Race and Gender on the Serving Line: Social Dynamics of Food Service at Yale

Using Yale Hospitality as a case study, this paper explores questions of race and gender to better understand social dynamics in food service organizations as they relate to the broader context of food justice. I argue that the very notion of sustainability must be expanded to integrate worker’s issues and identify the invisibility of workers at large institutions. Current scholarship on food service workers urges us to ask about workers in the restaurants where we ourselves eat. In this essay, I try to make visible the experiences of dining hall workers at Yale, through listening to their own stories, recreating the history of their labor activism over the past few decades, and looking at statistical portraits of who they are.