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Whose Place Is in the Kitchen? Harnessing New American Food Discourse to Envision Widespread Reproductive Engagement (Conclusion)

We need to get women out of the home because pure domesticity places severe limits on agency. But we also do not want to support the assumption that socioemotional reproductive labor is not important. How do we bridge this gap? Coontz gives us a hand with another look at women’s roles in the past. She points out that before the rise of consumerism, maternal energies were directed outside of the home as well as in, since “for all its repressiveness, the early-nineteenth-century definition of woman’s sphere had given her moral responsibility beyond the household, a duty that shaded easily into social activism.”[1] It was not until the growth of family privacy associated with the Self-Made Man/True Woman dichotomy that “the roles of wife and mother lost their transcendent moral and political significance.”[2] This privatization of care remains the guiding discourse today.

We need to return to a perspective on maternalism which encourages women to direct their maternal energy toward the public sphere. But this time, unlike the pre-Gilded Age mothers whose participation in abolitionism, the temperance movements, and welfare reform focused purely on systems with an intuitive connection to social reproduction, we need to encourage an awareness of the importance of reproduction across the board.[3] We need to hold not only schools and health officials accountable for the health of families, but also the workplace. It is not enough to decide, as one of Emily Matchar’s interviewees did, that “the way the workplace treats women is so irredeemably awful that continuing to fight for more family-friendly, gender-equitable workplaces is tantamount to ‘a therapist working with a wife-beater to at least stop smacking her around on Sundays.’”[4] We need not to both encourage middle class women not to use their own privilege to find individualistic solutions to their workplace problems, and charge supposedly masculine institutions with the task of supporting reproductive efforts, because socioemotional health should be achievable by and for everyone—of all genders and classes. Women have long been convinced to stake a claim in production; it is time to recognize that everyone needs to have a stake in reproduction, too.

Although there are many problems with the way that the New American food discourse relates food labor to maternalism and domesticity, it actually does provide some models for facing maternalist ideologies out toward the public sphere and shaping reproductive concerns in a manner that involves both men and women. Let us return to some of the figures and texts we explored earlier to see the ideas for social change which they promote.

It begins, once again, with Alice Waters, who expanded her vision for a French restaurant which emphasized simple and strong ingredients without snobbery into a social movement centered on environmental reproduction. McNamee notes in his introduction that:

Under the leadership that Alice has…assumed, this new community [of artisans and farmers dedicated to “good food and goodwill”] has seen its ideals and methods spread across the country. You can now walk into a co-op or a farmers’ market, or even a supermarket…and find fresh, delicious, organic foodstuffs, grown by people who share the values and vision of Alice Waters.

I am reluctant to assign the foundation of the entire New American food movement to Waters as McNamee does here, but Waters’ insistent food activism has aided the emphasis on fresh and locally sourced produce the country. She did more than capitalize on a trend for her restaurant’s gain; she fomented a movement.

Her nurturing ideology did not only turn toward environmental reproduction on a large scale—her workplace policies also aided in social reproduction. Her unique kitchen arrangement includes head chefs that trade off in the dinner and lunch restaurants and a kitchen team which decides together the components of the menu and who will prepare what, rather than having the menu designed and assigned by the head chef.[5] By rejecting a traditional hierarchal system whose patriarchal beginnings impeded women’s entry into the food industry for decades and embracing a new format for social cohesion in the kitchen, Chez Panisse provides far more flexibility for its employees with the same amount of clout. This means that not only can members of the team at Chez Panisse find time more easily for reproductive concerns—a workplace benefit that has always been a priority for Waters, who would take her daughter to work frequently—but they also do not have to travel through ranks in order to achieve notoriety before leaving the restaurant, meaning the time they do spend at work has more value.[6]

Slow Food International similarly recognizes the importance of changing engagement with the economy, through its emphasis on the dangers of the “fast life” which takes “the machine…as its life model.”[7] Consequently, it valorizes regional, small scale food producers and organizes events where citizens can familiarize themselves with local foodways, benefiting farmers and artisans. By “rediscover[ing] the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish[ing] the degrading effects of Fast Food,” Slow Food encourages us to prioritize community over consumption, and helps farmers and artisans to continue the productive practices which have been the most beneficial to their communities.[8]

Slow Food International also prioritizes sustainability, fighting the way “Fast Life…threatens our environment and our landscapes” by developing biodiversity initiatives like The Ark of Taste. This publication circulates a list of high quality and regionally specific food products which approach “extinction” and attempts to get them back into commercial circulation.[9] The impetus for Slow Food ideals, though they have wide-reaching effects on the economy and the environment, originates in the desire to afford pleasure and comfort “to the largest possible number of people.”[10]

Lastly, Barbara Kingsolver, for all her intensely domestic rhetoric, conducts a project which is primarily an attempt to aid environmental reproduction, and like Alice Waters she uses the status she has attained through economic success as an award-winning author to create a soapbox for her ideals. While many accounts of locavore eating define their project in terms of how many miles the food has to travel to get to the author’s table, Kingsolver wants to eat the food of producers she knows. This focus on community is a refrain in her text, as she frequently describes the community interactions her family engages in as part of their project and the farmers whose foodways they learn from. Hence, Kingsolver kills two birds with one stone by committing to locavorism: she helps the environment and benefits her community by patronizing local farmers.

Although the overwhelming majority of people engaged publicly in New American food discourse are women or employ maternalist discourse which implicates women in reproductive responsibility, I cannot emphasize enough the necessity of involving men in these processes. Environmental sustainability concerns are a useful entry point, but considerations of community welfare and workplace policies are also essential ways to prioritize care in the public sphere which can and should be gender neutral. Even reproduction in the home should be a responsibility for men as well as women: just because a woman can biologically reproduce does not mean that once the child has been born she should be its sole emotional caretaker. If men recognize that they too should be responsible for social reproduction on all scales, we can create not only a more just but a more emotionally healthy society.

Economic success and socioemotional health should neither be mutually exclusive nor limited to gendered spheres of influence. So, perhaps Alice Waters was not completely off-target when she expressed a desire for a balance of “nurturing” and “professional” perspectives in her kitchen. The key is to recognize these traits do not have to be gender specific, and the widespread influence of American food culture provides many ways for people of all genders to engage in reproduction in the home and beyond.

[1] Coontz 153

[2] Ibid.

[3] Coontz 154

[4] Matchar 22

[5] McNamee 62

[6] Find citations in McNamee

[7] Petrini xxiii

[8] Ibid. xxiv

[9] Ibid. xxiv, 91

[10] Ibid. 26

#feminism #women in the kitchen #slow food #alice waters #barbara kingsolver #reproductive labor #socialism #materialism #academia

Whose Place Is in the Kitchen? Harnessing New American Food Discourse to Envision Widespread Reproductive Engagement (Introduction)

The Fall 2013 issue, or “The Gender Issue” of David Chang’s food journal Lucky Peach opens with an interview with Alice Waters, one of the founders of the New American cuisine and among the most famous female chefs in the United States. Asked to give her views on women in the restaurant industry, she says:

I think it’s terribly important to have both male and female points of view in the kitchen. And I’ve always tried to find that balance of women and men, because we really are different. I think that women, because they have children and are hardwired to be nurturing, think of food as sustenance. And I think that the male point of view is in the more professional place of thinking of the job as being a creative endeavor.[1]

This perspective on gender seems to take much from the period she opened her famous restaurant Chez Panisse—which is to say, over forty years ago. Unfortunately, while the work of feminists from that same period has done much to advance the opportunities for women in male-dominated fields, Waters’ summation is a fairly accurate snapshot of the way that men and women are viewed in the restaurant industry today. Although more women are entering culinary school now than ever before, they are still struggling to gain chef’s positions, let alone notoriety, in an industry built and maintained by a system whose hierarchy views their femininity as suspect.

This situation allows us to think of the old saying, now often communicated jokingly, that “a woman’s place is in the kitchen” in a new light. One would think that women would excel in a field whose labor is so often their lot whether or not they engage in it professionally. But female chefs run into the same barriers that all women attempting to break into male-dominated fields do: the boys’ club is reluctant to admit female entrants, and in order to get in they often must become “one of the guys,” leaving whatever feminine traits they may exhibit at the door.[2] When they do finally make it, their cooking and leadership styles are often figured in domestic terms. For example, in her essay “Why Are There No Great Women Chefs,” Charlotte Druckman describes how even when a man and a woman prepare the same dish, they are perceived with different vocabularies:

So, if a male chef serves a plate of Spaghetti Bolognese, it is lauded for its “in-your-face,” “rich,” “intense,” “bold” flavors, while a woman’s plateful of the same indicates “homey,” “comforting” fare, “prepared with love.” The former becomes an aggressive statement, a declaration of ego, while the latter is a testament to home cooking.[3]

It is this kind of perception that leads to the recipient of the 2013 Best Female Chef Award[4] being described as “chatty, warm, and utterly unassuming” while recipients of the World’s Best 50 Restaurants awards get adjectives like “brash,” “bold,” and “genius.”[5] Such stereotypical depictions preclude viewing female chefs as professionals with years of training and business acumen. Instead, they become home cooks transported into professional kitchens.

What, exactly, is wrong with being compared to a home cook? It contributes to the gendered division of labor that views women’s work as only and always reproductive or aiming towards reproduction, no matter what the field. Women’s attentions are expected to always be directed toward the home and the private sphere, even when they are engaged in a public profession, while men’s attention remains toward productivity and the public sphere. Although we do not say it in so many words today, “a woman’s place” is still “in the kitchen” in the sense that serving her family or the community will always be her responsibility. She is, after all, “hardwired to be nurturing.”[6]

One method of pushing back against the devaluation of women’s contribution to the market economy is to emphasize the value of domestic work. We see this in the very next article in the same issue of Lucky Peach, where Naomi Duguid profiles the daily food labor of women in Burma, Senegal, Laos and India and calls her article “Great Chefs Around the World.” She justifies this title in her introduction, saying:

The cooking experts in the rest of the world, I’ve come to realize, are generally very different from the “chefs” in the developed world depicted in Western pop culture. Most of them are women, for starters. They’re home cooks, who each day take on the task of feeding their families.[7]

Duguid describes the work of wives who spend each day processing rice and millet and making noodles and flatbreads from scratch. These women have years of expertise in food labor and should be appreciated for the work they do. Duguid considers their work in home kitchens to be analogous to work in the professional hierarchy, noting that “as in a professional kitchen, roles are often clearly defined.”[8] But however well these women may deserve recognition for their work, this is a false analogy.

The term “chef,” short for “chef de cuisine,” literally means “chief of the kitchen,” and involves years of training and rising through a professional hierarchy to not only achieve wonderful food but to direct a team of employees to do the same. The roles in the home demanded by a patriarchocapitalist system that forces one partner to take a productive role and the other to take a reproductive role are not analogous to the brigade system of professional kitchens, nor should they be seen as such. The fact that a wife’s food expertise is geared toward the home and a chef’s expertise is geared toward the market—which is to say, the difference between the private and public spheres— is the distinction that separates “cook” and “chef.”

However, Duguid’s attempt to valorize home food labor on the basis of its intensity is representative of the perspective of the contemporary American food movement. The movement’s focus on locally sourced ingredients and from-scratch cooking as the best method for promoting physical, environmental, and socioemotional health demands a significant time investment in culinary endeavors. While social and environmental health are arguably public concerns, the thrust of movement rhetoric encourages individuals to change their engagement with food in the home. Since the responsibility for socioemotional reproduction in the home generally falls to women, it is women who take on the burden of this increased food labor. But, food movement discourse assures them of a wealth of benefits if they shoulder this load.

This revaluation of women’s domestic labor is a contributor to a larger trend of well-qualified professional women opting out of the workplace in order to turn their attentions to their families. Numerous texts have tracked this trend since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Leslie Bennetts’ 2007 book The Feminine Mistake emphasizes the way that women risk the loss of economic agency by attaching their lot to that of their male partners. In Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, Emily Matchar shows how do-it-yourself trends (including the from-scratch initiatives of the food movement) are distracting women from this harsh reality and offering them an escape from the difficulties and disappointments of corporate culture, but also pulling them more or less permanently out of the public sphere. These texts show that while women choose to retreat to the home for various reasons, they often try to valorize this choice by embracing maternalist discourses that attach high value to domestic labor, but are also uncomfortably reminiscent of the dangers Betty Friedan described all the way back in The Feminine Mystique.

As Emily Matchar shows, New American food culture is one of the discourses mobilized by these women. I hope to engage in a deep exploration of the interaction between food discourse and women’s home and professional labor practices in America in order to see if contemporary food discourse can be harnessed to subvert, rather than support, tropes that limit women to the home. First, I will explore the shape of the New American food movement to understand its problems and its potential. Then, I will examine past discourses on domestic labor, with a focus on the Domestic Science or Home Economics movement at the turn of the twentieth century, and the Women’s Liberation movement’s push to get women out of the home in the middle to late twentieth century. These explorations will prepare me to avoid retooling patriarchocapitalist narratives to valorize the work of the private sphere, and accepting success in the patriarchocapitalist system as the end goal. My intent is not to show how to beat men at their own game, but to change the game entirely. I will use the evolution of American women’s role in the kitchen to find the potential for public sphere engagement within the mire of contemporary maternalist discourse.

[1] Prior, David. "As Alice Sees It." Lucky Peach, September 2013, 4-9.

[2] Cite Druckman

[3] Druckman, Charlotte. “Why Are There No Great Women Chefs?” Gastronomica no. 1 (2010): 26

[4] Sponsored by the same group that gives out the World’s Best 50 Restaurants awards due to the dearth of female winners of its other award.

[5] Merwin, Hugh. "Is the Idea of a ‘Best Female Chef’ Actually Insulting to Women?." Grub Street, April 4, 2013.

[6] [6] Prior, David. “As Alice Sees It,” 6.

[7] Duguid, Naomi. "Great Chefs Around the World." Lucky Peach, September 2013, 10.

[8] Ibid.

#women in food #women in the kitchen #materialism #socialism #academia #feminism

We need to return to a perspective on maternalism which encourages women to direct their maternal energy toward the public sphere. But this time, unlike the pre-Gilded Age mothers whose participation in abolitionism, the temperance movements, and welfare reform focused purely on systems with an intuitive connection to social reproduction, we need to encourage an awareness of the importance of production across the board. We need to hold not only schools and health officials accountable for the health of families, but also the workplace. It is not enough to decide, as one of Emily Matchar’s interviewees did, that “the way the workplace treats women is so irredeemably awful that continuing to fight for more family-friendly, gender-equitable workplaces is tantamount to ‘a therapist working with a wife-beater to at least stop smacking her around on Sundays.’” We need not only to encourage middle class women not to use their own privilege to find individualistic solutions to their workplace problems, but charge supposedly masculine institutions with the task of supporting reproductive efforts, because socioemotional health should be achievable by and for everyone—of all genders and classes. Women have long been convinced to stake a claim in production; it is time to recognize that everyone needs to have a stake in reproduction, too.

Me, because apparently the last section of my thesis is a manifesto about making the personal political...It's almost like I'm a feminist or something.

#women #feminism #socialism #materialism #maternalism #work life balance #activism #America when will you stop the reproductive war #the personal is political

We came a long way, baby, into bad eating habits and collaterally impaired family dynamics. No matter what else we do or believe, food remains at the venter of every culture. Ours now runs on empty calories. When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families’ tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable. (Or worse, convenience-mart hot dogs and latchkey kids.) I consider it the great hoodwink of our generation.

Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

#that awkward moment when you hate something so much you have to block quote it #brb puking

Watching cooking shows is like looking at a children’s toy catalog: the boys are off practicing professions and having adventures, and the girls are stuck playing house.

#feminism #women in food #sexism

An Introduction

The Fall 2013 issue of David Chang’s food journal Lucky Peach—one which the editors labeled “The Gender Issue” in response to reader input that “what comes across loudest [in the magazine] is the dudeness of it all,”[1]—opens with an interview with Alice Waters, arguably one of the founders of the New American cuisine. In the interview, she states:

This perspective on gender seems to take much from the period she opened her famous restaurant Chez Panisse—i.e., over forty years ago. Unfortunately, while the work of feminists from that same period has done much to advance the opportunities for women in male-dominated fields, Waters’ summation is a fairly accurate snapshot of the way that men and women are viewed in the restaurant industry today. Although more women are entering culinary school now than ever before, they are still struggling to gain chef’s positions, let alone notoriety, in an industry built and maintained by a system that is intensely hierarchical and fraternal.

Such a problem seems counter-intuitive when the idea that “a woman’s place is in the kitchen” has been in common parlance for some time now. Although those who say so today would either be assumed to be backwards or ironic, the fact is that in the United States women still perform the majority of household food labor.[3] However, there is a key distinction between the professional and the domestic kitchen, and women are still relegated to the latter. Even when women do break into the restaurant industry, their cooking and leadership styles are often figured in domestic terms: their food is “comforting” and homey;”[4] their attitudes are “unassuming,”[5] and they take a “maternal” approach to running their kitchens. Such stereotypes preclude viewing female chefs as professionals with years of training and business acumen. Instead, they become home cooks transported into professional kitchens.

What, exactly, is wrong with being compared to a home cook? In the very next article in the same issue of Lucky Peach, Naomi Duguid profiles the daily food labor of women in Burma, Senegal, Laos, and India and calls her article “Great Chefs Around the World.” She justifies this title in her introduction, saying:

Duguid goes on to describe the work of wives who spend each day processing rice and millet from their plant forms in order to serve them in meals, and making noodles and flatbreads from scratch. These women have years of expertise in food labor and should be appreciated for the work they do. In professional parlance, they would not be called chefs—even though Duguid argues that “as in a professional kitchen, roles are often clearly defined,”—because they have not risen through a hierarchy to take on a position commanding a kitchen full of employees.[7] In fact, the problem is deeper than their work being domestic rather than professional[8]. More specifically, because they cook for their families rather than for the public, their labor is reproductive rather than productive. It is this distinction that separates the “cook” from the “chef.”

This discursive sexism is an important contributor to the difficulties which women encounter when attempting to move into the upper echelon of the food industry. Because their work is not seen as a “creative endeavor,” a product of rational thought and intensely trained creativity, but simply as an attempt to provide “sustenance,” their work is not taken seriously in the professional environment.[9] This means less reviews which recognize their talent as artists, less coverage in general, less awards, and consequently, less confidence in their money-making capabilities from investors who ultimately decide how far their careers can go.[10]

Clearly, we need critics to recognize that women are capable of working with food creatively outside of the domestic context, and that their work can be just as groundbreaking as every time Wiley Dufresne, Grant Achatz, or Ferran Adriá pulls out a can of liquid nitrogen or a bell jar. But would it not also be useful to explode the idea that creativity, talent, and skill are only important when nurtured by professional training and supported by a patriarcho-capitalist system? Duguid has already attempted to perform such an elevation by comparing the wives she has met to chefs. Can the staking of such assertive discursive claims have an effect on the industry at large?

It is important to note that despite the dearth of visible women in the restaurant industry, women abound as caterers, artisanal food producers, and food writers[11]—after all, how many food blogs can you name that are written by a man?[12] Food discourse is a massive part of young adult culture in the United States, and women have not only a stake in but a soapbox for shaping that discourse. Indeed, Duguid’s reification of intensive domestic food labor is par for the course in a world where you only really care about your diet if you know where the cow that became your steak is raised, and you only really care about your family if you grind your own flour. This perspective has its origins in Slow Food, a movement begun in Italy which migrated to America through the endorsement of Alice Waters and others who had already begun to focus on the quality of their ingredients and circumstances of food production as key components to the enjoyment of food.

The movement began with an association whose goals were “to create awareness of local products and awaken people’s attention to food and wine and the right way to enjoy them.”[13] This appreciation of location and tradition in the cultivation of taste, while arguably more fitted to a nation whose culinary history stretches back hundreds of years, has been adopted into American food culture and is the reason many restaurants now include notations on their menus which reassure the diner of the local origins of the restaurant’s ingredients. It has also manifested in the popularity of participation in food cooperatives among the American middle class and the sudden influx of young urbanites soaking their grains, creating their own jams and pickles, and baking from scratch. In short, contemporary food discourse encourages consumers to act as though they need to produce their food goods rather than purchase them. With its support of these kinds of laborious food tasks—tasks in the same vein as the work of Duguid’s “great chefs,”—the Slow Food zeitgeist valorizes food work that is traditionally ascribed to women.

If popular discourse reifies food labor that would, in the cook/chef dichotomy, likely be considered reproductive rather than productive, can the ideas of Slow Food be harnessed to empower women? Or is this focus on domestic work more of an extension of the problem than a solution? This paper will explore this question. I will lay out the foundation of the current perspective on women in food with a treatment of the obstacles that women encounter in the restaurant industry. Next, I will offer an overview of the evolution of the perspectives on women in the American domestic kitchen as a point of comparison and as historical precedent for the dominating discourse today. I will then dig into Slow Food by treating the tenets of its Italian origins and the main forms of its American permutation. I will use this information to perform a close reading of two key texts in the American Slow Food movement today: Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I will look at how the ideas propounded by these texts have manifested in the middle class trend toward elective food labor, and explore the problems they have posed from the feminist perspective. Finally, I will attempt to determine if and how the ideas of the Slow Food movement can be used to advance women’s roles in the kitchen at large.

[1] Khong, Rachel. "Editor’s Note." Lucky Peach, September 2013, 1; emphasis in original

[2] Prior, David. "As Alice Sees It." Lucky Peach, September 2013, 4-9.

[3] Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2013),

[4] Druckman, Charlotte. “Why Are There No Great Women Chefs?” Gastronomica no. 1 (2010): 26

[5] Merwin, Hugh. "Is the Idea of a ‘Best Female Chef’ Actually Insulting to Women?." Grub Street, April 4, 2013.

[6] Duguid, Naomi. "Great Chefs Around the World." Lucky Peach, September 2013, 10.

[7] Ibid.

[8] I say “professional” rather than “profitable” because it is extremely difficult to turn a profit even for professional chefs—for example, Chez Panisse did not become a profitable business until it had been in operation for over twenty years.

[9] Prior, David. “As Alice Sees It,” 6.

[10] Druckman, Charlotte. “Why Are There No Great Women Chefs?”

[11] Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound

[12] I read a lot of food blogs and I can only name one, and that is the website First We Feast. Notably, its parent company targets all of their holdings toward the market of twenty-something men.

[13] Petrini, Carlo. Slow Food: The Case for Taste. (New York, NY: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2003) 4.

#women #slow food #feminism #foodies #restaurant industry #domesticity #women in the kitchen #lucky peach #charlotte druckman

That awkward moment when you learn that Christina Tosi used to be the only woman on the line at WD-50, and suddenly Momofuku Milk Bar's inclusion of milk powder and glucose in everything they bake makes so much more sense to you, and you can't share this revelation with anyone because you don't know anyone else who has knowledge of the New York food world as specialized as you do

#christina tosi #mad scientist baking #momofuku #molecular gastronomy

"I don't call myself a chef...the word chef comes from this long history...it doesn't have to be a man or a woman. It implies this sort of brigade system where [there are] higher people and lower people, this whole totem pole situation, and there's on person at the top who's commanding orders. And that's not how I work or how I've ever worked. And so I just prefer to call myself a cook or a restaurant owner or whatever it is. Just the word chef, I don't use it to apply to myself. I'm not staunchly against it; I don't correct people when they call my a chef. It's just not the way I think about myself. I think of myself as somebody who cooks professionally."--Naomi Pomeroy, as cited in Skirt Steak: Women Chefs on Standing the Heat and Staying in the Kitchen, by Charlotte Druckman

Also, an interesting long-form story on how Pomeroy got her start in the Portland culinary world here.

#naomi pomeroy #women in food #chef #cook?#feminism??

Defining Terms Part 2: A Recent History

The requirements of creativity and vast knowledge tied to the term "chef" hardly apply to the conventional image of the home cook, who is generally laboring for the benefit of her family, and is focused on providing nutritional value—or at least full stomachs—with whatever resources she has. However, a look at the evolution of cookbooks shows that this has not always been the case, nor is it necessarily today. In Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?: American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century, Mary Drake McFeely offers two radically different visions of the home cook as guided by instructive cookbooks. She details how in the 1920s, America’s burgeoning consumer culture changed the relationship of women to food by turning them into “scientific consumers of goods:”

The scientific approach not only regularized cooking, making the product more predictable, and increasing the cook’s confidence, but also, not coincidentally, granted a certain seriousness to what women were doing in the kitchen. Cooking no longer depended on instinct (a female characteristic) …Nutritionists weighed the value of the elements of food composition. Domestic scientists in laboratories determined through experiment the exact formulas for successful food preparation. [1]

In this era, cooking became wrapped up in science, business, and technology, rather than being based upon recipes passed from mother to daughter or circulated through community and tradition. We might even say that home cooking took on the precision we now associate with professional culinary schooling. At the very least, the prescriptive literature offered to middle class women attempted to strictly regulate cooking practices using the principles of the public sphere.

Now let us fast forward half a century to when New American cuisine emerged. Cookbook authors were less like mothers, such as Irma Rombauer of The Joy of Cooking, and less focused on teaching for the “home kitchen,” as Julia Child was. Instead they were professional cooks, and their recipes were available in the cursory copy of Gourmet, Saveur, or Bon Appetit as well as in the bookstore. McFeely finds that “these chef-instructors have given cooking a very different look, placing a high value on sophistication and the novelty of imaginative cooking.”[2] Additionally, the focus on great ingredients and the proliferation of international cooking styles which influenced the New American cuisine meant that the home cook was able to broaden her horizons not only by reading about but by actually buying and cooking with a much wider range of foods.

This sounds like cooking more for self-actualization than for nourishment alone, and indeed, McFeely points out the somewhat hedonistic perspective that went along with this cooking zeitgeist:

Pleasing others was no longer necessarily the primary motive. The busy culture demanded that if a woman or man spend time cooking, the activity itself must be entertaining. The self insisted on first consideration. Cooking is a form of self-expression that is ready at hand; the cook seeks pleasure in the kitchen.[3]

Attached to this rather private and individualist cooking practice, McFeely identifies a very public motivation, as for some home cooks, “the kitchen became…a theater.”[4] Further, for these bourgeois cooking subjects who cooked “creatively” rather than out of necessity, cooking became yet another “area of competition for people who had become accustomed to striving at work or play.”[5]

Interestingly, Emily Matchar charts a completely different point of view for what we would now call the “foodie” home cook. In her book Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, published thirteen years after Can She Bake a Cherry Pie, Matchar describes a similar embrace of creative and difficult cooking among Generation Y and Millenials. However, Matchar finds that this interest in the kitchen is just part of a general movement toward domesticity which originates partially from quibble with Generation X mothers who were so concerned with the public, productive sphere that they paid less attention to the private sphere and the reproductive labor which their children craved. Presumably these are the same Generation X mothers who McFeely found thumbing pages of Gourmet in the checkout aisle, but perhaps this was not enough of a widespread phenomenon.

Matchar shows how home cooking has been taken up by the current generation as a nurturing responsibility. She describes how young women are retreating from a corporate world that does not fit their needs to become “femivores” who become deeply involved in cooking and sustainable food culture in order to escape the feeling of being “just a housewife.”[6] By making homemaking more difficult through a focus on providing the best possible foods for their families, they make their lives more fulfilling. They guard their families from the “dangers” of processed foods, conveniently forgetting that as much as the FDA caves to food corporations about labeling of imitation foods and GMOs[7], their regulations have also prevented millions of deaths via food-borne illness. They buy from farmer’s markets and other local sources, or even garden, raise chickens, or grind their own flour in order to combat the environmental and moral consequences of the nation’s current food system.

Unfortunately, these goals tend to drive these women out of the public sphere—why not lobby for better food policy instead of opting out of public options completely?—necessitate either very frugal living or financial dependence on a partner, and, as long as the onus falls on women to fulfill them, tend to support maternalist discourse about the relationship between women and kitchens. These femivores are certainly taking up challenging work to provide the best possible food options for themselves and their families, and perhaps acquiring the chef’s encyclopedic gastronomic knowledge and prodigious skill in the process. But they are limiting their talents and energies to a domestic setting. Can all of that creativity be called the work of a chef if it only enters the public sphere through a food blog? If you produce the most perfect roast chicken ever to bless the culinary world but no one pays for it, does it make a sound?

[1] Mary Drake McFeely, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century, (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 42.

[2] Ibid., 152

[3] Ibid., 153

[4] Ibid., 161

[5] Ibid.

[6] Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 103.

[7] This is a major focus of Michael Pollan’s crusade against processed food in In Defense of Food

#food writing #feminism #women in the kitchen #femivore #cooking #chefs

Defining Terms: Part 1

Susan Feniger at her restaurant, Street

As I began to get more into cooking in the middle years of college, friends and family had a rather higher opinion of my cooking than I did. Even as the menus I made became more and more complex, I insisted that I was just following recipes. I looked up to my friend at the time and cooking mentor, whose father was a chef and consequently had years of kitchen experience on me. I considered his ease with technique, his knowledge of ingredients, and his talent for improvisation to make him a budding chef, while I was more like a cook.

Now I find that these qualities are just a few parts of what might be said to make up a “true chef.” In attempting to differentiate between the “chef” and the “cook,” the first dichotomy that springs to mind is the public vs. the private sphere. The chef’s work is productive—labor performed for a salary—while the cook’s may be productive (as few would probably call the person flipping burgers at a local diner the “chef”) but can also be reproductive, as in the case of the home cook. To elevate someone past “cook” to “chef,” there is an expectation of professional training, including culinary school and/or internship at a restaurant, and years of experience in the restaurant industry. The student rises through the ranks of a brigade system in order to reach the full title of “chef de cuisine,” which translates roughly to “head of the kitchen.” These years of professional training provide the aforementioned characteristics in spades. A chef has an immense knowledge of preparations and flavors, and employs this knowledge to compose dishes that are well balanced in flavor, texture, and aesthetic. In Francis Lam’s article “Sweet Life” on the origins of Susan Feniger’s and Kajsa Alger’s Los Angeles restaurant Street, we can find some of the considerations chefs must be aware of when constructing a menu:

For a chef…[a menu] might be a statement of vision or a document of her past. For the kitchen, it’s a plan how to use precious space and manpower. For the accountant, it’s all numbers: What’s going to sell well enough to keep the lights on?[1]

In contrast, Lam notes that for the customer, “with a drink in your hand and hunger in your belly, [the menu’s] purpose is obvious.”[2] Ultimately, we call someone a chef when they have the skill to truly treat cooking as an art. After all, anyone can pick up a paintbrush, but we do not call everyone a painter.

[1] Francis Lam, "Sweet Life," The Best Food Writing of 2010, ed. Holly Hughes (Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo Press, 2010), 141-2

[2] Francis Lam, “Sweet Life,” 141.

#cooking #food writing #chefs #cooks #women in the kitchen #feminism

Can a Wife Be a Chef?

In her interview in the Fall 2013 issue of Lucky Peach, Alice Waters states that she “never called [her]self” a chef, and still does not.[1] She prefaces this refusal with a description of her culinary education, which included an initial insecurity about cooking for a lot of people, “because [she] just didn’t think [she] knew enough,” and reading more about food so that she could “look up anything [she] didn’t know.”[2] A few pages later, Naomi Duguid profiles the daily food labor of women in Burma, Senegal, Laos, and India and calls he article “Great Chefs Around the World.” She justifies this title in her introduction, saying:

These comments come into pretty distinct conflict with Alice Waters’ inability to call herself a chef because she entered the food industry “through the amateur door.”[4] It also doesn’t regard nurturing intention and professional expertise to be gender-based and implicitly mutually exclusive, as Waters seems to regard the two traits in her comments on the way that chefs manifest gender difference. Still, it is difficult to regard Duguid’s home cooks as “chefs.” But if these women have incredible food expertise, what stops us?

In “Why Are There No Great Women Chefs?” Charlotte Druckman lays out the problem succinctly:

In theory, we’ve come a long way from the notion that a woman’s place is in the domestic kitchen, and that the only kitchen appropriate for a man is the professional one. But in practice, things can be pared down to the following equation: woman : man as cook : chef. [5]

She cites the coverage of various incredibly talented and often powerful female chefs, and a slew of female cooking television personalities, to show how even women who are successful in the professional world ultimately have their work cast as domestic. The food labor of women is seen as reproductive, and the labor of men as productive. This is the divide between “cook” and “chef.”

It is nothing new to say that this discursive sexism is an important contributor to the difficulties which women encounter when attempting to move into the higher echelons of the food industry. Once they get through culinary school, endure the hazing involved in work in professional kitchens, prove their disinterest in being pushed into pastry, and in short show that they can be “one of the guys,” they stagnate. Because their work is not seen as a “creative endeavor,” a product of rational thought and intensely trained creativity, but simply as an attempt to provide “sustenance” (again, problematic claims of Alice Waters which seem to be held by the food world at large) their work is not taken seriously in the professional environment.[6] This means less reviews which recognize their talent as artists, less coverage in general, less awards, and consequently, less confidence in their money-making capabilities from investors who ultimately decide how far their careers can go.[7]

Clearly, we need critics to recognize that women are capable of working with food creatively outside of the domestic context, and that their work can be just as groundbreaking as every time Wiley Dufresne, Grant Achatz, or Ferran Adriá pulls out a can of liquid nitrogen or a bell jar. But would it not also be useful to explode the idea that creativity, talent, and skill are only important when nurtured by professional training? What would it mean to comprehend the work and expertise of single mothers who figure out ways to prepare nourishing and tasty meals for their families on tight budgets as truly equivalent to the creativity it takes to pair cabbage with chocolate in a way comprehensible to the tastebuds?[8]

[1] Prior, David. "As Alice Sees It." Lucky Peach, September 2013, 4-9.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Duguid, Naomi. "Great Chefs Around the World." Lucky Peach, September 2013, 10.

[4] Prior, “As Alice Sees It,” 6.

[5] Druckman, Charlotte. “Why Are There No Great Women Chefs?” Gastronomica no. 1 (2010): 24

[6] Prior, David. “As Alice Sees It,” 6.

[7] Druckman, Charlotte. “Why Are There No Great Women Chefs?”

[8] This was the dessert served at the 2013 James Beard Awards Dinner.

#food #food industry #women in food #feminism #WHERE ARE THE LADIES #in the kitchen that's where #lucky peach #alice waters

#food industry #famous chefs #feminism #WHERE ARE THE LADIES

Dear Lucky Peach,

I’m a pretty big fan of Lucky Peach. I read the magazine, I follow the Tumblr, and I’ve gone to one of the panels at McNally Jackson. Needless to say, I’m a big foodie. I’m also a pretty big feminist. So I guess now you know where this is going.

I have to say, I was pretty excited for the Gender Issue. I had never really noticed a lack of women involved in the magazine, but as a senior in Columbia University’s Women’s Studies department preparing to write my thesis on women in the food world, I found this quarter’s theme quite serendipitous. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite live up to my expectations.

Maybe I should’ve been prepared for this, since the introduction pretty explicitly warns that the magazine “may, inadvertently again, have wound up more mister than sister.” And although Rachel Khong assures the reader that “these are misters who cook flowers and love their mothers’ meatloaves; sisters who visit strip clubs and cuddle birds to death,” so “this gender stuff is not always so straightforward,” the gender bending that did occur in this issue was still ultimately male-centric. The “For Women!” section included an article called “The Breast Giveth” in which we get dairy recipes from Vinny Dotolo and Jon Shook of dudebro foodie fame, because “what’s more dude than food that comes from boobs?” What is progressive about that from a gender standpoint? Honestly, so many of the articles in the women’s section were based around the male gaze or the patriarchal view of women that it seems like a waste of space to list them all.

It’s frustrating too, because in a way, this issue started off so strong. I was very incensed by the Alice Waters interview, in which she states that she still doesn’t call herself a chef—despite being arguably one of the most prominent American chefs ever—and then goes on to actually make the claim that “women, because they have children and are hardwired to be nurturing, think of food as sustenance…the male point of view is in the more professional place of thinking of the job as being a creative endeavor” as though we are still living in the era before she opened Chez Panisse. It was a great move to follow this article with Naomi Duguid’s boundary-pushing “Great Chefs Around the World” which asks the reader to rethink what constitutes a chef, and Youngmi Mayer’s eye-opening profile “Jeju Island and the Haenyo Divers.” Both of these pieces draw attention to the key roles that women play in food production around the world.

I guess if I had to try to sum up the overlying problem with the issue, it’s that while it does show the varied and often essential roles that women play in the food industry, it doesn’t really place them on the same footing as men. Most of the women with by-lines or who actually wrote content (rather than having their recipes related by men) were food-writers, while there were multiple male chef contributors. Duguid’s “Great Chefs Around the World,” while incredibly skilled food producers, ultimately have these skills because it is their reproductive (see: private sphere/wifely) not productive (public sphere/professional) responsibility. While the magazine does an excellent job highlighting the presence of women in support roles in the industry, I would have loved to see a more serious look at why women often don’t rise out of these roles—or at least to hear from more women who have done so and have a more modern view of their position (see: probably not Alice Waters). Instead, I got to see why Ben Shewry was a “#1 Dad” for working so hard to balance his professional and family life. Why not reach out to someone like Gabrielle Hamilton, for whom this kind of double-competency is expected to be the rule, not the exception? Why bother to “force the female” to write the introductory note instead of letting a member of the all-male editorial board do it and really reflect on his position when the gender ratio of bylines in this issue is roughly the same as past ones anyway? And why put an essay about cooking a stag penis in the women’s section and castrating capons in the men’s section and call it even?

With all my angrily feminist but still avid reader-ly love,

Maya Meredith

Columbia University Class of 2014

Women’s and Gender Studies/English

#lucky peach #food #feminism #alice waters #gabrielle hamilton #WHERE ARE THE LADIES

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