I forget how this ended up on my TBR (bibliography of another interesting article somewhere, I believe), and reading it 5 years after publication in the midst of the pandemic makes me wonder many of these issues have been exacerbated or alleviated (a McDonalds I drive by on my way to work advertises starting at $14/hr!)

It's ridiculous that currently, 43 states still use the $2.13/hr minimum wage for tipped employees. My husband moved from South Carolina to Oregon and was amazed they paid him minimum to start with, but also realized that all the nonsense he'd been fed previously of, "Oh, we can't pay you more because food costs will go up" is nonsense. Wage theft and benefits like healthcare coverage are also things that have more weight in a pandemic. My only negatives were in the Subway chapter, Food Babe's 'yoga mat chemical' campaign was portrayed as big corporation putting bad things in food and... ugh, she's a pseudoscience huckster.. That's a bit of a tangent on how employees are taken care of, I think (and if that were going to be covered, Chipotle's claims about GMOs should've been mentioned too but alas). A lot of the high road places are small and local (as it goes), but is the ROC guide really useful outside of a metropolis? I haven't checked. ( )

I requested this book a while ago, and somehow between being approved for it and actually starting to read it I had convinced myself that this was a book about the history of the fork. As in the dining utensil.

Yeah, let me go ahead and disappoint everyone by telling you that no... Not even close. My bad.

This book was written by Saru Jayaraman who is the Co-Founder/Co-Director for ROC (aka Restaurant Opportunities Centers United) which is an organization promoting fair and equal treatment, living wages, and paid sick leave for food service workers, among other efforts.

This book reads like a pamphlet or convention speech about the "high road" companies that ROC considers to exemplify their ideals, and the "low road" companies that make some missteps. Each chapter centers around a different style of restaurant (Mexican, Coffee Shops, Diners, etc) and uses one example from each "road" as well as a story from someone who works there.

Personally, I found this to be very similar to reading propaganda, though I don't mean that in a negative way. It was just painfully obvious that the stories and examples were cherry picked to highlight ROC's goals. In the intro Jayaraman says that she isn't doing this to reprimand the "low road" companies, just to highlight what they can do better, but it really just comes off as scolding in places. I also had some issues with the stories that were used.

For example, in the coffee shops chapter she uses Starbucks as the low road company, and uses a story from a former barista to highlight issues that didn't seem like they had any place in the narrative she was trying to present. The workers had to use direct deposit or a supplied debit card and the debit card company was hard to deal with (at best this is a supplier problem since most corporations do this now), she thought there weren't enough non-whites that worked there but had no actual proof of racism, and she didn't think that she was being paid for sick leave when she took it but never looked at her pay stubs so she wasn't actually sure. None of these were issues the author brought up in the intro to the chapter as things they needed to improve upon so it ended up just feeling like the author putting in gripes from a former employee just to make then look a little bit worse. See what I mean?

Anyway, this was an interesting read since it brought up a lot of issues I knew about having attained a hospitality degree, but never had to deal with due to my choice of working in hotels instead of restaurants, partly because of these problems. This would be a great read for someone who is thinking about opening or owns a restaurant so you can take the "high road" and I feel like that is probably the whole reason it was written. Not as a book to sell well, but more as one to give to potential members of ROC.

Copy courtesy of Oxford University Press, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. ( )