Each year, about 23,000 inmates like Camper leave prisons in Ohio, and 640,000 are released from prisons across the country. Nearly two-thirds of them can’t find a job within the first year and a majority of them are arrested again within three years. Not getting a job doesn’t hurt just the former inmate, it hits the whole economy. One think tank estimated that the cost of not hiring felons is $87 billion in gross domestic product every year. Governments have tried to address the issue. In 2016, the Obama administration invited corporations to sign a “fair chance” business pledge to help reintegrate felons into civilian life. Major companies such as Total Wine & More promised to hire people with criminal records. Koch Industries and Walmart no longer perform a background check until after an applicant has been offered a job.
Joe DeLoss, a serial entrepreneur in Columbus, viewed former prisoners as business assets, not charity cases. He knew they were potentially loyal employees who would not take an entry-level job for granted. DeLoss aspired to build a company with a double mission: make money using a workforce the rest of the private sector had largely ignored. And he wanted to accomplish this goal using a somewhat unusual product: spicy fried chicken.
Are great chefs also great artists? They could be—if being “great” is taken as read. Food has appeared in art since time immemorial. In 1932, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published The Futurist Cookbook, in which the processes of cooking and eating are connected to avant-garde performance. Judy Chicago’s 1974 installation The Dinner Party set an iconographic table for women’s growing ownership of self in culture. Bronx collective Ghetto Gastro highlights New York’s racial inequalities with dinner installations. Grant Achatz paints dessert on a tablecloth at Alinea. Food intersects with art. But what makes either “great”?
The “great” that Noah Charney describes in his recent TASTE article fits a set of parameters: traits and qualities that chefs and artists can fulfill. His reference points—Aristotle, Giorgio Vasari, Eric Ripert, Ferran Adrià, Thomas Keller, David Gelb—all believe that food can be produced and appraised as an aesthetic object. They are all white. They are all male. They are all part of a Eurocentric tradition. Of the three women quoted—also all white—two, editor Bettina Jacomini and chef Ana Roš, are of the same opinion. The third, chef-owner Cindy Pawlcyn, says, “Food is nourishment to me, not art.”
In these high-stakes times, some may resist a book that delineates a narrow strip of male literary life in pre-Trump America. But the current president’s rise channelled anger at the cash and land grabs of the superrich that Klam brutally skewers, and the novel also deals seriously with the decline of traditional media and the ethics of memoir. Regardless of British qualms about the American takeover of the Man Booker prize, Who Is Rich? feels like another strong transatlantic candidate for 2018.