It’s that time of year: The new Tiny Desk Contest winner is here! Linda Diaz, a singer from New York, submitted a very tiny-desk-y soul track called “Green Tea Ice Cream,” that clearly charmed everybody at NPR with its message about finding moments of joy. In a perfectly-placed, laid-back timbre that’s still plenty energetic, Diaz sings what feels like the conundrum of 2020: “you should be living out your dreams / but you’re tearing at the seams”— and her solution is totally attainable: “when it gets to be too much, I find myself in what I love.” On top of the sweatshirts and spring cherries she adds to her list of loves, music lists itself tacitly; you can see Diaz and her band having a wonderful time jamming on video. And if you look at the bassist in the back left, you’ll see that it’s the instrumentalist and producer Matt Fishman, who has played various Lorem events with his band Cool Company. Congrats to a real one (or rather, several); listen here.
^^Who can name the company that owns this slogan? And if not, can we agree that any entity with this relationship to grammar is not to be trusted?
Great. Now that that’s settled, these words dangling between periods belong to Smithfield Foods, America’s largest pork producer. You’ve probably seen them in the news as one of the giant meat processors that’s failing to protect its workers from Coronavirus— or maybe you saw their full-page New York Times ad this weekend. The ad beat down the media for its portrayal of their virus-time situation, saying it’s unreasonable for the white-collar elite to criticize the working-class meatpackers who, at the end of the day, are doing the essential work of producing food for the country. That might be a decent argument if not for the fact that 1. It’s not the meatpacking workers who took out the ad; that was the work of the white-collar executives at Smithfield who are responsible for both their company’s optics and the safety of their workers. And 2. Those execs still haven’t detailed the “aggressive” safety measures they claim to be implementing at their plants— or reported on rates of illness among their workers (lowballed external reports tell us that at least 2,000 Smithfield workers have come down with Covid-19). So instead of undermining the work of reporting, we’ll repeat the essential question at play here: Are we cool with killing humans in addition to pigs?
The meatpacking plants have a ways to go, but at restaurants, at least, there’s an emerging dialog about the overshot power imbalance between bosses and workers. In Tejal Rao’s new article on the Death of the Chef-Auteur, she traces how chefs became such divas in American culture (fine, this is where we talk about Jessica Koslow) and reminds us that every restaurant is built by its team. Why do we need that reminder? Take a look at Kitchen Confidential or any other major piece of restaurant insiderism from the past 20 years that romanticizes brutal overwork and hazing.“This complicated, shared understanding of restaurant kitchens was often used to justify the work and the hours, and the unreasonable expectations in service of excellence and glory,” Tejal writes. “It also explained away the gross, systemic deficiencies of the business, and normalized abusive work cultures.” Of course, the image of the white-guy genius reinforces itself as star chefs anoint others behind them with business capital and prestige; meanwhile, “so many alternative kinds of food businesses are never considered for awards or investments. They don’t fit into the chef-auteur framework, and in some cases have no desire to do so — community farms with food stalls, roving trucks, collaborative projects, temporary projects, or family restaurants where three different cooks take turns in the kitchen, depending on their child care schedules.” This article is so good. Get in there.
To bring it back to joy of the Diaz variety, some of my buds have been deeply into Blue Marble’s matcha ice cream this week— it’s super creamy and not too sweet, and born just up the street from the keyboard typing this newsletter. Their pints appear to be sold out online (evidently you can otherwise have them shipped nationally), but if you happen to be in big BK, you know where to find ’em.
