My Month in an Organic Frozen Food Factory
By: Jonah Andrist
Tags: Capitalism, Food, Work

This is not a piece of journalism. I got a job at Amy’s Kitchen because I needed to pay rent, and to buy wine. Well, I don’t need to buy wine, but usually while I’m working at a job that I need to pay rent, I need wine. This job was no exception.

I think what I mean to say by this is that there are thoughts in here that have more to do with the feeling of being trapped than would be traditional to a piece of journalism, wherein the journalist knows they are simply a tourist and observing.

The fact that I went in just like everyone else, deaf dumb, humbled enough to do mindless repetitive tasks all day… I didn’t go into the job with the idea it’d become a piece of writing. I read an article years ago that was about how terrible it was to work in an Amazon warehouse, I assumed that the writer of that piece chose Amazon specifically, and I always assumed that any of us who read that piece already knew the work was going to be terrible. We read the story to have our assumptions confirmed. I can’t say that I ever really put much thought into the process of frozen food manufacturing. You assume it wouldn’t be a great job, but food is different than Amazon. Food is necessary. Though, of course, most of the ways we consume it aren’t.

I’ve spent most of my adult life supporting myself in the restaurant industry. Some jobs have been better than others. They’ve had better fringe benefits. The after shift beers flowed more freely, or the waitresses were more cute. In one restaurant I actually learned a lot, and the head chef was a gentle contemplative man who ran a good and curious kitchen. Though his English was not perfect, and he was embarrassed by this, so he didn’t say that much. This often made for a strangely charged atmosphere in the afternoons, where people hardly spoke, and the air had an electric ripple of expectation for nothing.

Nothing crazy has ever happened to me in a kitchen, though it seems like it should have. People basically did their jobs without too much hassle (honestly, given the virtual slavery of the business, this continues to surprise me). It may also have something to do with me since I’ve never been a good trash talker. Never had my Down and Out in Paris and London spat with a cook colleague where we curse at each other for the whole shift.

I might even say that this is the worst part of working in a corporatized food plant; there’s no way you’d get in an argument. No way to exchange feeling. You are, ultimately, infantilized. There are lots of rules, which to the adult rational mind, seem often arbitrary. Perhaps good guidelines, but the nice thing about guidelines is they leave sway for common sense. Play, a little levity with the rules that guide us. Our society the rich and the poor. Whom is cooking for whom.

Driving into the plant’s parking lot is the first indicator that we, the employees, are the in-glorious class. Beat up coupes, sedans from the ‘90s sit in untidy rows. More claustrophobic than your average grocery store parking lot, it is distinct in the uniformity of cracked windshields and old pickups. Though here and there you’ll see a Mercedes, older 2008 maybe, or you’ll see a Mustang. A brand new pickup. But this isn’t that much different from the cars parked in the average trailer park; U.S. citizens still have money tucked away somewhere.

To clock in for work they have an electric scanner with a camera which shoots a quick photo. These are placed at the relative height of what must be the average stature of Amy’s workers (35–45% hispanic women? don’t quote me on that). Often the photos would end up being of my chest or shoulder. Sometimes I notice people specifically trying to get their face in the camera’s window. If someone had made it clear to me that this was an absolute requirement of my job, to get a face shot eight times a day as I clocked in and out for breaks and lunch, I think I’d begin sending anonymous postcards to big brother watchgroups.

So here we are, already we’re at the first function of corporate policy which makes me scratch my head. Is the point of the photo taking to protect them, if, say: some family member took a workers card, and went into work for them? Does that seem excessively paranoid to you? Or no, I’m the weirdo for thinking there’s a metaphysical cost to the human soul for the presentation of faux efficiency. Well, maybe, but I’m going down that rabbit hole anyway baby.

I mean, yeah, probably most of their operating procedure is making the system idiot proof because of the amount of inevitable turnover, due to the monotonous and sometimes heavy work.

But I say, if you made the work a little more interesting you’d have less turnover, which means you could slack some rules making the work slightly more bearable (or just less infantilizing).

I’m an idealist. Though for a vegetarian pioneer, in the realm of ready-to-eat meals, you’d think they’d carry some of that too.

Most of their employees don’t eat Amy’s food. I’ve heard it called gross. Though primarily it’s the fact that the food’s not made for them. The work is taxing, no one is counting calories on their lunch break. It’s somewhat analogous to Chinese workers making iPhones. They are not the market for their own labor.

Personally, I had a few of Amy’s meals before I worked there, and thought they were basically good. Decent ingredients, better than your average Hungry Man or whatever. Though after working there, I’m not sure I’d buy their food again. And it’s not because the food is bad… it’s that they aren’t any different. Working there, it’s probably the same as working at any factory job. If you think you have made a righteous moral choice, here, I want to roughly quote the comedian Chelsea Peretti, her joke is about vegans and how they decide not to participate in animal labor; it’s childish logic to care about the moral quality of your food, because at the end of it, poor people are picking your vegetables and plating your dinner. That 20 minutes you saved not cooking for yourself is the totality of some other person’s life.

I’m a stupid radical.

Once, after being fired from a particularly bad restaurant where the head chef was a pompous dick, I had been living in a tent, and Down and Out was really speaking to me. I conceived of an idea for how the modern restaurant critic might begin to operate.

Yes you can talk about the quality of the food and its significance for the diners, yet ultimately, this means nothing, it’s a fine evening that you will forget. But for the people that have to work in the restaurants, this is their life.

I thought it would be interesting if the critic took a tour through the back, asked each employee personally what they thought of the management. What did they think about their head chef? Could the employees afford to eat the food they made? The dishwasher would automatically get a voucher to a bookstore, and the restaurant would get a rating based on the culture it cultivated.

Does this sound like the ramblings of a deranged idealist? I’m not so sure. Not much has changed since Orwell’s days. The hours have gotten less severe, but I’m not sure this isn’t corporate efficiency. Bookkeeping. If you keep your worker healthier, they can make you more money, ultimately.

Our culture is obsessed with the minutiae of food, it might be time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.