John F. Kelly Likes to Pick Fights. Chiefs of Staff Are Supposed to Stop Them.

By Phillip Carter, Slate

30 July 17

The Homeland Security chief’s aggression and blunt style endeared him to his boss. But a White House chief of staff needs a smoother approach.

f President Donald Trump called the “central casting” office that he often invokes to send over the archetypical military man to knock sense into his team as chief of staff, it would likely dispatch John F. Kelly to the White House. In 42 years of active service as a U.S. Marine, Kelly worked his way up from enlisted grunt to four-star general, serving in both Iraq wars and a number of other deployments. He’s also endured incalculable loss with the combat death of his son Robert in 2010. Kelly’s career culminated as the commander of Southern Command, responsible for all U.S. military operations in South and Central America.

Trump has a thing for generals, and it’s not surprising that he gravitates toward Kelly in particular. While serving under President Obama, Kelly became an outspoken advocate for greater efforts to secure the southern U.S. border. Kelly also has a bombastic style that is exactly what you would expect of a four-star Marine general raised in a Boston-Irish family.

And yet, Kelly carries some dents in his armor too. Although he served two tours in Washington as a Marine general, he never quite became a political operator in the manner of Gen. Colin Powell or Gen. David Petraeus. In comments to CNN last month, Kelly expressed shock at the level of partisanship he encountered at DHS, saying, “What I never saw on the military side was the level of toxic kind of politics that are associated with what I do now.”

Unfortunately, but perhaps characteristically for the Trump administration, Kelly has responded to Washington by attacking it. In April, Kelly told an audience that critics of immigration enforcement actions taken by DHS personnel under his leadership should “shut up” and stop questioning their actions. Further, Kelly added, members of Congress who objected to his performance “should have the courage and skill to change the laws. Otherwise they should shut up and support the men and women on the front lines.”

Kelly has also fallen victim to criticism over plans to build Trump’s vaunted wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, which appear to be stuck somewhere in the federal budgeting and procurement process. And Kelly has taken much of the criticism—from both Democrats and Republicans— for immigration policy and enforcement actions that are either too tough or too lenient, depending on the critic. However, Kelly hasn’t responded constructively to that criticism, picking fights with Congress when he ought to be building bridges (or walls, as the case may be).

Even his jokes have come across as hostile, such as his quip to Trump when handing the president a saber at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, encouraging the president to “Use that on the press, sir.”

The big open question for Kelly now is whether he can impose order on an unruly, undisciplined, and shell-shocked White House team. Kelly need only read the terrific palace intrigue dispatches by Maggie Haberman and her New York Times colleagues to see just how bad Reince Priebus has run the White House staff aground. Set aside any substantive policy issues: The Trump White House simply didn’t run as a White House must run on a day-to-day basis. Any president, no matter his political stripes, should have fired his chief of staff in this situation.

Four big challenges will confront Kelly as he transitions into his new job:

First, Kelly must persuade his boss to take it down a notch and focus on the job instead of creating spectacles and fighting with his enemies, real and imagined. Trump oscillates so fast between issues that his own staff cannot keep up, let alone the network of legislators, surrogates, and political supporters necessary to give momentum to a White House. This White House will remain stuck in neutral unless Kelly can convince Trump to settle down and let him navigate a steadier ship.

Second, Kelly must bring order to a White House team that is at war with itself. Contrary to what Trump’s vulgar communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, may think, the Trump White House is leaking because no one trusts each other or much likes their bosses. On health care, immigration, foreign policy, trade, and so many other issues, the White House has devolved into hostile camps led by various chieftains like family advisers Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and chief economic adviser Gary Cohn. These camps not only disagree on policy. They also dislike and distrust each other. Kelly must make these teams work well together or disband them and fire their leaders.

Third, Kelly must discipline the president and the White House to function amid an increasingly toxic political environment that includes the special counsel’s investigation into the White House and Trump campaign, numerous congressional inquiries, and a hostile press corps. In a sense, the combat veteran must teach the White House staff to function as if they’re walking through a steady barrage of incoming mortar rounds. This is, of course, easier said than done. But if the White House cannot learn to walk and chew gum simultaneously, it will be paralyzed by l’affaire Russe and the myriad other scandals emerging from the White House.

Fourth, Kelly must reinvent himself to succeed. His bluster and bluntness served him well as a Marine; he could afford to make enemies more easily when given political cover by the secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Kelly’s aggression in his former job succeeded because it played so well internally and was consistent with what many expected of a law enforcement chief. This bluster is undoubtedly why Trump hired Kelly and brought him over to the White House. But to succeed—and to make Trump succeed—Kelly must now shed this skin and become a smoother political operator.

Farm-to-Table May Feel Virtuous, but It's Food Labor That's Ripe for Change

By Andrea Reusing, NPR

30 July 17

ovel and thrilling in earlier days, today's farm-to-table restaurant menus have scaled new heights of supposed transparency. The specificity can be weirdly opaque, much like an actual menu item that recently made the rounds: Quail Egg Coated in the Ashes of Dried Sheep's S***. Farm-to-table fatigue is most evident in those of us who cook in farm-to-table restaurants — Even We Are Sick of Us.

In the 15 years since Lantern opened, guests at my Asian-influenced farm-to-table restaurant have only rarely asked why a white girl from New Jersey is cooking fried rice in North Carolina alongside a kitchen crew mostly born in Mexico. The food we cook is openly and inherently inauthentic. But guests are sometimes surprised to learn that every single thing we serve isn't both local and organic, that our relatively expensive menu yields only slim profit or that we can't afford a group health plan. Diners occasionally comment that our use of Alaskan salmon or California cilantro has detracted from a truly "authentic" farm-to-table experience.

The ubiquity that makes farm-to-table meaningless also gives it its power. It has come to signify authenticity on almost any level, suggesting practices as complicated as adherence to fair labor standards, supply chain transparency or avoidance of GMOs. As farm-to-table has slipped further away from the food movement and into the realms of foodie-ism and corporate marketing, it is increasingly unhitched from the issues it is so often assumed to address.

Farm-to-table's sincere glow distracts from how the production and processing of even the most pristine ingredients — from field or dock or slaughterhouse to restaurant or school cafeteria — is nearly always configured to rely on cheap labor. Work very often performed by people who are themselves poor and hungry.

Inequality does not affect our food system — our food system is built on inequality and requires it to function. The components of this inequality —racism, lack of access to capital, exploitation, land loss, nutritional and health disparities in communities of color, to name some — are tightly connected. Our nearly 20-year obsession with food and chefs has neither expanded access to high-quality food nor improved nutrition in low-resource neighborhoods.

Only an honest look at how food gets to the table in the U.S. can begin to unwind these connections.

Food workers, as members of both the largest and lowest-paid U.S. workforce, are in a unique position to lead these conversations. Many of us have already helped incubate policy change on wage equality, organic certification and the humane treatment of animals. But a simpler and maybe even more powerful way we can be catalysts for real change in the food system is to simply tell the stories of who we are.

Take immigration. Our current policy renders much of the U.S. workforce completely invisible. This is more true in the food industry than in any other place in American life. There is a widespread disconnect on the critical role recent immigrants play in producing our food and an underlying empathy gap when it comes to the reality of daily life for these low-wage food workers and their families.

For example, here in North Carolina, over 150,000 immigrant farm and food-processing workers harvest nearly all the local food we eat and export, but their living and working conditions would shock most Americans.

Our state produces half the sweet potatoes grown in the U.S. — 500,000 tons a year — which are all harvested by hand. A worker here has to dig and haul 2 tons to earn about $50. In meatpacking plants, horrific injuries and deaths resulting from unsafe working conditions are widespread. Farmworkers are exposed to far more pesticides than you or I would get on our spinach. Poverty wages allow ripe strawberries to be sold cheaply enough to be displayed unrefrigerated, piled high in produce section towers. Nearly half of immigrant farmworkers and their families in North Carolina are food insecure.

When as chefs we wonder whether a pork chop tastes better if the pig ate corn or nuts but we don't talk about the people who worked in the slaughterhouse where it was processed, we are creating a kind of theater. We encourage our audience to suspend their disbelief.

The theater our audience sees — abundant grocery stores and farmers markets, absurdly cheap fast food and our farm-to-table dining rooms — resembles what Jean Baudrillard famously called the simulacrum, a kind of heightened parallel world that, like Disneyland, is an artifice with no meaningful connection to the real world.

As chefs, we need to talk more about the economic realities of our kitchens and dining rooms and allow eaters to begin to experience them as we do: imperfect places where abundance and hope exist beside scarcity and compromise. Places that are weakened by the same structural inequality that afflicts every aspect of American life.

Roger Ebert described the capacity of movies to be "like a machine that generates empathy." With more expansive definitions of authenticity and transparency, restaurants can become empathy machines and diners will get a better understanding of the lives of the people who feed us.