How To Prepare Three Tons of Food

Today’s post was written by Kent Place student Maya Shpilsky.

Feeding 300 Ukrainian refugees a day, the Jewish Community Center in Krakow, Poland moves about 3 tons of food every week. 

It’s all because of Adam Smith.

Preparing the Food

Individual Sandwiches

My family and I walk down the cobblestone street leading to the Jewish Community Center in Krakow, Poland as a line of people starts to grow outside of its Ukrainian flag-decorated gate. We walk past them, towards the security guard standing outside of the center’s entrance, and show him our volunteer ID cards, personalized with our names spelled in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. As we enter the building, like we do every day, we pass through a room filled with plastic bags of oatmeal, tea, pasta, rice, lentils, and other foods. This room was the reason so many people were lined up outside of this building. The JCC’s food distribution center provides a reliable, healthy, and most importantly, free weekly source of sustenance for Ukrainian refugees who were forced to uproot their lives and escape to a neighboring country.

The Krakow JCC:

My family makes its way down to the basement of the JCC. Starting our first assignment of the day, we sit at tables where each of us will assemble individual sandwiches. We take out the cucumbers, mayonnaise, lettuce, and cheese from the refrigerator and put olives and sundried tomatoes into little bowls.

The Food:

And then, we wait.

Soon, we get our cue to begin work when 100 freshly baked bread rolls arrive in a large black polypropylene bag. I set up this bag right next to my chair, and one by one I cut rolls down the center, preparing them to be packed with various sandwich fillings. I help my mom do the fillings, putting them all on the bread, and then my dad puts the sandwich in the bag and closes it all up. 

But as the weeks go by, everything changes.

Specializing

Soon, my only job was making sure the rolls were perfectly cut and ready to be filled with the sandwich components. Sitting to my right, my little brother was in charge of the mayonnaise and cheese. While it took many lessons from me, he finally got the hang of how to spread a condiment properly and efficiently on a piece of bread. As he placed a slice of cheese on top of the bread and stacked these completed top halves on a cutting board beside him, my mother assembled the bottom halves of the sandwiches. She added lettuce, olives, and sundried tomatoes to the bread and covered it with the top half that my brother had prepared. After these completed sandwiches piled up on another cutting board, my dad packaged them tightly in plastic bags and placed them into a basket to be later carried upstairs. 

Because we had to pump out a huge quantity of prepared food each day, speed was crucial. Our transition from the slow process of making sandwiches more or less individually, to assigning specific roles to each of my family members, greatly boosted our output. 

I later realized I was not the one who discovered this process. It was Adam Smith.

Adam Smith

In one of the famous anecdotes in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith discusses the impact that the division of labor has on pin production. He shows that by breaking down a complex process into smaller and more specialized tasks that are assigned to different people, overall productivity can be greatly increased. Smith paints the image of a pin factory with one person drawing out the wire, another straightening it, another cutting it, and so on. Smith aimed to emphasize the potential for immense economic growth through specialization of tasks during the production process; a given number of workers can produce far more efficiently using a division of labor than if the same people worked individually. 

Quite unexpectedly, my family’s division of labor for sandwich production took us back to 1776. Who knew that the process of packing sandwiches and producing pins would be so connected? Adam Smith certainly did.