begin to teach their kids what ‘healthy food’ is, or why they should eat it.  Somehow, reaching around some of these detached parents and slipping some nutrition into their innocent and malnourished kids was a critical part of why I was there—and it was one of the best ways I could make sure that the people who contributed to that facility were getting at least some real success out of their wonderful intentions.

This was just one of many experiences I had at that job that lead me to understand a bigger, underlying meaning to the picture I had found my own place in.  The lesson I was learning so often boiled down to the core problem of lack of self-esteem.  People who thought they were worthless, or had no chances left to ‘be something’ were the source of my own bread-and-butter, yet this looming presence of hopelessness was, and will always be, my enemy, and the enemy of so many well-meaning people that just want to help. 

Sadly, we don’t always have the resources, and we certainly don’t always agree on ways we can effectively attack this beast we call poverty.  One thing most of us can understand and agree on, though, is that no matter what, it is not the kids fault, and some of the most effective weapons we really do have to fight with are the nutrition, education, and medical resources that a kid like that one little boy needs to ever break out such a terrible cycle.

(This chapter, which describes my experience as the Food Service Director of the Homeless Center of Santa Cruz CA from 2001 to 2004, will be continued at the beginning of the next episode–the fourth in this podcast series.)