FOOD YOUNG & HUNGRY
Life on the Line
Darrow Montgomery/File
“Cooking has become one of the most lethal occupations in the last year alone. We don’t have the luxury of staying home.”
By Michael Loria and Laura Hayes In his 27-year cooking career, Antonio Burrell has worked ever y where from retirement homes and fast-food chains to D.C. restaurants like Bistro Bis, Masa 14,
Republic Cantina, and The Occidental. He’s a restless soul who frequently changes jobs and has held every position from dishwasher to line cook to executive chef. “I’ve never wanted to do anything else,” he says. “I love my job.”
18 February 2021 washingtoncitypaper.com
But for the past year, fear has extinguished Burrell’s unconditional love for his profession. “I’m not ready to die,” he says. The chef has diabetes, and his lungs are compromised from smoking and bouts with bronchitis. His underlying conditions increase his risk of severe
illness from COVID-19, which is responsible for 465,000 reported deaths in the U.S. as of Feb. 9. Burrell is currently opening a restaurant in Maryland; working didn’t feel like a choice after facing eviction in January. If he coughs once, he panics. “I live with that fear every day I go to work,” he says.” You can’t stay home because there’s pressure to pay bills. You have to live your life, but living our life could cost you your life.” While Burrell fills more managerial roles in kitchens at this point in his career, he’s right to be afraid, especially for the cooks in his charge. A University of California– San Francisco study published last month found that cooks had the highest proportional increase in risk of mortality during the pandemic than any other profession, including health care workers. Researchers used occupations listed on death certificates. Between March and October 2020, the number of working-age cooks or food service workers who died in California was 60 percent higher than it would have been in a normal year. “It’s individuals in low-wage essential jobs, such as cooks, who have suffered the highest relative increases in mortality associated with the pandemic,” says Alicia Riley, a postdoctoral scholar in epidemiology and biostatistics and one of the study co-authors. She notes that executive chefs are excluded from the category of “cook.” Farmers and bakers were also in the top five. “Our policies have treated their labor as essential but not their lives. These were preventable deaths.” There’s been discourse about the safety of restaurant workers during the pandemic, but the focus has largely been on the difficulties servers and bartenders face as they interact with diners who don’t always adhere to COVID-19 protocols. Burrell says that risk trickles into the kitchen: “You have customers coming in who don’t want to be told what to do. They’re having interactions with the front of house, who have interactions with us.” A confluence of other factors also put cooks at risk for contracting COVID-19. City Paper spoke with several cooks about the past year. Some asked to be identified by their first name only or by a middle name. In addition to fearing for their health and safety, cooks have struggled to feel any sense of job security and the joy of their daily work has been stripped away as dining rooms emptied out and owners cut costs to stay in business. Restaurant owners dedicate more space to the dining room than the kitchen for a simple reason: Every table represents a revenue-earning opportunity. That’s how cooks wind up working in hot, crowded spaces. “What square footage you get, you have to cram in equipment and cooks to make food to make profit,” Burrell says. “You’re working shoulder-to-shoulder with people plating food, breathing on each other, sweating on each other. It’s not the most sanitary conditions, even in the best of times.”
