Whats Fa Dinna?

Last week I partook in a rite of passage of the food service industry, when I attended the SYSCO Metro Area Food Expo at the Meadowlands Expo Center in Secacus, NJ.

SYSCO, for those of you outside the biz, is the largest food service distributor in the United States. If you ever eat in a restaurant, cafe, cafeteria, hospital, airplane, catered event, summer camp, or anywhere else for that matter, you have eaten SYSCO food and used SYSCO products. They OWN food.

They have some competition, but they basically win. They sell almost everything you eat, everything it’s made and served in, and everything in between, from the dish soap to the toilet paper to the little stir sticks for your coffee. The company formed in 1969 in Houston Texas through a merger of eight other small-time distributors. Since then they have gobbled up distribution companies in cities across America, employing a warehouse-saturation strategy similar to our lovely all-American Big Box store, contracting wholesalers and manufacturers to work exclusively through their network, and homogenizing the food supply so that anything you want can be brought to your establishment in neat cardboard boxes from a nearby warehouse.

Anyway, this delightful corporate behemoth supplies the cafes I manage with many of our supplies and ingredients. Therefore I was invited by our delightful sales representative to attend the annual Expo, where wholesalers who distribute their products through SYSCO gather to market their newest wares, spend face time with customers, win new establishments for their products, etc.

Imagine, if you will, a huge corporate expo center, wall-to=wall with cubicles bathed in eerie neon light, no windows anywhere, and at each stall is a little restaurant giving away free samples of their yummiest goods, with stacks of packages behind them. Many people are wearing suits, some are wearing silly chef hats. One can consume an egg roll, antipasto sampler, cookie, small cup of the latest all-natural juice, breakfast sausage, pancake, sandwich, fried shrimp, or hunk of fancy cheese every 10 feet. Luckily, I was not very hungry and had eaten breakfast, so I took it easy.

We were given bags to fill with our marketing swag, from pamphlets to business cards to small sample-sized packages of things like Craisins, Goldfish and Gruyere cheese. We were also given a magnetized card, which could be swiped at every expo station into an electronic console. Every swipe would be recorded and sent to our sales rep, who would then follow up with us on the products we were interested in, and presumably continue trying to sell them to us.

We consumed San Pelligrino sodas as we walked the sprawling aisles of corporate food distribution Christmas. Salespeople hocked their ware, pitched their pitches, made eye contact and smiled. They had all sorts of tricks up their sleeve to make you stop and try a bite.

All told, we spent about an hour getting there, and 1.5 hours getting through all the aisles, making sure to try stuff that looked good without pigging out too seriously. By the time I got to the part where all the awesome desserts were, I was too stuffed to care that there was free cheesecake everywhere.

It was sort of fun, this SYSCO expo. It was weird, it was exciting, people were EXCITED and they were doing business. The ectoplasm of commerce was collecting in the nooks and crannies of the expo center, and the smell of magnetized plastic was heavy on the air. People whose lives center on doing business, buying and trading and selling food, were very happy. But the whole experience strikes me as very unreal, totally bizarre and pretty upsetting.

I’ve always known that most consumers experience a disconnect from the reality of the food supply, but the disconnect between what food actually is, where it comes from, and how it transitions from raw plant or animal material to the thousands of commodities it is made into is also experienced by people at higher levels of food service work. Even the people who sell and cook and market food don’t really seem to know or care what that food really is, or where it came from.

One man we spoke with at length was exclusively selling pre-made guacamole, and frozen, peeled, halved avocadoes. Plastic bags of avocado halves, lime green, bearing little resemblance to the fruit with a peel and a pit. They’ve done all the work, i.e. taken all the nature out of it, and what is left can be preserved, packaged, shipped from a warehouse, manipulated and commodified even further before it hits your, the customer’s, plate. Cha-ching.

I’ve been eating more mac and cheese lately than I have in a long time. The last two rounds were Annie’s Deluxe, preceded by several days of Hot Dish.

I used to eat tons of it in college, and in high school, and come to think of it my whole life. It was the only dish I ordered from restaurants for a long, long time as a kid, and was the constant but of jokes about “turning into a noodle” if I ate too many.

Well, parents, no need to worry. If I resemble a noodle, it’s a ravioli, or maybe stuffed manicotti. Ha, ha.

In light of two posts ago, where I claim that dairy and wheat are bad for a person most of the time, writing a whole entry on mac and cheese seems a little silly. But, like I said, bad or not, many of the cells in my body are built of this humble stuff, so why knock it.

Today I worked all day in one of the cafes I manage at NYU. This one is in the math and computer science department, and most of the people who frequent are middle aged white men, sometimes with exotic accents, who drink black coffee and can scarcely interact with other humans, let alone female non-mathematicians who serve coffee for a living. It is an interesting place to spend time and I often find myself thinking of the Mentats in Frank Herbert’s Dune books, engineered from childhood to behave like computers. I also find myself becoming very rude to these poor geeks, which probably makes me a bad person.

I also feel conflicted about the kind of food and drink we serve here. On one hand, coffee and bagels and pastry are what people want from cafes. Our soup and sandwich offerings are pretty classy and well-made, but still emphasize wheat, dairy and meat. Just about everything we serve here is something I consider to be at least partially toxic and unhealthy. Soda, coffee, tea, chips, cereal, bagels, muffins, scones, lattes- none of it is very good for anybody, even if it’s good.

But it’s the sort of fare the institution of the coffeeshop is founded upon, so I comply. I can’t help but to wonder whether our collective consciousness, and therefore our political situations, cultural norms, degree of freedom and happiness, etc would be altered if we did not eat and drink poisonous, exploitative crap like sugar and coffee and wheaty baked goods all the time. Perhaps. But then coffeeshops would not exist, and all of the great moments of culture that have taken place in cafes around the world would never be. But maybe we wouldn’t need them, either.

Since our cultural dietary habits, and bionic modern bodies, are hard to kill, at least a few awesome and reputable institutions still exist in the proud tradition of café-cum-bookstore/salon/meeting place, authentic places with good music on the speakers, attractive, educated, hip baristas, good lighting and comfortable seating.

Starbucks can try all they want to make coffee culture suck like McDonald’s but they shall not prevail as long as people recognize the important social function of little independent coffeeshops.

My top 10 places to get coffee and hang out in nyc:

Cake Shop

cake shop is my favorite place in manhattan. its everything a girl could want- show venue, record store, bar, cafe, cupcake-seller, wifi, cute little tables, and there always seems to be a place just for you to sit and hang. I’ve spent two days solid in here and only got sick of it at the very end.

Bluestockings

best and only feminist/political bookstore/infoshop in nyc. they also have yummy coffee and lots of amazing books. best place to meet punks and their dogs.

Goodbye Blue Monday

hell. yes. everything is for sale, there are very few rules, the owner is awesome,  shows are sometimes bad but always exciting, and there is a strange crew of regulars, bartenders, and Bushwick neighborhood artistes around all the time. A quiet, dreamy place to work and hang out during the day, when it’s nearly empty and there is free wi-fi, the couches and tables all available to you.

Housing Works Used Book Café

i work here. when i first entered this place, i thought to myself “i want to work here.” and now i do, and we sell really good coffee. sweet books,too.

Vox Pop

my new neighborhood cafe. have to say, i havent spent much time here. but it fulfills the multi-function cafe-cum-salon role very well. there are shows, an open mic, readings, meetings, books thru bars, and a self-publishing business.

Hungarian Pastry Shop
just go here, once in your life. its freaking awesome.

Everything Goes Bookstore Café

Staten Island’s used bookstore, cafe and show space, run by the friendly, furry folks at Ganas, a communal stronghold on the island since the 70s.

Verb on Bedford (no link)

ok so people here might be a little bit snobby, “hipsters,” even, but if you are on bedford you know what you’re in for. Earwax is on the corner, that’s my excuse. At least you know where a good cup of coffee and an old wooden chair can be found.

Joe The Art of Coffee Waverly Place

This is a tiny-ish, unassuming coffee-only kind of place. Their coffee is truly delightful. I used to walk a good 15 minutes out of my way to get coffee there before work, and there was a line. The staff was always pleasant and prompt.  Sitting here works if you miss the rushes, otherwise it’s too crowded.

Mud Truck at Sheridan Square

So ok, it’s not a “shop.” But this Mud truck is great. The girl who works here is amazing and cheerful and sells delicious coffee. It’s just parked there, flaming in the middle of the most flaming neighborhood in the world.  I don’t know how I feel about Mud’s weird branding campaign, but I admire their homemade aesthetic and their hardcore, almost Turkish coffee. They have one size, which is more awesome points. I also have a thing for cool food trucks.