A Work-Family Meal

I’m watching a new series on Netflix this week–Chef’s Table.

It’s interesting and well-done, and I find myself wondering a lot of things about the business of ultra-fine dining.

The thing that struck me most, though, was a passing comment in the first episode; the featured chef reported the most important thing he learned from one of his fellow restauranteurs, but the documentary didn’t make much of it.

He said that she told him that the most important thing was for the whole staff to sit down, half an hour before service started, and have a family-style meal together. The documentary didn’t show one of these work-family meals, but it seemed to indicate that the chef-owner took the suggestion seriously, and that it spilled over into how he saw and spoke of his staff.

By coincidence, I’m also watching the series Blue Bloods, a show which also emphasizes the family meal by featuring at least one Sunday dinner per episode. The extended family gather, share a meal, and variously fight, support, criticize, and love on one another. (I can’t really recommend the show–the writing is poor, and its tone-deafness to issues of race and violence is often appalling. But I try to find pockets of worthwhile, and there are occasionally some.)

Any way, at one point, the main character, a police commissioner in New York City, seems to want to extend the concept to his department. He’s realized that there’s a certain lack of familial connection going on, and he wants to build it.

His media guy mocks the concept almost at once: “What are you gonna do, throw a barbecue for 35,000 people?” The commissioner settles for a round of drinks at the local cop bar toward the end of the episode.

The scale of a high-end restaurant is different than the scale of a metropolitan police department, and the scale of the latter is enough to make the concept of a work-family meal seem ludicrous.

But I suspect it only seems ludicrous because our understanding of what is required for a business to function properly has been warped by the supposed efficiencies of large-scale businesses.

I can remember the employee meal at the restaurant where I used to work. It was a mid-lantic beach town, and most of the staff were there only for the busy summer season. Wait staff lived in dorm-style apartments, and the restaurant provided a few options to snack on during the dinner service. But the main meal for employees was breakfast–industrial and not lavish, but tasty enough and plenteous.

It never quite worked up to a real work-family meal, because it was served over two hours, and most people dashed in for a quick bite before heading to the beach, or back to bed. I did cement some relationships, though, with people who tended to come in the same time I did. And I enjoyed the food, and the feeling of being taken care of by my employer. It felt like a blessing, even if the actual owner of the company was never at these meals.

I’ve never not felt that way about being fed by an employer. The president of the college where I work now hosts two annual luncheons for faculty and staff–back-to-school, and Christmas.

They matter much more than might appear. They’re not just a random “non-salary benefit,” like travel reimbursement or a book budget. Food is sacramental in a way that money is not. (This is at least in part because food actually exists, and is necessary to sustain life. Money does not, and is not.) I look forward to the Eastern Carolina barbecue and banana pudding every fall, and recognition of years of service every Christmas.

Events like these function as real work-family meals. They are a blessing, a gesture of good will. They make employees and co-workers into colleagues and partners.

Different businesses and organizations have differences of scale, purpose, profitability, and intrinsic mode of operation that may make a daily all-employee meal unworkable. Not everyone can do what Google does.

But maybe more organizations could. And maybe it’s not the case that only a successful, profitable company like Google can afford to make feeding employees a priority. Maybe companies that make feeding people a priority will find themselves more successful, more profitable.

There are hurdles, to be sure: coordinating times, accommodating medical and religious restrictions, acknowledging non-dominant cultures, sourcing food ethically.

Cost isn’t one of them. Or, rather, it is only a hurdle if you imagine that man can live by paycheck alone. Business relationships, as much as some might desire otherwise, are not reducible to the monetary transactions those relationships entail.