Madeleine O’Toole (Rhodes College) interviewing Heather Jamerson (275 Food Project), Diane Terrell (275 Project), Chef Tam (Chef Tam’s Underground Café) and Jesse Hewlette (The Container Café)
This podcast is part of the Rhodes College Just Food series, which addresses food inequality through discussion of production, access, distribution, and consumption in Memphis and beyond.
In this semester long project, students and community members have come together to promote empowerment through awareness and equity.
My name is Madeline O'Toole and I will be hosting this episode of “Building their Own Glass Ceiling.”
I'm a native Memphian and have had an interest in food and the local food scene in Memphis for the last several years. For the past two years, I've been writing a food blog called Granola Grrl in which I highlight local restaurants and my own college dorm recipes. I've also been working in restaurants all around Memphis pretty much since I was little enough to do so. I've been interested in food justice for the past couple of years as well and worked as an intern for Memphis tell for about a year, helping with the more communications and fundraising side of things. But I live to these food experiences. The Food Justice nonprofit, my blog's 40 local restaurants and my various jobs at local restaurants around town as totally separate entities. Yes, food was an underlying part of each, but I'd hardly even considered my restaurant job or my writing about local restaurants to be engaging with the overall food system as much as my internship. However, it wasn't until coming across some statistics about the food service and food entrepreneurship sector that I realized how wrong I was.
The restaurant industry is one of the most diverse industries out there. Yet rarely is there diversity among management across the food system. Around 75 percent of the people in restaurant management are white. Within this 75 percent, 50 percent are white men. And the other 25 percent are white women - thus meaning that only around 25 percent or less of the managerial positions in the food industry are occupied by minorities, both male and female. And obviously, this inequality has economic repercussions as well. As I learned in an article by Fortune stating that restaurant workers of color earn 56 percent less than white workers who have equal qualifications. Around 64 percent of Memphis's community is African-American, with a majority of that 64 percent being female. Yet, I'm still only able to count the number of black female owned restaurants that I know in the city on one hand.
So, if attempting to shift this marginalizing restaurant structure is not food justice, I do not know what is. Sure, it may not seem as impactful as, let's say, building a community garden within a food desert. Yet, I would argue that it is impossible to achieve a more sustainable food system without first addressing the inequalities existing in the structure of the food service industry that fail to give power to particularly female minority communities.
So, over the next 20 minutes or so, we're going to explore this together through talking to some local stakeholders and female restaurant owners around the city. First, I talked to Heather Jamerson and Diane Terrell from 275 Food Project over a cup of coffee in order to a truly deep dive into learning more about food, entrepreneurship and restaurant leadership, I needed to talk to some of the leaders and shifting the restaurant structures in Memphis. Heather has a background in sociology and economics, while Diane has a background in more of the social work side of things. 275 Food Project really does address almost every aspect of food justice in some capacity through its various programs, but specifically they have a Food Fellows program that pairs people of color, particularly women of color, with the resources necessary to attain higher success in the food industry. Their latest product has been helping Chef Jess Hewlette, who we'll hear from next, begin a restaurant in Soulsville under the 275 Food Project brand Eat Radical. This one in particular will be called Radical Tacos and is a branch of their radical restaurant concept that serves local food in order to boost the local food economy.
In addition to this Food Fellows program, they also work with local restaurants and head chefs in diversifying their restaurant spaces and ensuring that women and people of color have the opportunity to move up within restaurant positions. I first asked Heather and Diane to speak a little bit more as to why 275 Food Project began and how it works to shift this restaurant structure.
So here's a little bit from our conversation about women in the food industry that can give you a little bit more context as to the whole situation. This is what Heather has to say about it.
Heather: I had come from a foundation that had done quite a bit of macro level research about the food industry in Memphis and really saw that, first of all, we don't grow a lot of food around Memphis and we don't have a lot of infrastructure to support our chefs or food professionals who may be outside that mainstream. And so, if you are quite well-connected, there's access to capital. And if you're not, then it's really, really difficult to break into the food industry, whether you're a farmer, whether you are in logistics and distribution, or whether you're a restaurateur or a chef or line cook or anything like that. And so we've gathered a lot of data at that macro-level and then basically sketched out, once I left the foundation, along with Diane's experiences and her work, you know, how the two of us collectively come together and build an organization to fill some of those gaps that we have observed from our different vantage points.
And here is what Diane has to say about women and people of color in the industry.
Diane: I would say, and you alluded to this, women and people of color lack mentors in the industry. And the industry is very relational so to move up it requires that someone at or near the top reaches down to bring you up and what we’ve noticed is that in a white male dominated industry, the people who are these “chosen ones” are also white males. And so what we’ve encountered as we’ve brought people into the program is a real lack of awareness on a broad scale of some of the skills, information, and knowledge required to move up because they haven't received a lot of those opportunities to learn and grow.
Heather: This happens in every industry, I mean sociologically there’s tons of research on this. That social capital matters. So that’s the networks and the resources embedded in those networks. It’s who you know and what they can bring to you. And so if you look at a lot of the where people end up, it’s because of the personal relationship they have and the access to resources that person has for themAnd so my guess is that if you started asking people questions I don't know this (but I know Felicia Suzanne and I haven't talked to her about this) someone in her life was that conduit to chef ownership. And likely there was a similar story for Chef Tam but maybe it was different. And so like what we know sociologically is that even from an early age in our occupations, we get sorted.
And so you can kind of see that within the training programs that are in place. Who goes to this culinary school and who goes to that culinary school and how does that set your trajectory into the future. And so when we first met with a local culinary school here and we heard their process of getting people into that next job, it was a trap basically that was really excluded from the top chefs or those farm to fork restaurants or any of those higher paid, upwardly mobile positions. So you’re getting a culinary degree but you’re automatically getting funneled into a certain direction. You will hear stories as you ask people to trace that relationship conduit that got them to where they are. And then, what were some of the barriers that kept them from going off in the other way?
Diane: You know, people may be thought of as the center of their families for their cooking, but that doesn’t mean that it’s an economic center of their families. Isn’t that interesting?
That's very interesting.
Diane: A lot of what we talk about - and you hear it everywhere - food access is a buzz phrase and you hear it everywhere. But when we talk about access, we're talking about access in the conventional way that it means access to actual food. But we also talk a lot about access to our community in the local food economy.
And that means, you know, the opportunity to be a chef under the opportunity to be a chef. The opportunity to be an investor. I mean, there are so many opportunities. This is big business. You know, are three billion dollars a year in Memphis.
And you know, who is participating in that food with that needs to change. It needs to change.
Heather: And what is the wage structure for the people within that economy and the power of those resources allocated based on race and gender? That's kind of where we enter in it. So part of what we do is we wrap people in support so that they're successful. But the other thing, which is the big piece, is to be able to have those harder conversations with those ally chefs that we know and who support our work. And we're proud to call partners to say so can you open up a place in your kitchen for someone? And we've gotten a great response. I mean, we're hearing that chefs are willing. Now let's be able to transition, you know, some of the fellows out of our program and into those permanent positions where they're standing side by side and learning from that celebrated chef. So, our work is twofold, right? It’s working with individuals over here to help them have the skills and abilities to cost menus and other things. But it's working with the chefs to change that culture. We could have sat on the sidelines and gone in and told restaurants what to do but we wanted the experience and exposure of trying to do it ourselves and to be profitable doing it. And so that's why we decided to open radical. And then early on in our thinking, we knew that we wanted a great, healthy, locally sourced restaurant in Soulsville because that was a passion project that Diane brought to the table from her work in Soulsville. And so we said, well, why don't we call them both radical? Because they are. And what if we create a network of restaurants that are being proof points to the city of how to really reshape this this restaurant culture, right?
Dianne: This is about more than just swapping a person of color for a Caucasian. It's really about changing the culture of the industry so that it aligns more with the popular culture shifts that, you know, every community is undergoing. And there's no reason if people are saying this separate, where for there to be so much dissonance between what we believe in as individual human beings and the way our food system is structured, you know? And I would say that that's true across the board, the way public education is administered, and it goes on and on.I think we all want a better world, even in our small little communities, you know? And a lot of it starts with food because it is the one thing that we all need
And in having a conversation with their current Food Fellow Jess, I could tell that this “radical tacos” was more than simply a new local restaurant, but it was a movement that the entire 275 team was building, in order to give women of color these opportunities and networks that they deserve, despite the fact that the current restaurant systems may leave these chefs overlooked. So Jess and I sat in front of her soon to open first ever restaurant, and discussed a little bit more about her experiences within the food industry and her experiences in working with 275. She first recounts to me how she went from being a chef at various restaurants to being a Food Fellow with an encounter with David Krog, a highly celebrated local chef who works with the 275 Food Project team, along with his wife Amanda.
Jess: So I was doing a festival with a cousin of mine, craft food and wine festival, and Dave Krog was there and I knew he was going to be there and I was super excited. And I, tell my cousin, I'm like, I have to meet Dave Krog. So I get there, and you know when you're setting up and you're getting your station ready, you're not really thinking. So once we set them, we started moving. I was like, Oh my God, I got to go see Dave Krog go downstairs and shake his hand. We have this great conversation. And then he goes to the back and keeps prepping. Well, I talked to his wife for a little bit and one of Christina’s friends was a volunteer. And she says, “Hey Jess, where are you working?” So I tell her where I'm working and. So then his wife looks at me, she says, “I know you know me.” She says, “yes, I know you.” And I’m like “Oh my God, how do you know me?” So she, she tells me about, you know, her about the work you're doing, where you are and you're doing a really good job and you know, keep up the good work. “You're on the radar.”
I'm like, Oh, snap. I'm on the radar. So she goes back and she says, “did she tell Dave who you are?” And I'm like, no. I didn't, I just, you know, shook his hand. And so she comes and she brings him back and he comes and shakes my hand. He says, I know about all the up and coming chefs in the, in the, in Memphis, and you're on the radar. You are being watched or for lack of better words, you know, like, you know, , they were just such good, you know, people to have a conversation with. And it was like gave him a hug. And it was this guy who I freaking love. He knows about me. So maybe not even a couple of days later I posted a picture of, um, cause we took a picture together and I posted that picture. And so then, um. A friend of mine posted, sent me a message and it's like, “Hey, this guy that you just took a picture where he's doing a program that maybe you should fill out.” So she sends me the application, fill it out. I get my friend to help me to record everything out. And I'm like, Oh my God. 30 minutes later, my cousin who was doing the festival, she calls me and she says, “Hey, Dave says you need to fill out this, this, this application. You need to try to get in this program.” Yeah. So then the rest is history.
That's amazing. As for you, I feel like what has been your restaurant experience before this?
Jess: I have worked in various restaurants in Memphis. I’m what I consider like bloomer, cause I didn't start into the culinary industry till I was in my twenties. And so, I've worked literally everywhere. I worked with Chef Tam for a little while and she was so awesome I liked Tam a lot. And then I left there and I went to the Lookout Bass Pro, um, and a chef who was there, we had a really great relationship - work relationship - and when he left, he left a note for me to follow him. So I followed him to seasons 52. Right? Then I left there and then I got a job at the liquor store in management, which was awesome. Great experience. Um, but I knew that I couldn't, you know, set anchor. I needed, you know, just more. Yeah. And so then I got the opportunity to kind of do this, and it's been there, and I've had a couple of little jobs here, and there are Cafe Olé, you know, places like that. But I've worked everywhere in Memphis.
And so, um, this is kind of a, I guess a bit of a heavier question, but, um, like are there any instances where you feel like you've experienced like racial or gender discrimination, like within the food industry?
Jess: Absolutely. Yeah. Um, and it's, it's sad to say that because there's truly no difference between me and you and one other person, a guy, you know, only the color of our eyes or the color right here. You know, like there's truly no difference so to be discriminated on really feels bad, but it is something that is every day in some kitchens. Um, some of the kitchens I've worked in, like I knew that I was, you know, the lower person on the totem pole and not because I couldn't perform, but because of how I look. Yeah. And I mean, you know, that makes, it, makes it hard to do what you love to do. You know what I mean? So, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. And were there any times that you felt like you couldn't fully, like, move up in positions because of that?
Jess: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean most of the, most of the people who were management or in management were white men. And you know, not. You know, against anybody. I love everybody, but very few of them have been willing to invest into their staff and to their employees are 95% black. Like you will have in any kitchen, a chef or a sous chef who's white and your entire team is Hispanic and black. And I mean, why not invest in the people who run your business?
You know, the sous chef and the chef arrange the kitchen, but the employees. The people working the line. They are doing the job pretty work. When the hard work, why not invest into these people? Why not make these people be greater? It's a representation of yourself. If I work for you and I and you run a restaurant and then I turn around and I run a load of restaurants, then it's what you taught me that got me there. That means you're a good person and I do that, but it's, it's not like that. At all. Yeah. At all.
So what do you feel is your role as a woman within the food, entrepreneurship and ownership community?
Jess: Um, so ownership and entrepreneurship, I'm not quite there yet. Yeah, I'll see. I'll be getting there. But, um, in leadership, I think that my role. As a woman, um, is to prove that we can do it too. Yeah. Um, and I think that women are so often, like, you know, look to the side. They look over us. You know, she's a lady, you know, she's docile, she's sweet, and they, you know, we're overlooked. You know, people don't know how strong we really are. We are tough. Oh yeah, we are tough and we don't stop. And there are so many women in the culinary profession who are resilient, who are tough and are strong. And so I think that my role is to prove to everybody else, and we can do it too. We can do it too. And quite frankly, I think we do it better. Oh yes. I'll leave that conversation for another day.
And do you feel like that that kind of also being a woman of color? Like, how do you feel like that as a leadership position?
Jess: Same way. Yeah, same way, you know, because like I said. Well, for one, I've worked with a lot of guys in the kitchen and most of them are men of color. They're Hispanic, they're Asian, they are black men. They are Haitian. They're Jamaican men. These are strong men (and not any stronger than any other men) but these men are often looked over and I hope that when they see me standing there that they don't just see a woman standing there. But they do see a black woman standing there and they've makes them feel, you know, energized and inspired to like, you know, just don't take no as an answer. Like not ever because you know, these people aren't capable. These people are all are, are. Are proficient as all get out. Some of the first guy I remember working with at Babalu, I told you I worked at everywhere. So the first guy I remember working with Babalu, um, I can't think of his name right now, but he was tough, and he ran the stove to run the stove at Babalu is major, Oh my God, he was on the stove and he could do a thousand things at once. This guy, he was the heartbeat of the restaurant. And so I hope that, you know, young men like him, older men like him, black men, all men of color, Hispanic, Asian, every color, any color, you're in a position where you're feeling like you're not getting what you need, I hope that seeing me in this role makes you, makes you persevere. That's what I hope.
I hope that, too.
In speaking with Jess, it occurred to me that women like Tamra Eddy or Chef Tam of Chef Tam’s Underground Cafe, who was one of her first managers in this industry, served as an example to her, and now she, through the 275 Food Project, is able to serve as that example to others, specifically former co-workers that she believes often get overlooked in the industry because of their race despite their strengths and capabilities. These networks, as Heather and Diane mentioned earlier, are truly the key to the restaurant industry, and even simply supporting these females of color as food consumers is one place to start. Yes, there is a notable gap in having connections and then actually having the means to start a restaurant, but it is also true that sometimes these connections, such as in Jess’ case, are what lead to having the means to start a business. I next talked to the aforementioned Chef Tam on the porch of her Underground Cafe. It was 4:30pm when I got there, and already there was a line that ran out the door. This restaurant has been on Food Network five different times after only having been open for three years and it continues to gain traction and success within the Memphis food scene. However, this was not exactly how Chef Tam envisioned her life to look.
And she came into this industry through Christina McCarter and other women of color, who has gained great success within the local food scene through city tasting tours. Sitting on her porch, she tells me a bit about how exactly she got into the restaurant business.
Tam: So for me, um, I was a food services director for a charter school and Shelby County schools ended up pulling the charter and when they pulled the charter, my world was shattered. I was like, Oh my God, what am I gonna do? Single mother at the time, and it was like spell bound to say the least, because I wasn't sure just how I was going to make it work. And, um, there's a young lady named Christina McCarter that … she does city tasting tours and has the walking plate.
And so she takes people, you know, place different restaurants downtown. And she was like, Hey, there's a building, an old house over on Young. It used to be imagined vacant, and I think that you should go and look at it. And when I kind of pulled up like right out in front, it was. Like the bushes were over Braun. And I was like, that's really ugly. Like I didn't even come in. I was like, no, thank you. And so I went back home, but still, I'm a single mother with no, no way to take care of my son. And um. So I called one of my friends and I asked her friend, like if I wanted to start a restaurant, what you helped me. And she basically told me that she would help me, and she gave me the money to get the building. And when I came back, I just kind of afraid it was like, okay, God, if this is really you telling me to do this, you know, give me a sign. And when I looked up a literal sign, we sit at the corner of Bruce and Young. Bruce is my dad's first name and my dad is who I got my love of cooking from. And my dad had recently passed away. So I was like, OK. And so I undertook it. And where the name “Underground” comes from is that my name Tamra actually means Palm Tree.
Everybody always, you know, talks about how strong the Oak trees, but really Oak trees aren't as strong as you think. The palm trees roots actually run deeper. And so. The roots that I stand on in the culinary field are all deceased. My dad, my grandma, and my grandfather, my other grandfather. And so I stand on their shoulders as the tree that's above ground now. And so everything I do is because of those that have went, went on before. That’s how we are here.
That's amazing. And so you would kind of say there was this specific person, Christina, who kind of brought you into this.
Tam: Yeah. She told me about this place and I need not like, I see all kind of seem to run down and I just really didn't want any part of it. And once I kind of came in, I was like, okay, I'm gonna make the most of it, make the best of it. And we December, in fact, tomorrow will be three years that we've been here. And we go, we have a two hour wait and acclaims on Food Network. Five different times we’ve been on Food Network.
Then in essence magazine, like I couldn't have written the story any better. If God said, go write what you want to happen, this would have never been like this. I think my thinking would have been too small and I certainly wouldn't have thought that I would have accomplished what I've accomplished here.
Incredible. Um, so I mean, you've had such success in this industry...Have you had any experiences of like difficulties within the restaurant industry?
Tam: I don't really look at the struggles the way other women in business would, right. Because I think, yeah. You were talking about the, the minority side of it. I've seen struggle my whole life, so I don't see struggle here the same. It's just you gotta work hard, you gotta go hard no matter what. And for me. Then my father didn't have any sons. So because he didn't have any sons, he taught us to never let anybody be better than us, even boys. And so with that being in my head, embedded in my head as a child, it's like, no boys are better than me as a little girl. So here I am 40 about to be 41 years old, and it's like, I don't care what success a man is having, he's still not going to beat me. Like, that's my mindset. And it's so interesting because, you know, I went up against the guy on food network (a white guy on food network), and I was petrified because they were using words that I'd never heard of. And I'm like. Breaking out my phone, trying to Google those words. I did not go to culinary school. And here I am competing against somebody that's, you know, cooked for James Beard, the James Beard house, and I beat him. And so. I can allow those things to limit me, or I can allow those things to be the things that catapult me. And so what I've decided to do in my life is make those things the things that catapult me to better and do more and to never quit.
That's great. Yeah, that's a great outlook on everything. Makes me want to work harder, honestly.
Tam: I mean, because here's the thing. What beats a hard work, strong and hard work ethic. Nothing can beat. So man, woman, boy, or girl. My husband and I talk about this all the time because he says, I never sleep. And I'm like, well. What comes to sleep, but a dream. Well, I'm, I'm living my dream so I don't need to dream anymore. Like, I don't, not to say I'm not dreaming bigger, but I don't need the rest that I needed when I wasn't working for my . Well, when I worked for someone else, had to get my sleep, but now I'm working for myself. I'm creating dreams. I'm thinking about what's going to happen next year, what's going to happen in two years? What restaurant are we opening three years from now? You know what? What legacy am I leaving my son? I don't have time to worry about what man created with the glass ceiling. I'll build my own.
And then I'll stand on top of that. So yes, yes, I am woman. Hear me roar.
What an incredible woman Chef Tam is. And, needless to say, an inspiration to many, including myself. After speaking with these females in the food industry - both chefs and women trying to shift the restaurant status quo - it is obvious that increased diversity in both gender and race is necessary in the restaurant spaces in order to create a more equitable food system. For a primarily African American city like Memphis, the food culture cannot truly be reflective of the city as a whole until chefs of color hold more power within the food system. Yes, there is much work to be done to make this a possibility, but I would suggest that first things first, these women need to be getting the attention that they deserve. Even just supporting female and black-owned restaurants is a step in the right direction. Then, telling your friends, posting it on social media, and ensuring that the city as a whole knows as much about these restaurants as that highly publisized white male-owned barbecue place down the street. And, even simply speaking out against race and gender discrimination in food spaces is also a way to start, especially in bringing these male restaurant stakeholders into the picture and demonstrating the necessity of diversifying even their own kitchen. As a consumer in the local food system, you more power than you can even imagine. So, let’s start using that power to make some serious changes.