It’s been a couple of years since I did any serious work on a restaurant line.

I did occasional catering jobs, but that’s an entirely different creature in terms of its physical impact on me. Now that I’m back to the grind of meal service; in a little more than a month of line-work I’ve dropped about three pant sizes.
No, I’m not on any powdered drugs or meal replacement supplements (unless you count Kentucky Bourbon). It’s just that kitchen work provides a perfect storm of high-energy work, extreme temperatures, calorie burning mental stress and very little down time. These factors boil down to an 8 hour workout without any breaks and fewer opportunities to sit down and eat a meal.

This is your brain on dinner shift

Cooks, whether in the finest restaurant or the greasiest spoon, are a little like diamond miners. We work hard in dangerous and stressful conditions to produce a product most of us will never have access to as consumers. That, and our bosses will cut off our hands if we try to skim anything off the top. This creates a number of problems when trying to catch a meal during an 8 hour restaurant shift.
Although a good cook is supposed to taste everything they make before it goes out the window, the truth is that there isn’t always time to do so during a meal rush, and after making the same item 200+ times over a weekend, you should be able to adjust the salt levels without taking a bite every 30 seconds. Some cooks “taste” everything less out of professional acumen, and more because they need a constant flow of calories in order to avoid passing out. This system works for some, but in my case, where my list of dietary restrictions seems ever-growing, I can’t just subsist on bits of what I’m cooking, because most of the time what I’m cooking is bacon.

Despite what the label says; this pork is not kosher.

In my less restricted days; I could get by on sneaked strips of bacon, ends of toast and an occasional misfired egg. Because so much of what I cook at both my jobs is forbidden to me; I’m far more likely to subsist on coconut water and cigarettes than to even attempt grazing during my shift. Luckily (or unluckily, if you’re the restaurant accountant) my low blood sugar will often lead me to make a mistake, leaving me with a mistake sandwich I can gobble down like Smeagol going to town on some fish heads.
Did I just say we eat our mistakes?
Yes, much of the time when you send your food back to be remade, some server or cook will be eating what you didn’t want. If it’s a steak or seafood dish, the manager will usually get first dibs, but most misfires end up getting eaten by the kitchen. If not by individual cooks, then incorporated into family meal.

"I just can't send out all this braised lamb, boss. Better eat it."

Family meal is one of those things that sounds much better than it is (unless you grew up in my family). In theory; it’s the meal made for the entire kitchen staff so they’re not grazing the profits of the restaurants away. The kind of restaurant you work in and the type of people you work for will dictate what qualifies for a family meal in your particular kitchen.

If you work for Ferran Adria at his laboratory kitchen/university/cult, or if you worked at El Bulli anyway, your family meal would be a sit down affair with plates and silverware and everything, with the entire kitchen staff sitting down to eat. If you saw the Bourdain episode where they showed the El Bulli family meal you may have a skewed view on the general nature of family meal, much like if you based your mental picture of “football field” on Cowboys Stadium.

Pictured: Not family meal.

In reality; family meal is almost always a thrown-together mess of whatever is about to be thrown away. If the staff is fairly tight knit and has the time on their hands; family meal can resemble a potluck meal with everyone contributing an element to the shared meal.
But there’s a dark side to family meal as well.

I worked in the kitchen of a Thai restaurant for three years as the only Caucasian in a 15-person staff made up of either Southeast Asians or Ecuadorians. Every kitchen has its class-stratification (usually along ethnic lines, but not always) and this place was no different. If you were Ecuadorian or me, your family meal was fried rice with chicken wings 5 to 6 days a week, with a misfired Pad Thai closing out the cycle. If you were Thai, Lao or Vietnamese; you shared the fried rice and chicken wing entree maybe twice a week . The rest of the time you were chowing down on grilled fish, sticky rice hand-rolls, vegetable stir-fries, soups, rice noodles and an occasional pizza ordered directly to the kitchen and only dispersed to the non-Spanish speaking cookstaff.

In fairness; when my boss was in a good mood she would occasionally share the good stuff with the amigos and I. The flipside to that would be when her walrus-faced second in command, name redacted, would be given the job of making our daily fried rice. Not only would this hungover manatee not make the requisite chicken wings, she was so lazy that she wouldn’t heat the oil in the wok before adding the rice, leaving us with something that was less fried rice than it was par-cooked rice lightly poached in warm vegetable oil. After dumping this lukewarm pile of oily rice on a platter for us; she would spend two to three hours putting together a fried carp and papaya salad meal just for her and one other cook.
No joke; this happened multiple times.
It was the increasing frequency of family meals like this that led me to leave that particular kitchen. Even the Ecuadorians complained, and they’re tough as nails.

Other than learning the valuable lesson that racism knows no color; I learned not to depend on family meal for any necessary nutrition during my cooking shifts. In the many years since I’ve realized that fend-for-yourself is becoming a much more common attitude in kitchens than the communal meal and the esprit de corps that it sometimes creates among the staff.

So the next time you go to a restaurant and your food comes out slightly wrong (but still well-made!), and you happen to see your cook looking sickly and bleary-eyed, don’t just assume they’re hungover or on drugs (although they most certainly are). Chances are that they’re merely starving to death while surrounded by food, so cut them a little slack.
You try doing a stressful job while surrounded by something you can’t have for yourself.

Unless you’re already a diamond miner. Or a strip club DJ.