Joe Jackson was a chef at a Gaslamp Quarter restaurant and later the executive sous chef at a downtown hotel. But these days, after a full career in San Diego’s culinary scene, he’s Deputy Joe Jackson.
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About five years ago, Jackson traded his chef hat for a deputy badge. He’s with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office, and he sometimes spends his shifts breaking up disturbances, chasing people, making arrests. As a deputy, the 48-year-old has worked in the courts, worked in the jails, patrolled streets in Vista and now patrols them in Santee.
But being a professional chef? That’s odd and cool, so it’s no surprise that word of his past life got around — probably thanks all those well-made meals he brought in and shared with coworkers.
News of Jackson’s talent reached the ears of the department’s Performance, Wellness and Resilience team, dedicated to the wellness and holistic health of the department’s roughly 4,700 employees.
The unit approached Jackson earlier this year and asked him to help promote healthy eating department-wide.
Jackson certainly knows the challenges of eating well while working on patrol, with sometimes just a few minutes for a meal and only fast-food options available. He seen deputies wolfing down California burritos during late-night shifts.
“That’s just not healthy,” he said.
The wellness unit recently introduced an internal video series starring Jackson teaching meal-prep and providing practical, healthy recipes.
His first featured dish: pan-seared salmon with steamed couscous (from a box!) and a Mediterranean relish.
The longer version is available internally for department employees, but the Sheriff’s Office also posted a roughly 90-second video on Instagram, which includes the recipe.
The idea is to make healthy eating doable, especially for an audience with odd hours and high-stress jobs.
“You know, if I’m working night shift 5 days in a row, hey, I can watch this video of a deputy who’s making a meal that I can make pretty easy at home,” said Sgt. Peter Myers of the PWR unit.
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“We’re trying to make it easy,” Myers said. “Trying to make it fun.”
The meals are the sort that a deputy can bring to work and eat straight from the container, even if there’s no microwave around to heat up the food.
“If it helps a couple deputies out,” Jackson said of the lessons, “I did my job.”
Jackson was an Indiana kid who moved to San Diego after college around 2001, armed with a degree in social and behavioral sciences (and a minor in anthropology). Around that same time, he began to notice that being a chef “was thought of as almost like a rock star,” and he decided to go to culinary school.
A year later, Jackson was working in San Diego restaurants and banquet kitchens. For him, it clicked — the professionalism, the fast pace, the intensity of it all.
Jackson said he interned at the Town and Country in Mission Valley and later took his first restaurant job as a line cook at an old restaurant at Hotel del Coronado.
He went on to work in several restaurants and hotels, and said he liked creating menus and pulling together wine dinners. He said he eventually became chef de cuisine for a Gaslamp spot that has since closed.
Jackson later became the executive sous chef at a downtown hotel, where his job included ensuring the quality of the food, maintaining the financials, managing people and taking responsibility for everything that came out of the kitchen.
He had spent most of his adult life in an industry that expects people to change jobs every few years but is “feast or famine” when it comes to work opportunities, he said. And that was before COVID hit and restaurants closed. With COVID, Jackson, in his early 40s, started looking into a change, hoping for more work than the culinary scene could provide.
“I needed a career that was going to be stable,” he said. “I was thinking 20 years down the road.”
He sees himself with the Sheriff’s Office for several more years.
Jackson has recorded three videos thus far for the wellness unit — one with a marinated chicken recipe, another with tri-tip meat. The next video could be released later this month.
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