Cook Or Chef

Recently while speaking to a restaurant recruiter in the Vaucluse, I asked if she had noticed an increase of women chefs in the industry in recent years. She looked at me forwardly and told me the life of a chef simply was not women’s work, and that when the time for her to bare children would undoubtedly come it would not be possible for her to continue in her work. For centuries women have

been cautioned that their educations and careers be moderated as to not interfere with their primary roles as wives and mothers.

 

In Food And Femininty Josée Johnston and Kate Cairns explain that femininity as a notion refers to the socially constructed roles that society at large has deemed appropriate to be performed by women. Though for many women, myself included, foodwork can be an intimate expression of selflessness and love, the intrinsic ties of femininity and food work are hard to deny. Women’s role as primary nurturer and person responsible for the feeding of families is one that is highly scrutinized, those who are not able to maintain the perfect balance of feeding families healthy home cooked meals without teetering into the neurotic obsessively organic mother or the mother shamed for feeding their children fast food, often due to economic and scheduling reasons are deemed inadequate and shamed in their performances of femininty.

Potentially in part to the mostly unpaid ‘intrinsic’ connections of food and femininity that have been perpetuated throughout history, despite the women’s place in the kitchen in many family homes, highly regarded female chefs remain a rarity. The trope of the “bad boy” hot tempered male chef  is one that is abundant in modern media representations of high-end kitchens. With these media representations and socialization comes a societal exception of the ideal chef as one that is aggressive, militant and above all, male.

According to a Bloomberg study women occupy  6.3 percent, or 10 out of 160 head chef positions at 15 prominent U.S. restaurant groups, regardless of recent increases of women culinary students in recent years (up to 40% at the International Culinary Center) and women making up 45% of the culinary industry. As well as the lack of women chefs gaining industry accolades, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission revealed the restaurant industry as the largest source of sexual harassment complaints.

In Charlotte Druckman’s Gastronomica article “Why Are There No Great Woman Chef’s?” the author compares the ‘lack’ of great chefs to the ‘lack’ of great  artists historically and asks “What defines greatness? For our purposes, we must inquire, specifically, what makes a Great Chef? The answers reveal that our signifiers of greatness, chef-wise, are those attributes considered inherently “male”—or at least those not generally associated with women. In the United States, especially, success, for chefs, has historically been measured more by business acumen, celebrity, and marketability rather than by what happens at the stove. Who cares if your panna cotta has a “female” look to it; tell me instead whether you own multiple eateries. Is your personality translatable to a wider audience? Is your restaurant concept something that can be replicated? Do you have a style that both complements and transcends your culinary point of view—as in, are you a serious extremist (a science nerd like Grant Achatz or a purist devoted to technique and ingredients like Thomas Keller or Tom Colicchio); an enterprising French master (Daniel Boulud, Alain Ducasse, or Eric Ripert, par exemple); an unrepentant glutton and camera-loving ham (Mario Batali); a bad-ass genius-rebel who bucks the establishment (David Chang or Anthony Bourdain)? And then, ask yourself, can you think of a female counterpart for any of these?”