Work forced me to conquer one of my biggest fears ever: meat slicers. I have been afraid of meat slicers since the dawn of man. So shiny, so devious, so, purposefully sharp. So close to people's hands.
My fear was amped up about a million percent when Kay was working at a bakery and fell out of commission for a good two days because the slicer gashed his thumb open.
So, on my very very first day, very first hour of my sandwich job, I was trained to work the slicer. I didn't feel like on my first fifteen minutes of work I could stipulate I would rather clean toilets than stand near the death machine, so I swallowed the fear lump in my throat and learned.
Here's what the meat slicer has taught me: MEAT IS DISGUSTING. Obvi, I thought this before, but now, I KNOW. To slice a package of ham I take a "chub" of ham out of the fridge. It's a block of pinky flesh. I cut open the package and nasty juices spill out of it. It's pure rubber bits smashed together. (It makes you wonder how the meat got from pig, off the bone, and back into a neat lil package.) Nothing about the chunk reminds me that it was once an animal. Until it bleeds. Yes, on the slicer, blood oozes out and spills over the metal. Also, the meat is marbled with fat, which of course ends up in long strands in the slices. At the end of the entire process, there's a good inch that can't be processed by the slicer, so it just has to be thrown away.
So wasteful! Actually, inherently working food service exposes you to many wasteful practices. There's a lot of latex glove changing, a lot of "Oh this touched this, so throw it all away," a lot of storing things is disposable containers for freshness. Yesterday as I was putting a stack of provelone away, I dropped about half of it on the ground. The trouble with a family owned business, is that the owner directly pays for all of your stupid mistakes. My manager tried not to show her momentary hatred for me, but she could not bring herself to say, "It's okay" as I apologized profusely. I was thinking,
I already feel horrible just for wasting the misshapen part of this cheese log. Believe me, I feel bad. You do not have to accentuate it.
I mean, I get it. Ultimately, I know about
The Jungle, I'm grateful for the FDA and rules and stuff, but...if I walked into a restaurant and my waitress said, "Hey, in order to not use one hundred gloves a day, no one in the kitchen wears them anymore. Everyone still washes their hands." I'd be like, "Yes! I am coming here more often!"
If I got a sandwich with a misshapen piece of cheese on it because that's what happens when you get down to the end of the block on the slicer, and someone told me that, I'd be more than happy to eat it rather than see it tossed into a landfill.
So, my new plan is to have Alice's Wasteless Space For Your Face! A restaurant where we're clean and care about presentation...to an extent. The floor will be mopped daily, and swept often, so if your sandwich falls on the floor as the mustard's going on, we're gonna serve it to you anyway! I will serve foods that have been made improperly for half price instead of tossing them! NO, YOU CANNOT HAVE ANY PLASTIC SILVERWARE. So, does anyone know how to hide a business form the federal government?
