Move over Pommes Anna, it's Patatas Anita! (I totally invented that name, btw)

Back in my culinary school-teaching days, we instructors were required to wear a specific uniform. It was important to present ourselves to our students as professionals, bien sur, setting the example by showing up every day fully turned out in a clean white jacket with our names embroidered on the left, black pants (as opposed to the student’s houndstooth checks) and black shoes or clogs. The students were uniformed too, it was a requirement that they agreed to when they signed their contracts to attend the place. But despite that contractual agreement and their alleged interests in actually becoming professional cooks, it was always a struggle to get full uniform compliance in a class. Someone would show up in Jordans instead of the standard issue black shoes, or they wore a hoodie over their chef jacket, or wore jeans instead of the requisite houndstooth checks. Or they’d forgotten their white caps, or had their nails done (nail polish is totally verboten in kitchens, and when I see people online cooking with their nails painted it makes me squeamish) or they wouldn’t tie back long hair or remove dangling earrings. Or a hundred other ways that always struck me as ridiculous tiny acts of defiance, or rebellion or just laziness, that wasted my time and energy and that of their more serious classmates.

It also didn’t help that several of my colleagues were also constant uniform flouters, wearing their own nail polish, or long earrings, or a skirt instead of pants. The administration had a collective spine of tapioca so complaining about a colleague, or writing up a student for an infraction was useless. We got no support. Nobody wanted to lose a tuition of a student in the for-profit business of vocational education, so nobody was ever really penalized, or expelled. They were paying customers first, students second. And as far as the faculty, it wasn’t until the reign of terror began, when all the senior instructors started getting fired because the CFO noticed that we were actually making decent salaries due to working doubles and triples, six (or seven) days a week, that the uniform policy for faculty suddenly became a weaponized tool of accumulated infractions, to be tallied up, added to an HR file and ultimately used for termination. A housecleaning sweep of the highest paid, longest tenured, and most experienced. Though ironically, in my wave of the reign, we were the compliant ones, the ones who actually gave a shit about the images of professionalism we presented.