Across the country, DSA chapters are mobilizing to picket lines and feeding striking Starbucks workers. Here, Rhode Island DSA member Carlos reflects on the history of the kitchen in times of revolution and class struggle.

The modern figure of the chef did not begin in a luxury dining room. It began in the barracks, in hunger, in political upheaval. Marie-Antoine Carême — the man later called the “King of Chefs and Chef of Kings” — was born in 1784 to an unemployed laborer on the outskirts of Paris. He was one of eight children. His father, overwhelmed by poverty as the French Revolution unfolded, took him to the city at the age of ten with a single instruction: find work and survive.

Carême did. He washed dishes, swept floors, and cooked in exchange for food for his eight brothers. He was a worker before he was an artist. He lived in the same uncertainty as the masons and stonecutters who built Paris. From them he absorbed a way of seeing structure, symmetry, order. And in the heat of revolutionary France, surrounded by ruins and construction sites, he began shaping pastry as if it were stone — edible monuments that echoed the geometric clarity of the nation’s new architecture.

His pièces montées — towering sculptures of sugar, dough, and caramel — borrowed from the building language that would later inspire Le Corbusier and the architects that remade modern France. Carême believed that architecture and cuisine were parallel disciplines: both required discipline, engineering, creativity, and respect for labor. He designed not only dishes, but the first chef’s jacket: white, double-breasted, practical, proudly worn by cooks to this day. A uniform built for workers.

Nearly a century later, during the upheavals of the 1930s, another chapter of kitchen history unfolded — not in Paris, but in Minneapolis. The Great Depression crushed wages and pushed millions toward starvation. In 1934, as the city’s Teamsters strike escalated, workers built a commissary to feed thousands of strikers, supporters, and families. It was not a restaurant. It was a lifeline: a kitchen to keep people warm, sheltered, nourished, and alive. A place where food was not a commodity but a collective defense. In the middle of police beatings and freezing nights, workers cooked vats of stew, baked bread, treated injuries, and protected each other. The commissary became an engine of solidarity.

This is a pattern in American labor history. When a crisis arrives, kitchens appear. They appear because eating every day is a fundamental human need, and because the ability to feed each other is one of the oldest acts of resistance. The soup lines of the 1930s, the civil rights kitchens of the 1960s, the mutual-aid networks after hurricanes and pandemics— all extend the same lineage that began with Carême the child laborer building pastry monuments for a nation under reconstruction.

And today across Buffalo, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, New York, Providence, Boston, Minneapolis and more, volunteer cooks and labor activists assemble meals for the Starbucks strikers. These solidarity kitchens are not charity. They are infrastructure built by food workers, baristas, cooks, organizers, and community members who understand that the fight for wages, safety, and dignity runs through the stomach as surely as through the picket line.

At this moment, the national Starbucks strike — now entering its fourth week — honors that tradition. The young baristas are stepping into the long memory of labor in the United States. They are showing that the struggle for better conditions is never just about pay.  

From Antoine Carême shaping pastry like architecture, to the Minneapolis commissary nourishing an entire strike in 1934, to today’s kitchens supporting Starbucks workers, the lesson is the same: food is a collective act of dignity.

Let’s help them win.

Chef Carlos