So when I think of food service, I think of cooking serving people food, plain and simple. Yet today a completely obvious thought hit me. Serving food to customers faster lets a restaurant serve more people. Cutting time yields more income. Therefore a restaurant like mine that serves at most blanched and grilled, but mostly raw ingredients, can serve food faster and get more customers in and out the door even during busy times with less labor.
Duh. I mean this isn't rocket science, yet the thought had never crossed my mind.
What troubles me though is how this must affect the financial thoughts of the wigs behind food service industries. Thoughts like this have created things like "food warmers" where a joint will cook ready foods and have them sit in trays under heavy heat so that a customer can get in and out with no cook time seen. Prices can be cut and labor can be cut to compensate while maintaining or increasing profits due to increased volume. I don't like this purely because I know that the longer food is cooked, the more nutrients it loses. By the time many faces meet food in these places, they may as well be eating incredibly tasty cardboard for all the nutrients left.
This model CAN work with things like salad bars and places like mine that create and cook on the spot, but I believe it unacceptable for any foods that one would cook to serve in their own kitchen.
... Yes. Duh. I don't think I will get many disagreements from my readers, yet the masters of industry that forge our cultural norms through their mass produced practices have MADE this something that is thought of as something people just do.
It is not ok. Fight it with the only vote you have been given-- fight it with your dollar. Make food fresh. Eat with love.
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