How can feeding people well give my work meaning?

You already sense the answer, and it is a good one to build a working life on. Feeding people is one of the oldest kinds of care there is. Long before anyone had titles or careers, someone cooked, and someone else was kept alive and comforted by it. You stand in that line. Under all the pressure, that is what you are doing. Meaning does not need the work to be calm or easy. In fact the pressure can sharpen it. To hold dignity in the rush, to send out something good when everything is screaming at you to just get it out, is a real thing to be proud of. You are not just surviving the shift. You are giving people a small, honest good in the middle of their day, over and over. So let that be the thing you hold when the pressure spikes. This plate goes to a person. Make it well. Once a shift, watch a plate leave and picture the face it is headed toward. That one moment of seeing the person turns motion into meaning. The work was always worthy. Now you get to feel it.