“GO BACK TO THE KITCHEN AND MAKE ME A SANDWICH!11!11!” —an old Internet proverb
To be a woman who dares overstep her place in the physical or the digital worlds is to be branded a target by men, men who wish to return to halcyon days: of women only seen (except when they shouldn’t be) but not heard, of apron-donning, of apple-cheeked ma’ams bowing to their every whim. For these men, food — or rather, feeding — is the second most important women’s work (with the first being to create/carry/raise the man’s children), and the domestic kitchen is the only place a woman should be when she isn’t tidying up the homestead or on her knees.
Note “domestic,” since every woman-in-the-kitchen joke should include an asterisk that of course, you wouldn’t mean the professional kitchen, as those are still dominated by men. A 2014 study found that 95% of executive chefs (those running the kitchen) are men, while a 2005 study cited in Deborah A. Harris and Patti Giuffre’s book Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen puts the percentage of men working as sous chefs (second-in-commands in the kitchen) at 82% and as line cooks (the ones you see sweating and running behind burners) at 66%.
Where do women dominate? Of course, at pastries: Flowery, delicate, intricate pastries that would collapse under strong, calloused man hands. But dessert is only the powdered cherry on top of beautiful man food (aka the stuff you pay for) rather than home food (aka the stuff your mom makes you because she has to — because she’s a woman, because she belongs in the kitchen, etc. etc. etc.)
The formal food industry is in awe of men who create, cook, and critique each other’s amazing, not-at-all-inane skill sets. (There are few household female food icons, and most of them also operate in entertainment media.) Just look at how men used to write about cooking for men, by men, in Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite’s dissection of the 1949 Esquire Handbook (now just Esquire) for The Awl:
A bride takes up cooking because she must, whether she’s an eat-to-live gal or just medium-bored with the whole idea. But a man takes to the stove because he is interested in cooking, therefore he has long been interested in eating and therefore he starts six lengths in front of the average female … After suffering steam-table tastelessness or misplaced housewifely economy, any palate will perk up at the taste of fresh fish, properly prepared—by a man. (Women don’t seem to understand fish—and, we suppose, vice versa.)
As Aggarwal-Schifellite puts it, “The Handbook shows over and over again that women have no choice but to cook bland food and throw boring parties, but a man can choose to do those things better than women, which allows him some semblance of control over his life. It also reinforced the Esquire man’s superiority over women, precisely because he could choose to take over her domain, and with the right training, he could do it in a way that would garner respect from both women and men in his life.” Or, as author Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket wrote in a piece for More,“it’s immediately clear that the world demands more of girls … A good girlfriend should do the laundry and maybe plan a dinner party when her guy’s parents come to town. A good boyfriend just has to not make passes at her friends. A good husband should have a job and not get violent; a good wife runs the whole damn show.” A good woman thanklessly does the day-to-day food labor; a good man does it infrequently and drowns in delighted praise.
(Aside: what makes an “eat-to-live” gal different from a regular gal? Are there eat-to-die gals? Eat-to-only-enjoy-but-not-live gals? Why has the notion of woman as food consumer remained so hard to grasp, especially in an age where it’s mostly women writing odes to Eat 24 and Seamless online and Instagramming every cupcake they come across? Why do all domestic kitchen magazine spreads look like set pieces for charity dinner film scenes? Why haven’t there been more high profile leaps by women between the food blog world and restaurant kitchens? Women are cooking, and eating, more visibly than before…and yet.)
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The backbone of the food industry relies on female labor, particularly in the realm of big agriculture. The image of the farmer will still conjure a solitary white male figure, gazing across fields of grain (see: Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar), even as machinery and mass human labor drive the reality of the business. The love affair between men and big machines holds strong, but while women may not always be pictured behind the wheels of tractors and combines, they’re certainly picking fruit, planting and harvesting rice and millet and cocoa, and working in food processing factories.
When it comes to the final product, as with most things, the domestic, “amateur” reflection of the elevated “prestige” profession is more populated by women, and carries with it connotations of frivolity, excess, and bare competence, despite the fact that social food sharing is open to and done by everyone. The culinary profession is a perfect example of University of Texas Austin professor CL Williams’s “glass escalator,” which suggests that men are often propelled to the top of prestigious professions faster than women, leading to increased visibility for men in a shorter time frame.
That might sound preposterous — in a world of Food Network and reality cooking TV, we can all list a slew of female chef personalities, but everyone from Julia to Giada to Ina to Padma wouldn’t exist without a screen on which a viewer can tune in. Meanwhile, a cursory Google search for “the best chefs in the world” runs through 18 male chefs before they even get to Julia freakin’ Child, while this 2010 Epicurious roundup names 15 men, almost all of them white, as modern cooking’s most iconic chefs. Though there’s surely an issue with racial diversity within the visible capital-F Food world, at least I can think of Marcus Samuelsson, Roy Choi, Aarón Sánchez, David Chang and their various modern commercial culinary endeavors. As for women of color, there’s Gina Neely, whose show ended in 2012, Aarti Sequeira, Maneet Chauhan, Kristen Kish, and Padma Lakshmi, who’s almost definitely on screen for more than her taste profile. And since 2000, only three female chefs have won the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Chef category. (In that same time, five male chefs have won the Outstanding Pastry Chef category.)
So, why are so many of the “best chefs” men? It’s certainly not because women can’t cook—after all, that’s why they’re in the kitchen—but rather because the professional kitchen environment is still comparable to that of a frat house or any sort of brotherhood-inspired society or field (see also: tech, sports fandom, physically intensive and/or blue collar jobs). As a 2011 post on The Feminist Kitchen posits:
There is a fine line for what is considered acceptable behavior for women in this “macho” environment. Women described themselves as “invaders” of men chef’s turf, and their male supervisors often had preconceived ideas that women were not physically and emotionally strong enough to work in kitchens and would give them fewer high-status jobs…
But the women had to be careful. If they acted too masculine, such as brusquely giving orders like men chefs, this could get them labeled “bitchy” and undermine their authority. Other women took a more feminine approach and a caring attitude about staff. They also “got their hands dirty” doing some of the less desirable kitchen jobs to demonstrate their commitment to teamwork. This made their male coworkers view them as mothers or big sisters in the kitchen — two feminine authority figures —but it was a fine line between encouraging teamwork and being a pushover.
In addition to the age-old “how do you play with the boys” dilemma, there’s also the perceived and real time commitment, itself based off of the assumption that female chefs are concurrently also dealing with the same-old issues of fighting the biological clock and then actively raising children, an assumption not also placed on male chefs. (The idea of a chef as a sexy playboy bachelor [thanks, Anthony Bourdain] doesn’t have a female counterpart.) Because while many women take their place in the professional food world’s lower ranks, they’re forced, whether they themselves worry about the issue or not, to confront their womanhood and its perceived effect on their ability to work.
Case in point: Three-Michelin-starred French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten said, in a Bloomberg inquiry into the dearth of high-ranking chefs in kitchens, “Many times when ladies become sous-chefs, as soon as they hit 27, 28, 30, they want to have a family. It changes everything. The ticking clock makes a difference. Women, they need a life more than men somehow, non?” In the same article, he describes the only female chef de cuisine in his restaurant emporium as such: “She’s an excellent chef. Very committed. Very pretty girl. She should be a model, not a cook.”
Of course, one might expect a middle-aged French dude to give that answer. How do the laypeople working in professional kitchens think? One Quora post by a male chef suggests that the issue is rather the perception of the celebrity chef, which places acceptable figureheads in place rather than honor the laborers, of all sexes and genders, who make those kitchens tick. In the same post, though, he suggests that women “aren’t crazy enough” to go deep into the kitchen world, and that the “bad boy” posturing that makes male chefs appealing — and encourages men to get into the business — simply isn’t applicable for women.
As for female chefs, there are generally two lines of thought, which are often adopted by women in other male-dominated industries: What gender bias? versus This is real and we need to talk about it. (See: New York Magazine in 2007 and Eater in 2013.) Many female chefs have the defensive undertone typical of people who gained their current power from white men, which is about right for an industry in which cases like Barbara Lynch’s mentorship of eventual Top Chef winner Kish are so unique as to warrant their own New York Times Magazine profile.
Indeed, woman-to-woman mentorship within the field might be the only real way to change the industry. Scholarships certainly help with the cost, but aren’t necessarily the most effective way to get women to stay. Some female chef mentorship program exist within the Women Chefs & Restaurateurs network and SheChef; programs by the French Culinary Institute and the James Beard Foundation suffer from having disappeared since 2002 and having mostly male mentors, respectively.
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Looking away from the industry itself, the cultural associations around the word “chef” still very much exist. Gendered occupations in themselves, though now rightfully under siege, still draw invisible lines in the sand: think of your firefighter, your ballet teacher, your secretary, your engineer. But for something like food, universal in its necessity and importance, those assumptions should be banished by the sheer ubiquity and impartiality of its demand. Sure, one can trace some sort of abstract thought lineage to the popular image of our species’ hunter-gatherer days, wherein the physically stronger males brought home the meat that bulked our meager prehistoric forms, while females foraged greens, roots, fruits, and fungi to supplement for lean stretches. But often glossed over is that women learned to tan hides and boil down fats; they helped smoke and save meat alongside men; and in cultures around the world, men and women hunted and cooked together until industrialization forced that model of food preparation into exceptional obsolescence.
The idea of the woman waiting for her man’s fresh catch in order to prepare it for the family just so is, on its own, a defunct notion. But the notion that a woman buys, prepares, and cooks the household food, or at the very least worries about it, isn’t so foreign in many households. Just think of your favorite home-cooked meal — how many of you thought exclusively of your father chopping up produce and checking on pots, your grandfather’s warm stews wafting through the rooms of your home? Who did you call on when you came back from school with a rumble in your belly? Whose ire did you rouse when you snacked before dinner; whose feelings did you hurt when you pushed away your meal?
A memory, composed of many: Setting the table under my mother’s watchful eye as she prepped meals, many times multiple dishes for multiple days at once, while my father puttered around the house until the very last minute. On those occasions when my mother was too tired to cook, out of town, or celebrating a very special occasion, we’d head to a Burger King, a local restaurant, or a McCormick & Schmick’s-level mall eatery — all treats that I sought away from the boring and “ethnic” stuff we got for dinner every day. I repeat: my mother cooked me homemade meals from family recipes for most of my life, and I oftentimes wanted nothing more than to eat anything else, save a few choice labor-intensive dishes.
What I didn’t know! — and now, I long for stir-fried spongy bean curd, soupy tomatoes with eggs and sesame oil, pork bone stock soups with cellophane noodles and cabbage, steamed sea bass with special Asian market soy sauce. Yes, the tastes and smells alone have me pining, but these memories are also visual and auditory and tactile: kitchen aprons hanging from a hook on the fridge; chopping sounds amidst sizzling pans and the buzz of the nightly news; the cooking burns and scars on my mother’s otherwise unmarred hands and arms.
I know I was lucky to have a mother who cared equally about her child’s nutrition and taste buds, and who was really, really good at cooking. For many people with less harmonious, Norman Rockwell-esque memories, family meals were the thing that Mom did or at least tried to do. I don’t particularly envy those who grew up with dry meat loaves, “creamed” vegetables, and lettuce-heavy salads — but whatever else, those mothers, almost always mothers, fought against the odds, including perhaps the knowledge that whatever they whipped up in their kitchens would never dazzle quite as brightly or tempt quite as readily as food that had to be prepared by others, bought, and then hand-delivered. Money equals value, but money also imparts value. You do not grow up knowing the exact price or the time units that went into your meals, only the things that pass your lips.
Tags: cooking, feminism, food, gender, lilian min, women, work
Oh this is so, so good.
My dad is an executive chef and my mom is a caterer. Much as the shoemaker’s children go barefoot, the chef’s children eat takeout. The crazy hours and job-related burnout add up to not a lot of home cooking at the end of the day, and while I do have some very amazing food memories from childhood, they’re nothing like yours.
Also, the gender disparity in professional kitchens is APPALLING to me. Just absolutely gut-punchy sickening.
I believe there is some evidence to suggest that hunter-gatherers actually get more calories from foraged foods (generally obtained by women) than from hunted/fished foods (generally obtained by men). Any anthropologists know more, or am I misremembering?
You are right, studies have found that 70-80% of the entire diet in hunter-gatherer societies comes from plants. The meat portion was fairly small, less certain (in some areas, the hunters would only return with meat less than half the time) and probably only a small handful per week.
I just posted below, having overlooked your comment. Yes, you are correct, except with the addition that women and children also hunt and fish.
I also remember reading that, in a study that came out sometime within the last few years.
This is a great article with a lot of depth. Thanks for writing, Lilian 🙂
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, ever since, a few months ago I saw a short-take on this subject by Chelsea Fagan of The Financial Diet (here: http://thefinancialdiet.com/on-being-a-woman-in-t… I’m now self-conscious every time I cook a large, elaborate meal and get compliments from roommates/coworkers/family/etc. Because I’m usually so quick to deflect compliments on my efforts and process and how good everything smells. “Well, I’m no chef. I just threw a bunch of things in a pot and it smells good.” The truth is that I’ve developed a whole lot as a cook since I started living on my own 1.5 years ago, and every meal is a relaxing yet labor-intensive ritual. But “I’m not a chef.” Right? I’m just a woman in a kitchen, which is normative, doing exactly what has been expected of me. I didn’t even consider it a hobby–just a chore, albeit one I liked.
But IDK, considering I spend so much time fussing over a stove, creating new recipes, I’ve been calling myself a hobbyist-chef more and more lately. And plenty of men with less skill or experience or creativity than me in the kitchen are listing “AMATEUR CHEF” on their OKCupid profiles. Why can’t I use the same term for myself?
Also, jeez, that Daniel Handler quote really burns. That whole essay is quite a read.
“The first time my wife and I took a walk with our infant son, someone called me a good father, because I was pushing the stroller. ‘I pushed that, my wife said to the passerby, gesturing to our sleeping son, Out. Of. My. Body.'”
Things you have to do to be considered a good father: exist near your child and contribute in any way, shape, or form to keeping them alive or content. I once saw a picture on instagram a blogger had posted of a teddy bear her husband bought because she was pregnant. There was a comment on it about how you could tell he was going to be a great father because of that. Because he managed to think about the fact that he was having a kid and buy it one toy, he’s now father of the year.
This was so well written and so enraging.
I feel very lucky to have grown up with parents who did an amazing job of splitting kitchen labor. My mom cooked dinner for 7 nights and did the dishes for those nights, and then my dad cooked dinner for 7 nights and did the dishes. As an only child I always had to dry dishes, so I didn’t feel it was fair, but looking back it was a wonderful system.
This is a great read! It makes me think back to being a child and seeing this disparity elsewhere; for me, having two parents who didn’t really cook, the idea of “woman as domestic, man as professional” manifested itself in horse sports, of all things. I was a competitive horseback rider for many years, and it always really stuck out to me that at lower levels, almost all of the competitors were women/girls. But then once you reach the professional levels, BAM! There are all the men, coming in to take the money and the glory. It seems like much the same thing here, with cooking – men have the luxury of deciding when they’re good enough to go pro, and then after that they just breeze through the ranks while the women are left behind trying to prove themselves. Of course working in a kitchen is difficult for anyone, but as with most things, men start at the top and then work their way to the higher top.
I worked in restaurants and had to leave because it was such a toxic work environment. I was on the pastry side (like most women in kitchens) and just couldn’t handle the language, the drug use, the attitudes of my coworkers. It really stripped me of my happiness. I’m now working at a law firm, getting paid barely enough to survive, and I’m still happier than I was working in restaurant kitchens
I hear you. I’m another pastry refugee. I swore up and down that i’d never treat any people that worked under me the way i’d been treated. The yelling, the bullying, the middle school bitchery (from the men, never the women. we stuck together), and then the assumptions from management that I was going to throw a fit and cry every time they even gently criticized me. Ugh.
Although I’m out at least partially because instead of hiring pastry chefs, lots of people are hiring chef de parties, putting them in charge of the pastry section, and saving themselves about 10 grand or so a year on salary. Sure, you can get a pastry chef job at hotels still, but good luck getting past all the men.
Please edit out the SORELY (I mean by 50+ years) outdated version of man the hunter/woman the gatherer. That concept, which was a flash in the academic pan, has wrought so much damage. Put it bluntly, in contemporary subsistence societies, women bring home 75-80% of the calories. That includes meat and fish, which both women and children contribute to, heavily.
I actually think it strengthens the author’s point. We have the ideal of man hunter/woman gatherer, and it’s not true and also women are (by at least one measure, i.e., calories) doing most of the work here, and yet who gets all the credit? i.e., in the case of the professional kitchen, what matters here is the perception — that men do the important work, and have always done the important work, way back to caveman times, so women suck and men are awesome (or whatever.)
Obviously the standards for professional anthropologists (and interested laypeople) are different! But thank you for confirming my vaguely recalled tiny piece of knowledge.
Hi! Wanted to clarify: I meant that as PART of the hunter/gatherer fantasy, not something to be believed or perpetuated. I had a lot of Indian friends growing up so I know for sure that having a meat-easy diet doesn’t lead to any caloric deficiencies.
The author notes it’s a “popular image,” which I took to mean that she knows it doesn’t represent reality.
Aaand just saw this. Yes!
Great piece. I want to also point out how often male cooks are either gearheads or otherwise super-invested in technology in clichéd ways and how both chef-as-superior-technologist and chef-as-crazy-liberated-artist don’t leave much room for something as warm and fuzzy other-directed as cooking for, y’know, people, which is just emotional labor the women should give away for free as usual. Male chefs somehow manage to claim cooking as ideological. I guess Alice Waters managed that too but what other women?
Now I’m going to nag everyone to read Perfection Salad again. http://www.amazon.com/Perfection-Salad-Cooking-Ce…
LOVE Perfection Salad. One of those books that looks at something you take for granted and realize that there’s historical development there. People didn’t always eat like this. And it’s always astounding to read about food fads of the late 19th-early 20th century and realize that the same ideas are still floating around today. Paradox of Plenty and Revolution at the Table by Harvey Levenstein are also great.
Oo will have to check that out. Thanks for sharing! (And, so true.)
This is great, thank you. I love this topic and think about it a lot from the other end, the agriculture end, and I think there may be a similar discussion to be had about women in small-scale ag vs commodity farming. (In 2013, women as primary operators was the fastest-growing segment of the ag industry.)
Anyway, this also made me think of the related book Kitchen Literacy, which addresses how capitalism manipulated our eating habits. I haven’t read it in years, and it was at the beginning of the local food zeitgeist, so it may be dated, but I remember it being really well done.
Will definitely add that to my reading list, thanks! And so interesting to note on the small-scale side; I see this on the smaller small-scale side when it comes to who’s running my local food co-op.
When I was about eight or nine, my mom started teaching me and my brother to cook, and we had to cook one meal a week after we were about 11 and nine. (Initially together, then taking turns after it became apparent that we were too dangerous to collaborate if knives and boiling water were involved.) I didn’t think this was weird, and it wasn’t until high school that I realized there were some dudes my age who didn’t know how to boil a damn egg, and literally expected to eat nothing but take out and ramen until they got married, and then their wives would take over where their moms had left off. I’m 37 now, and I’m sure there are teenagers in my town being raised this way now. It’s baffling.
My parents actually did the same thing with my brother and I (we were a bit older when they expected us to start cooking meals, but I was 13 when I was expected to feed the four of us once a week, and a toddler when I started helping). It never stuck with my brother – for him, cooking is such an arduous chore that at the end he isn’t even hungry and thus doesn’t eat what he cooks and there’s no reward, whereas I picked up cooking and baking as a hobby to the point that my parents bought me a (refurbished) KitchenAid stand mixer for my 19th or 20th birthday. (Also, because my brother dislikes cooking so much, for a long time the end result was so unappetizing that even if he had been hungry for it, he would not have eaten it. To be fair to him, he has pretty severe ADHD and some fine motor skill issues, but so do I (ADD, anyway).) It’s not an issue of there being a lack of modeling of men cooking for the family, as my father cooked on weekends (he worked outside of the home and my mother did not, so it made sense for her to cook on weeknights).By the time I was 15 or 16 it broke down so that she only cooked two nights a week, as I had taken over two and my brother a third.
I have had more than one person compliment me on landing a male partner who could cook and do laundry. I never know what to say to these people. o_O
When my mom was asked why she was teaching us to cook (and clean and do laundry, etc) she said she wasn’t going to inflict us on any future wives without being able to do all the basics of housework.
My non-cooking wife appreciates this.
My husband and I both love to cook and entertain–he has gotten rather famous for his cooking skills among our friends, to the point where a number of times when he gets complimented for a dish he has to make a point of saying, “actually Ann made this. I just helped out.” He gets twice the compliments I do, and happily redirects them back to me.
On another note: please please please tell me more about soupy tomatoes with egg and sesame oil”?!?
You’re gonna want something like this: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/stir… Add a hit of sesame oil at the end and make sure the tomatoes really fall apart for the full texture. Good eating!
The division in perception between women-who-cook-for-their-families and men-who-cook-professionally continues to fascinate me. It shows up even when the women ARE professional chefs: Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith and their ilk are shown at home in their family kitchens (well, supposedly), dressed in clothes that wouldn’t look out of place at an informal dinner party, and there’s a general air of mumsy middle-class housewife contentment (plus suggestive finger-licking by Nigella – all that and sexy too!). This is part of their image: they’re selling a fantasy to the people who watch their program that this could be you, or your wife, preparing home-cooked meals for you to come home to, looking perfectly put-together all the while.
The male chefs I’ve seen don’t do this. Their shows are filmed not in their homes, but in their white-and-chrome restaurant kitchens. They wear chef’s whites. Alternatively, particularly over in America some of them seem to focus on XTREME COOKING STUNTZ involving a lot of technology and odd ingredients. There may be a lot of shouting, and if Gordon Ramsey has ever coquettishly licked his fingers on camera I want the video. Cooking made manly.
There are exceptions: Nigel Slater is an excellent example of the ‘feminine style’, and Jamie Oliver has made a living out of presenting himself as ‘just a casual bloke’. But unless my knowledge of cooking shows is very outdated, I’d say the divide is quite clear, at least in the UK: I don’t know if the US experiences it more or less sharply.
Curiously, although my parents’ marriage is in other ways very ‘traditional’ – husband has intense career, wife becomes housewife to take care of child (and for other reasons – ‘There comes a point,’ she said, ‘that you say to yourself, ‘If I have to teach the treble clef to one more set of first-formers, I am going to scream’.’) – my father taught my mother how to cook, since her mother has always been a terrible cook and didn’t teach her (Maman still likes her toast and sausages carbonised black because ‘it reminds me of my childhood’ – Grandad now does all the cooking and everybody is much happier), and they both enjoy cooking and share the kitchen work equally. When I think of delicious home-cooked food, I think of Papa’s lasagna.
Thanks for sharing your story and those perceptions! Yeah, the visualized gender disparity between “man” kitchens (all rugged wood, Japanese knives, steel in gen everywhere) vs. “woman” kitchens (matching linens, pastel appliances, the like) is its own thing, just to reinforce that oh this chef is on TV but we’re gonna make sure you never forget that she’s a woman and is doing this for cute hostess-y reasons!!!
Aaand just saw this. Yes!
Oo will have to check that out. Thanks for sharing! (And, so true.)
You're gonna want something like this: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/stir… Add a hit of sesame oil at the end and make sure the tomatoes really fall apart for the full texture. Good eating!
Thanks for sharing your story and those perceptions! Yeah, the visualized gender disparity between "man" kitchens (all rugged wood, Japanese knives, steel in gen everywhere) vs. "woman" kitchens (matching linens, pastel appliances, the like) is its own thing, just to reinforce that oh this chef is on TV but we're gonna make sure you never forget that she's a woman and is doing this for cute hostess-y reasons!!!
Will definitely add that to my reading list, thanks! And so interesting to note on the small-scale side; I see this on the smaller small-scale side when it comes to who's running my local food co-op.
Back in 2000 when I was a student, I dated another student who did chef work as a summer job. The level of sexual harassment he reported from that job was sky-high. The head chef, for instance, would say “Spit or swallow?” to the waitresses as they came into the kitchen. I’ve a feeling he reported groping too. My ex thought all this was hilarious. He also thought raping me was a good idea. I don’t know how typical he was of male chefs, but he sounded like he fitted right in. If this was typical or at least not uncommon, no wonder women rarely last in that job.
I know I’m pretty late on the uptake here, and probably no one will ever read this, but I’ve been cooking professionally as a woman for nearly twenty years. As far as the sexual harassment, it’s just as bad as anyone says it is. The only way to survive was to play the game just like the guys did, and out-gross them, or grit your teeth while laughing at another misogynist joke, often at your expense. I’ve had bosses suggest “while you’re down there….heh heh..” when reaching for something from the lowboy. I’ve been told I didn’t belong in kitchens, that I was stupid, and too weak. I had an old boyfriend who encouraged me to quit cooking jobs on many occasions, but I knew that “if I quit, they win”, and I wasn’t about to let them have the upper hand. For the past fifteen years I’ve been in positions of power in the kitchen, working alongside men who were my juniors, only to have patrons walk by, look at the dude, and say “great meal, man”, without even looking at me even though I wrote the menu, sourced the ingredients, prepped everything for service, conceptualized and executed the meal. But the man must be the one in charge, right?
I fought tooth and nail to get to a position where I’m taken seriously as a chef, and had to put up with heinous treatment and always being passed up for any kind of recognition in my field. Now I work with kids who are coming out of culinary school with more swagger than veterans and sleeves of primal-ed pig carcasses and knife tattoos, who refuse to put in the hard work I slaved at for nearly two decades. They all demand respect, and love to swing dick in the kitchen, but have no concept of the kind of hard work and dedication it takes to actually be a “real chef”.
One thing you forgot though, is that women aren’t always pastry chefs. Sometimes they cook brunch. Sometimes they run the best brunch programs in their cities. But is anyone asking them if they’d please do a farm dinner, or cook for an event? No. That kind of recognition and adoration is reserved for the endless string of bros who look good on camera hoisting suckling pigs over their shoulders and shopping for perfect brassicas at the farmers market.
I thought I would do this forever. Cooking is how I’ve defined myself for as long as I can remember. I’ve sacrificed nearly everything for the craft of cooking. I came to the realization though, that standing behind a stove for fourteen hours a day and hammering your body for decades is completely unsustainable. The only things I could do to stay in it would be owning a restaurant (not sure what level of hell that is, but pretty low), cooking institutionally (no creativity), or running someone else’s restaurant for them (also horrible). At 39 years old I’ve gone back to school, studying for a Nutrition degree. I never got a chance to change the system, and I didn’t stand up for women or myself as much as I should have because I had to survive somehow. It all makes me unspeakably sad, but I look forward to when it’s all over. I wish it didn’t have to be the way it is. I don’t know how to change it. I wish I did, but I’m exhausted, and I’ve decided that I want more out of my life.