Food & Hospitality: Food Ethics

"Sustainability is about contributing to a society that everybody benefits from, not just going organic because you don't want to die from cancer or have a difficult pregnancy. What is a sustainable restaurant? It's one in which as the restaurant grows, the people grow with it."-from Behind the Kitchen Door How do restaurant workers live on some of the lowest wages in America? And how do poor working conditions-discriminatory labor practices, exploitation, and unsanitary kitchens-affect the meals that arrive at our restaurant tables? Jayaraman shows us that the quality of the food that arrives at our restaurant tables depends not only on the sourcing of the ingredients. Our meals benefit from the attention and skill of the people who chop, grill, saute, and serve. Behind the Kitchen Door is a groundbreaking exploration of the political, economic, and moral implications of dining out. Increasingly, Americans are choosing to dine at restaurants that offer organic, fair-trade, and free-range ingredients for reasons of both health and ethics. Yet few of these diners are aware of the working conditions at the restaurants themselves. But whether you eat haute cuisine or fast food, the well-being of restaurant workers is a pressing concern, affecting our health and safety, local economies, and the life of our communities.Largely American content, with some focus on the globalised food chain.

. Local livelihoods; global trade; the politics of taste, community, and environmental change: all enter into this lively, surprising, yet sobering tale about the nature and cost of our hunger for freshness. Chapter 5 focuses on iceberg lettuce as a case study in how the vegetable supply chain relies on poorly paid labour combined with technological innovation, whilst being packaged as “fresh” and “natural”. Chapter concludes discussing globalisation in the vegetable supply chain.

We are literally drowning in sugar. In this fascinating account, Sanjida O'Connell reveals the extraordinary and illuminating story of sugar's world domination. Before written records began, a type of grass grew wild in one place :New Guinea. Once domesticated to create sugar cane it was passed to the modern world by an unholy alliance of Buddhist monks and Arab traders who showed how to extract the sweetest substance known to humanity.