Let them Bake Cake: Food High School trains kids for low-wage jobs

Cooking mania is trickling into publiic school, as per a nicely done profile of New York City's Food and Finance High School by Kim Severson in the Times' Dining Out section. The school's 600 students study Fast Food Nation in English class, grow hyrdoponic bok choy, and learn the national origin of different dishes. Most importantly of all, the piece emphasizes, they're getting a solid education that can make them marketable food workers, ready to slide into a rapidly growing field.

It would be naïve to think many will end up alongside the Rachel Rays and Thomas Kellers of the world, but it's interesting to consider where those students are likely to end up. Severson cites a National Restaurant Association stat to make her case--the NRA projects 17 percent growth in restaurant cooks in the next ten years--that field clocks in at a median wage of $9.39/hour, with most workers falling between $7.79 and $11.13, according to Department of Labor statistics. That puts our aspiring foodies at annual salaries between $15,500 and $22,260 a year--not much to live on.

What's more, the fastest growing segment of food work overall is in food preparation and cooking at ready-to-eat markets, or in institutional dining like hotel restaurants--which are increasingly contracted to outside providers--according to the DOL. Those jobs pay even worse, with median wages ranging from $6.99 to $10.69.

Of course, that range of income probably might not sound incongruous--but that's because so many Americans earn so little. One-third of all American workers are considered low-wage, at $11.11 or less, according to a recent study.

That makes most restaurant work less a bright new future and more of a dingy addition to our economic present: An expanding service industry, slowly taking up more of the economic room previously held by manufacturing but failing to mimic the latter's job quality. That's not to say some of the kids won't go on to do quite well, but stories like these tend to create a public narrative about upward mobility, without ever assessing the feasibility of the project.

At the end of the day, there's not much we can do about our economy's metamorphosis from one of production to one of consumption. Indeed, the smarter thinking on the jobs and poverty front isn't how to get people into good jobs--so few of them remain, after all--but how to make bad jobs better. Crappy jobs aren't that way because of a natural law. Many of the low-skill jobs that are now considered good ones, like auto manufacturing, weren't born that way; we have union organizing to thank for that.