understanding PH through waitressing

I have been a waitress for four years now at PF Chang’s. Those who I’ve worked alongside all these years know that I’m planning on attending graduate school after I finish with college. When I tell them what I want to study, most people ask what is “public health”. Though waitressing once seemed like a whole different world from my life in academia, the competencies that go into being a server are very similar to that in the study of public health and I’ve been able to use my seasonal job as an analogy to explaining this health field: both waitressing and public health require the evaluation of a target population, followed by the education, promotion, and management of a program, and strengthened in a sustainable manner using prevention.

While public health is primarily focused on health and servers the optimal dining experience, both fields are ultimately concerned with understanding and helping to improve the experiences of others. Foremost, public health deals with a population of people in the same way that servers interact with costumers. Costumers walking in the front door are a population of hungry people looking for that optimal dining experience. Once costumers sit down in your section, you need to talk to them and get to know the culture of the table. By learning their food preferences, allergies, and expectations, you can educate the costumer about dishes that will complement their ideal restaurant experience. While the chef prepares the food to cure their hunger, your job is to make sure that the food being carried out onto the floor matches the costumer’s preferences and that it gets to them in a time and manner that is most suitable for them. Public health, then, is like waitressing in how you have to study your patrons, understand what contributes to their definition of proper care, and implement a plan of action to get them what they want.

The roles of public health and of the server, however, do not stop here: both require maintenance and follow up. In the same way that the absence of health is illness, a server sees any absence in the fulfillment of a costumer’s needs as a decline in the dining experience. As the meal progresses, you make sure that they continue to have this optimal dining experience by providing cutlery, drink refills, and sauces. You make sure that busboys, like family physicians in this analogy, are frequently checking up on the table. Furthermore, a strong public health program, like a well-practiced server, anticipates potential needs throughout the meal. Before the costumer even asks, you teach them how to use chopsticks and how to fold Mushu. In the same way you are educating and equipping the costumers with the tools they need to maintain this optimal dining experience prevention is the key to success in the domain of public health. By the end of this process you will have bridged any disparities, whether it be in satiation or in health. Ultimately, as I said before, public health, like the roles of a waitress, is about understanding and helping to improve the experiences of others.

mm mm chicken

I remember this one time when my mother and I went to the grocery store to buy chicken to cook a church lunch for 200 people. My father said he would wait in the car because no one would sell us that much chicken for the fifty dollars my mother was carrying on her. Without even looking at the price, my mother walked straight up to the counter and asked for some large quantity of chicken. Then, she proceeded to tell the guy behind the counter that she was going to pay him no more than fifty dollars. The butcher behind the counter laughed as he and the manager made their way over. Overcome by embarrassment for my mother, I only remember snippits of what happened next: I recall hearing a lot of yelling back and forth, a lot of bargaining, occasional logical reasoning, and the words “do it for the church.” The next thing I remember was walking to the car where my father was waiting, and opening the trunk so that the butcher and manager could bring out all the free chicken my mother had just acquired.