The 2 Types of Stories on the Restaurant Labor Shortage + Recipe: Passion Fruit Bars!!
Issue No. 75
In today’s issue, Matt investigates the restaurant labor shortage, and the real reason your food is taking so long to come out of the kitchen. We’ve also got Costco and TikTok influencers, and a luscious tropical fruit dessert to get your mind right for your very own Hot Girl Summer.
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Restaurants are enduring a labor shortage. I figured it out myself when I waited 35 minutes in an empty Burger King drive-thru for a rock-hard Impossible Whopper. Answers for what’s happening appear in two distinct ways:
One type of story interviews only restaurant and franchise owners, who invariably blame unemployment payments for being too lucrative during the pandemic and call anyone taking advantage of the situation lazy. Sometimes the owners celebrate their state governors for opting out of federal unemployment benefits and taking an additional $300 out of the hands of unemployed laborers, assuming that will solve the shortage. (For one example, see how our local paper let owners shape the narrative).
I think time will show that this strategy will not solve the problem. As the other explanation shows, the worker shortfall is a lot more complex than that.
The second type of story actually speaks to employees and ex-employees in the restaurant industry. The pay in fast food joints and low-end restaurants is unsurprisingly meager. (That’s something owners might not want to make public. Those who complain that workers get paid more on employment than at their restaurants are really telling on themselves.)
But low wages are symptomatic of the larger problem, which is that the restaurant industry can feel abusive and soul-sucking. Media stories that interview ex-employees reveal many of them have left the industry altogether. Others are gone for more depressing reasons: A study found that restaurant workers and food producers have had the highest ratio of mortality during the pandemic.
Employees sound fed up with horrid bosses, looong hours, sexual harassment, anti-maskers and other rude customers, and, yes, the crappy pay that comes with it. Those same restaurants that laid off employees last summer feel entitled to their labor now, but workers are using that unemployment as a lifeline to escape the industry. Read the Mississippi Free Press’s disquieting interviews with workers at their breaking point:
Blake Weil, employed in the restaurant industry in New Orleans, has seen the writing on the wall for years before the pandemic.
“So many workers have left an industry that clearly doesn’t value them, whose model is predicated on them being disposable. Frankly,” Weil said, “a lot of industry people are dead. Line cooks had a higher mortality rate this past year than medical workers.”
The federal minimum wage for tipped workers ($2.13) hasn’t changed in 40 years, and laborers seem to have had enough. Despite all the “we’re hiring” signs, the industry employs 1.7 million fewer people than it had before the pandemic began in the spring of 2020.
With workers exiting the industry, a shortage seems unsurprising. And where do the remaining workers go when there’s a bunch of openings everywhere? The spots that pay the best, of course! I’m not an economist but there appears to be a simple solution to the worker shortage. Give people more money for their labor.
Look, it's like magic!
Abra kadabra:
Peace,
Matt
p.s.- As the industry wrestles with how to handle the labor shortage, there is one facet owners and workers both agree on. Please don’t give the waitstaff hell because things in the kitchen are moving slowly.
Email this issue to a friend who works in the restaurant industry:
💲🌭The Uncanny, Fluorescent World of the Costco Influencer | Jezebel
Are you passionate about high-quality, affordable bulk goods? Do you want to turn that passion into a career? The luckiest among us have done exactly that — by starting Costco-themed Instagram accounts. Writer Molly Osberg investigates this “devastatingly banal” subgenre of Instagram influencer. They post straightforward, fluorescent-hued photos of Costco deals. Some accounts gain millions of followers and lucrative brand sponsorships, but most do it simply from a place of deep devotion to the world’s fifth largest retailer.
The success of these Costco accounts seems to highlight the elegant appeal of the Costco shopping experience: “Where other Instagram personalities appeal to specific (and often impossible) subgenres and hyper-specific tastes, the people who unofficially affiliate with Costco are simply endorsing the desire to consume.” America the beautiful, baby.
🌊🍚 Inside a Michelin-Starred Chef's Revolutionary Quest to Harvest Rice From the Sea | Time
Chef Ángel León runs a 3-star Michellin restaurant called Aponiente near the port town of Cadiz, Spain. His restaurant opened in 2007 and earned its stars “through a radical reimagining of what to do with familiar fish.” He built menus around pesca de descarte (trash fish), such as krill, sea bream, moray eel and mackerel. At the acclaimed annual culinary conference Madrid Fusion, he showed off seafood-based charcuterie, like mortadella and blood sausage, from discarded fish parts. Another time he presented an ocean floor-themed meal around roots, fruits and leaves found in the murky depths.
These dishes weren’t just about savory creativity. He wanted to emphasize a message of sustainability and environmentalism. Now León is working on his biggest project yet: turning seagrass into a mass-produced product that could change agriculture around the world. The seagrass is called eelgrass and it flourishes in coastline meadows around the world including off of Cadiz. Agriculture is such a drain on natural resources because it requires transferring so much water, but seagrasses “are the only plants that flower fully submerged in salt water.” Moreover, seagrasses absorb carbon even better than rain forests and serve as diverse underwater habitats.
If oil, sake, and flour made from eelgrass starts to replace some of the planet’s land-based agricultural products, that could have huge benefits to the environment. Saltwater rice has long been the holy grail of underwater agriculture. This summer León will soon harvest 20,000 kilograms of seagrass to cook with as he works toward the most crucial step in his plan — turning seagrass into something the world wants to consume.
🐝🍯TikTok’s Viral Beekeeper is Getting a Lot of Buzz | Washington Post
Erika Thompson, 35, is perhaps not an unsurprising TikTok star. The beekeeper based in Austin, Texas is a slight blonde with a soothing voice who does absolutely wild stuff like this for her millions of viewers:
Still, she’s a beekeeper first and a viral star second. She has 50 hives in her backyard, and one of her most lucrative endeavors is helping other people remove unwanted bee colonies from their property. Thompson only started her company Texas Beeworks a couple years ago, after spending a decade in the nonprofit world. She didn’t realize at first that beekeeping could be a sustainable career for her or that so many people would care (including her husband, who she met, of course, on Bumble).
She also hopes her videos will inspire anyone wishing to remove a colony from their property to call a professional beekeeper instead of an exterminator. Simply killing them will not only damage a vital part of the ecosystem, but it will leave behind the hive and its honey — which can cause structural damage and may attract random critters, including another colony of bees.
“Bees need advocates,” she said. “And I’m so glad to do that for them.”
Passion Fruit Bars
On a visit to St. Pete last week I was lucky enough to get a box of tropical fruit from the super cool Florida Fruit Co-op. It contained five different types of passion fruit! With tropical fruit season upon us in South Florida, I wanted to celebrate with a twist on a classic lemon bar. An acidic passion fruit will work perfectly here.
I adapted this recipe from Smitten Kitchen, my go to place on the internet for solid recipes for classic sweets.
Ingredients and Special Materials
9x9 in. pan
stand mixer or handheld electric mixer
blender
fine mesh sieve
nonstick spray or a knob of soft butter
For the crust:
1 stick of butter, room temperature
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 cup flour of choice
1 pinch of salt
For the passion fruit layer:
2 eggs
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup passion fruit (1 or 2 fruit, depending on size)
1/3 cup flour of choice
Step-by-step
Preheat oven to 350°F and grease the baking dish with nonstick spray or a bit of soft butter.
Make the crust. In the bowl of a stand mixer with paddle attachment (or a mixing bowl if using handheld mixer), cream together the butter and sugar on medium-high speed for a few minutes, until light and fluffy. Reduce speed to low, and add the flour and salt, mixing until just combined.
Dump the dough into the baking dish and smoosh down into every corner to form an even layer of crust.
Bake for 15 minutes. Remove and set aside to cool a bit while you prepare the passion fruit layer.
While the crust is baking, prep the passion fruit layer. First, scoop passion fruit from the shell. Set aside 2 tablespoons of the fruit.
Blend the remaining fruit, then strain through a fine-mesh sieve, removing the seeds. Mix this strained fruit with the reserved fruit (if you don’t want any seeds at all, just blend and strain it all, but I think they add a nice texture).
In a mixing bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, passion fruit, and flour. Pour over the crust and bake for 25-30 minutes until the passion fruit layer is no longer liquid.
Another classic sweet treat from the recipe archives, also adapted from Smitten Kitchen:
Try this great hack for eating a banana:
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Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is a cook and kitchen educator based in Stuart, Fla . She runs Otto’s Bread Club and is co-founder of the Florida Ferment Fest. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a communications strategist at the ACLU of Texas. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes other scraps to each issue.