The Middlebury Cross Country team sponsored a community supper during the first Friday in October. These suppers began in 2005 at the First Congregational Church in town to address food insecurity in Addison County. Nine years later, the suppers continue to serve a demonstrated need in a county beset by rural poverty: Dottie Neuberger, the coordinator, estimates that she and her volunteers serve about 200 meals every Friday.

As the “sponsors” for the week, we were responsible for purchasing, preparing, cooking, serving, and cleaning up the food. The 40 men’s and women’s cross country members rotated through the kitchen in 2 shifts lasting about 2 hours each, and when the crumbs settled, we ended up serving about 120 meals of rice, beans, chicken, salad greens, bread, and potatoes. (Fewer people might have been present than usual because workers receive their paychecks at the beginning of the month, when the supper took place.)

At first, the kitchen felt unbearably crowded. Everyone wanted to help, but no one knew exactly what to do. Very few of us have experience working in the food service industry–in fact, many of us wouldn’t know how to cook for ourselves. So, how did we compensate for this lack of skill? Dottie saved the day by breaking us up into very specific tasks, assembly-line style. For 90 minutes, I stood at the end of a long table, placed 3-4 pieces of chicken on a plate, and passed the plate along to the next person, who added rice, then beans, etc. I did not have to interact with anyone except the person immediately to my left; in fact, I barely used my brain. I didn’t mind the process at the time, but if I worked like that all day, every day, I would go crazy. I realize that many workers in the food industry perform tasks like this every day because it is so efficient–we served people so quickly!–and it is so easy. If Dottie were my employer, she could replace me instantly.

The space of the kitchen was divided into 3 clear sections: the cooking section on one side, the dishwashing section on the other side, and an assembly table in the middle. Two wide doors opened into the serving area, one on the dishwashing side and one on the cooking side. As a result, we did not interact with the people in the other sections, because we never had to step into each other’s space. Hierarchies developed immediately. The more experienced people, like Jake Fox, who is a regular volunteer, gravitated to the oven area, because cooking required the most amount of skill. No one really wanted to do the dishes. Maybe this is because dishwashing is harder and/or dirtier work. Maybe we have absorbed the cultural message that dishwashing is an inferior task to cooking and food prep. For whatever reason, most of the dishwashers ended up being the freshmen, sophomores, and the people who showed up late. Fine and Prole may have been writing about long-term restaurants, but I realized that their analyses of hierarchies and exclusive spaces in the kitchen hold true even in a temporary, volunteer setting.

Simply put, the people we served looked different from us. Many of the community members were overweight and/or seemed to suffer from a chronic health condition. There were disabled people and plenty of elderly. Surprisingly, I saw very few kids. A waist-high wall kept the kitchen workers apart from the customers, but I spent some time walking around with a pitcher of milk. Most of my interactions  with people were friendly but awkward. I sensed that one of the men I served was surprised and flattered that I wanted to talk to him. Like when we spoke to the Jamaican workers, the invisible had become visible. No one seemed to have much practice bridging the class divide.

We’ve talked a bit in class about how personal food tastes develop along regional and class lines. Julie Guthman reminded us that some people, particularly African Americans, may consider the food movement elitist and “not for them,” so they value the price and taste of the food far more than any organic, fair trade, or nutritional qualities. Everyone we served was white, but Guthman’s points still rang true in terms of class. When I cleared plates at the end of the night, I realized that many people did not eat their salad, which was arguably the most expensive and nutritionally dense item on the menu. Before she left, one woman asked me if I would whip her up some “creamed corn” as a favor. I had never heard of such a thing. As it turns out, creamed corn is canned, microwaveable, and almost certainly not “real” by Eat Real’s standards…but she wanted it more than anything else we had to offer. I realized how complex this issue really is. You can put vegetables on someone’s plate, but you can’t force them to eat it. And is that even the point?  Our conventional, high calorie food from Costco staved off hunger, but it didn’t solve why they were hungry in the first place. Dottie’s work is noble and wonderful and a drop in the ocean.

I have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid on this assignment.

–Katie Carlson