food collar jobs

by Lynn Fredericks, FamilyCook Productions 

Watching a swarm of inner city teens crunch golden delicious apples like they were candy and crowd in front of trays of quesadillas loaded with Swiss chard and apples was, well – pretty darn amazing! 

This video chronicles the America's Best High School Chef competition held in April at Monroe College.  Check it out to see high schoolers excited about preparing great food.

http://www.monroecollege.edu/aboutmonroe/news-videos-abhsc

Posted by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC

On July 7, 2009, Restaurant Opportunities Center New York held the first annual “Exceptional Workplace” restaurant awards breakfast honoring restaurants for taking the “high road” in their employee practices.   

Some of you will know ROC-NY as the non-profit, advocacy organization born in the aftermath of 9/11 to help restaurant employees who lost their jobs as a result of the attack.  After 9/11, ROC-NY, while not a union, went on to advocate for fair and legal treatment of restaurant workers by conducting notable studies of the NYC restaurant industry; founding Colors, the worker-owned, cooperative restaurant and restaurant job training facility; and negotiating resolutions and winning court cases regarding some restaurants’ illegal employment practices, from unfair compensation practices to discrimination and harassment. A significant portion of ROC’s formative years were spent on picket lines.  

ROC is now complementing this work with another approach, built on the concept that a well-treated work force helps make a successful business.  

posted by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC

The last time I saw Lillian Butler was about two years ago when she was trying to start an organic, vegetarian food co-op upstairs from her small, vegan restaurant, Raw Soul, in Harlem.  It was a calling.  She said there was just not very much good, fresh food available in the neighborhood..a poor circumstance for health and taste.  

I visited Lillian, and her partner Eddie Robinson, again this June.  She is still trying to start a food co-op.  “But,” she reports cheerfully, “food in the neighborhood is getting better.”  And Raw Soul, the restaurant and the associated businesses, including catering, meal plans, cooking classes, mail order, and wholesaling, are aiding the change for the better.

Posted by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC Incubator kitchens are affordable, time-share, professional kitchens that make it financially possible for start-up food processors to move out of home production into a licensed, professional production facility where they can start to grow their businesses.  

Katherine Gregory, the founder of Mi Kitchen Es Su Kitchen, operates the Artisan Baking Center (ABC) Kitchen Innovations incubator kitchen in the Long Island City facilities of the Consortium for Worker Education, a non-profit organization that provides free career training to New Yorkers.

The ABC kitchen, primarily a baking facility, boasts three large, well-equipped working areas, each capable of accommodating several cooks, and a separate confectioner's kitchen, away from the heat of the rest of the facility.  Since Katherine started it in July 2005, the ABC incubator has been used by more than 100 food micro-entrepreneurs, many of whom have “graduated” to their own successful food businesses or to more permanent, shared kitchen facilities.   

Posted by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC

FSNYC member Jessamym Waldman is a woman who puts her bread where her politics are. Jessamyn is the Founding Director of the not-for-profit Hot Bread Kitchen. I chatted recently with Jessamyn about Hot Bread Kitchen and why and how it got started.

Ed: For those of our readers who have not met Hot Bread Kitchen by discovering and enjoying the breads, what exactly is it?

Jessamyn: Hot Bread Kitchen produces artisanal breads “kneaded with a social vision”, I like to say. We help immigrant women, who have come from places as diverse as Mexico, Afghanistan, and Togo, to turn their traditional baking skills into commercially valuable careers. That, in turn, can lead to jobs in the City’s baking industry and launching their own micro-enterprises.

E: How did you come up with the idea for Hot Bread Kitchen?

J: Hot Bread Kitchen is the product of my great passions; baking, social justice, and immigration advocacy. First, I am the great-granddaughter of an immigrant Polish baker, so I guess flour is in my DNA. And, I have been baking part-time at Daniel (restaurant). But most importantly, I’ve worked as an immigration advocate at several international organizations, including the UN. I guess I’ve collected an unusual set of qualifying credentials: a Masters in Public Administration from Columbia (University), where I specialized in immigration policy, and a Master Baker certificate from the New School. What else could I do?

E: But why pick baking as a way to help new Americans?