I’d love to comment on the topic of education you have deftly interwoven with the story here (and added the topic of restaurants-as-employers) but I’m afraid this post would become torturous and complicated to say the least. :)

But anyway. When you said ‘footnotes to the menus’ it reminded me of something I’d seen recently – a new literary journal (put out by Fresno State) is asking for ‘annotated recipes’ among the other categories of pieces being called for as submissions. I thought this was fascinating, for I’ve never seen this exact thing before!

Here’s a link to the website of the journal – it’s called The Normal School and here’s part of what it says about the annotated recipes:

We gladly consider unsolicited annotated recipes. Boy, are we ever pining for some great annotated recipes, compelling correspondence, found texts, and story-ish charts and graphs.

Fun stuff!

(Tangential to your point, which I do take, and agree with thoroughly by the way.)(Maybe we can call this response a garnish?)