"If you lose your job, you try to find work in a restaurant. If you’re formerly incarcerated..."

"... you can get a job in a restaurant. If you’re undocumented, restaurants will hire you. I don’t know if I like that. There’s a conflation there of a safety net with employment—and with precarious employment, at that. It’s sort of like saying that because we don’t have socialized mental-health care in this country, that prisons and jails are the closest things we have to that, and so if we close down prisons and jails, we’re leaving these folks no option but to be on the street. I’m not equating restaurant work to being in prison, but I think the biggest issue with employment in general—anywhere in the world, but especially in the U.S.—is lack of choice. The existence of precarious jobs is not the same as security. On the face of it, that perspective sounds like an excuse to keep an industry going that’s problematic. It sounds terrible. It’s like somebody saying, 'Stay in this marriage, even though you are suffering terribly. Stay in it for your children.'... The only truly affirmative and sustainable response is a governmental response—one that’s universal, that’s agnostic of industries, at least initially, and that focuses on developing a really robust social safety net, so we don’t have to rely on unfortunate, fake safety nets like poor restaurant jobs."

Said Tunde Wey, an "activist-artist and cook," interviewed in "The Case for Letting the Restaurant Industry Die" by Helen Rosner (The New Yorker).