SMNTY Classics: The Gendered Chef

How did chef get to be a 'man's job', and how is that changing? Find out in this classic episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, this is Annie and you're listening to stuff mom
never told you. A couple of weeks ago, a Glamour
article called I'm a great cook Now that I'm divorced,

(00:26):
I'm never making dinner for a man again went viral.
I bet a lot of you saw it in your
social media feeds, and I bet this because I saw it,
and I am very rarely on social media. The title
caught my eye because, as I've said before on this show,
I love cooking, but I can't stand being expected to cook,
which some people have a tough time squaring that in

(00:48):
their head. To me, it makes perfect sense, and that's
what this article was all about. I related to it hardcore.
I used to try so hard to make these elaborate dishes,
but I I wasn't doing it for me. I was
doing it because I thought I had to, and it
wasn't appreciated, and it became something that really interfered with

(01:09):
my love of cooking for a while. And I've in
the past couple of years come back to it and
I once again love it because it's something that I
do for me and that I like to share. But
if I'm cooking, then you're doing the dishes. That's just
the way it is. But one thing that a lot
of you probably have heard or is a part of
this whole thing, is that women are doing a lot

(01:31):
of the cooking in our homes. That is changing, but
in general, women are still doing a lot of the
cooking in our homes, and women are working in restaurants,
but they are generally not the chef that has been
traditionally more of a male position, and we even see
it in movies like Gratitude where it's sort of a joke,

(01:54):
but there's truth to it. And in light of all
of this, I thought we could take a listen to
this classic episode all about how men took over this
position of chef and how women are changing that today.
Please enjoy. Welcome to Stuff Mom Never told You from

(02:16):
how stupp works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, and today we're cooking with
gender in the podcast Studio we are we're talking about chefs,
not the movie Chef, well maybe a little bit the

(02:37):
movie Chef to kick things off, because first of all,
just generally speaking, this chef gender women, cheffing, cooking words
words topic is one that a number of stuff I've
never told you listeners have requested because chef is still
very much a masculine, gendered down and it is epitomized

(03:02):
in a lot of ways by the movie Chef starring
Jon Favreau, which may may I offer a brief synopsis
before we give our stuff I've never told you review Chef,
So Jon Favreau, who I like. Okay, I'll go on
the record. I like Jon Favreau. He stars as this
tempestuous chef who's very inventive, very good at what he does,

(03:26):
of course, but he ends up getting fired from his
chef position because, you guys, he tweets out what he
actually thinks about a rude food critic and ends up
starting a food truck. And that seems fine enough, right, Yeah,
But basically the movie comes off like Jon Favreau just
put together a script or a screenplay in order to

(03:49):
have sexy times with Sophia Vergara, who plays his wife
or his ex wife wanted to uh and Scarlett Johansson,
who is the hostess in his restaurant question Mark, who
was very attracted to him, And that was the scene
where I wanted to throw my whisk at the television
screen was when scar Joe was really pining for him

(04:13):
actively and he was like, Oh, I don't know if
I can do this, And I was just like, seriously,
seriously a blow to Jon Favreau gets gets to turn
down Scarlett Joe Hanson like I welcome to Hollywood. Yeah, yeah, no,
that that movie. There's this like super long speaking of
Scarlett jo Hanson, there's a super long grilled cheese making

(04:33):
like sexy montage. He's making the grilled cheese for her.
She is not a grilled cheese um. And I just wondered,
like thinking about that if the role were reversed, if
the woman, if the main character were a woman chef,
would they have made like a sexy grilled cheese montage, No, Caroline,
it just would have been a cutaway to her eating

(04:54):
yogurt very sexily as every yogurt commercial test right, and
laughing with a salad. Yeah. Maybe if she were making
some kind of chocolate dish and some like fell out
of the bawling out of the counter and she was like, oh,
I'll look it up. Oh wait a minute, or she
could have re enacted that cover. I can't remember what
magazine it was. That had Nigella Lawson on it with

(05:15):
the caramel. It was a cheek here or something like
dripping down her face. Yeah, as same as that's just
hard to get out of the hair. I don't know, Yeah,
oh yeah, I know. That's all I could think about.
It's hard enough to get like bubblegum out of the hairs,
the whole bucket marshmallow fluff. You know, I don't know
what I'm doing, but but for our purposes today, Chef

(05:37):
starring Jon Favreau is a useful jumping off point because
it really does contain so many of these gender dichotomys
of men and women in the kitchen, where you have
man as revolutionary, innovative, sexy chef by virtue of his genius,
whereas women are kind of always struggling in the male

(06:00):
dominated profession. They have to be more sexless unless they
are like a Nigella who's cooking on television, which we're
going to talk about in our next episode. Um, and
are nurturing with their food. They're feeding people rather than inventing. Yeah,
and I mean also when you look at the movie Chef,
everyone in his kitchen is a dude gold, including John Leguizamo.

(06:24):
It's really the only other person I remember in that movie.
But but there are no ladies. Um, I don't even
know if there was a lady pastry chef in that movie.
And if you look at the statistics today, ladies and
gentlemen women make up the bulk of pastry chef. Yeah,
pastry chef would have been a perfect like token woman
role for that. For that, here's your opportunity, and you
missed it. So let's talk a little bit though about

(06:46):
the history of cheffing, because as long as there have
been people wealthy enough to not cook their own food,
there have been private cooks. Though it wasn't exactly an
esteemed position because if you go back, for instance, to
ancient Rome, then cooking would have been the job of slaves. Yeah,
so women at the house, they were not tasked with cooking.

(07:09):
You didn't have the ancient Roman wife in there with
a whisk being like, oh, I've got to get dinner
ready for the gifts, all these great leaves. No, none
of that. It was slaves jobs. But but don't be fooled,
there were still ancient food snobs. So like you can
take comfort and when you're rolling your eyes at food
snobs today, whether it's a food writer or just your

(07:29):
friend who won't stop posting pictures on Instagram. It's always
been there and it will always continue to be there.
So this is coming from Patrick Fosz, who wrote Around
the Roman Table in UH. He says that there were
these cookery writers who asserted that the art of cooking
and that's in quotes, should not be left to slaves

(07:50):
or ordinary folks. So there was the idea back then
of like chef or not chef, but a cook as
someone who was above the fray, that they were smarter
and more artists than you in practicing this craft. And
there are even third century BC plays that do feature
boastful commercial cooks who had their own kitchen slaves. And

(08:12):
when we get to the Middle Ages, things start becoming
a little more professionalized and structured thanks to guilds and apprenticeships.
But for the origins of restaurant chefs, we have to
go to France, Caroline, Let's go to France, France and
to sup places. Yeah, I love. The first restaurants were

(08:35):
essentially those like let us supprise you restaurants which I
will not go to because the name drives me crazy.
You still love it as a kid, because Caroline, you
know I love puns. I know you do. And also
I wasn't there so much for the soup and salad,
but they would always have all you can eat frog
always in it for the froo and puns. What has changed, nothing,

(08:56):
I don't know. Yeah. So in the eighteenth century, after
those guilds legal structures relax, we get the first modern
Western restaurants, and of course they're run by guys, because
the world was run by guys. Uh So, in seventeen
sixty five we get the first restaurant, which is basically
just a soup place that sold restoratives, hence the word restaurant.

(09:20):
And I think it's interesting to note that that word
restaurant has been associated with restorative broths and stews since
the Middle Ages. And this is followed by the first
fancy pants place with actual menus in seventeen eighty two,
which I would love to see a menu from the
eighteenth century. I bet it's heavy on the awful, you know.

(09:41):
But it wasn't until the beginning of the nineteenth century
that chefs became known as chefs, short for chef de cuisine.
That's right, and then still in France because it's like
the birthplace of cheffery as well well of everything Caroline
all culture, sue and tweeds and soups and poodles, yes,

(10:03):
and soups but yes. So it's in France that we
get the development of different types of chefs, and it's
where we start to see higher status and more professionalization
when these formerly known as cooks chefs start making their
own menus and supervising all aspects of kitchen management. So
it goes beyond making soups Kristen and into telling other

(10:26):
people how to make soups and take them out to
people at the dinner table. And the most famous one
the time was a guy named Anton and Karem, who's
credited with making the position of chef what we think
of it today. Karem was the original John Pafro. He
essentially worked up through an apprentice style hierarchy himself, and

(10:47):
then I guess once he got to the top, he
was like and now since I cannot be king, I
shall be chef. But it's really George Auguste Escoffier who's
often cited as the chef who applied military like structure
to the kitchen, and he also is credited with inventing
the fifth mother sauce. And Caroline just think it's kind

(11:09):
of funny that all of these guys who created these
like five basic sauces of French cuisine called the mother sauces,
because shouldn't they just be like father sauces instead saucy sauces,
sassy saucess. I actually hate French cooking. I'm dropping a
truth bomb. I'm I'm I My boyfriend and I went
to a like super hyper fancy, expensive, overpriced French restaurant.

(11:32):
We we we uh we know. It was terrible. It
was it was just like so heavy and and everything
was like, oh, this is so good, but let's put
one weird ingredient in here to totally throw the taste off.
I just Antonin krem is rolling in his grave. I
know they both are. I'm I'm We're gonna get letters

(11:54):
um from from their ghosts, from their ghosts. Yeah, but
so we've only mentioned dudes so far. I would like
to know where the ladies are. And it turns out that, uh,
no surprise, women were basically at home. But even though
a lot of them were cooking at home from the
seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries were a very very long time.

(12:14):
That didn't mean they weren't necessarily making money off of it.
Some women would be caterers or confectioners, and as early
as the seventeenth century in England, women were instructing other
women in the art of baking, talk about a very
gendered culinary craft, so that they could earn a little
pocket change as well. Yeah, and they sometimes ran small

(12:36):
shops selling their own preserves and candies and ba goods,
and sometimes ran simple baking and catering operations out of
their home. And I think that it's an interesting side
note that in eighteenth century America, when you start to
see a couple of different types of cooking schools emerging,
you get the first public pastry lessons from a woman,

(12:59):
and this is Elizabeth Goodfellow, who opened her own pastry
shop in Philadelphia and eight and that's America's first cooking school.
Which that's not this episode. We're not talking about cooking schools.
But I do think it's interesting that so women have
always been cooking at home, except you know, in ancient Rome,
where it was the job of a team of slaves
and not the woman of the house. But it's always

(13:19):
traditionally been woman, the woman's role to cook for the family.
But here when it comes time to leave the house
and make an income, women are basically limited to this
baking realm. Baking realm, I mean, and the I think
it's notable too that we have it acceptable for them
being in the instructional role as well, which is still

(13:41):
distinct from being in the professional kitchen cooking for quote
unquote important mouths. I don't know why I put that
in quotes because those are just my own words. Um,
And that's something though. That instructional angle is something that
we'll talk about also in our Celebrity Slash TV Chef
episode meng Up next. But like you said, this whole

(14:02):
women as baker's trend never really stops. Even if we
look at the James Beard Awards for pastry in the
past ten years, seven women have taken it home while
three men have taken it home. And then there was
one husband and wife couple, which I thought was so precious.
And women, though still make up a large majority of

(14:23):
culinary school pastry program and roll ees. It's the most
acceptable culinary course for women even today because ladies love baking, right,
we have these little delicate fingers that can make those
intricate suites. Yeah, it's basically the industrial Revolution for food,
with tiny child fingers making making cakes. And it is

(14:44):
that exactness that a lot of people site as a
reason for being attracted to baking. And it's interesting to
read interviews with people who are pastry chefs and bakers
and things like that, because they all they echo these
gendered ideas. Uh. Jersey Monthly talked to pastry chef Melissa Walknock,
and she says, um, she loves the precision and science

(15:07):
of it. She says, if something goes wrong, I can
backtrack and figure it out. And I've always been drawn
to the artistic element of pastry. A regular chef not
to demean what they do. They take a piece of
raw meat and cook it. I'm making a whole new
creation from scratch. Perhaps, she says, females have more patients,
enjoy working on intricate things, and are more organized, whereas

(15:29):
she says, guys take a monstrous animal like a three
pound pig and break it down. It brings out their manliness,
I guess. And Walknock also notes that the pastry departments
in the super fancy restaurants where she's worked are all guys.
So even though she says that, yeah, there's this total
gender division, like women maybe are more drawn to pastry

(15:50):
and men are more drawn to classic cheffery. Uh, even
when you get up in those higher echelons, it's still
dude driven and which is something kind of echoed in
our teaching podcast where it's like the higher up the
rank of what we consider a feminized profession you go,
you do tend to see more guys at the top.

(16:10):
But she also wasn't the only pastry chef that New
Jersey Monthly talked to who mentioned just like this assumption that, oh, yeah,
women are just innately drawn to pastry. One person said, yeah,
there's just you know, less testosterone involved in making pastry.
But perhaps it's not so much hormones attracting women to

(16:31):
pastry chefing as earlier and more regular hours. That was
something that the New Jersey Monthly reporter mentioned that pretty
much every woman they talked to sided in terms of
it just being something that they could do and also
have a family. Yeah, one woman they interviewed said that

(16:52):
I'm the pastry chef so I have my kids at night.
My husband's the classic chef and the restaurant he works nights,
and how the kids in the morning. Yeah. Oh, and
they also noted like cooler temperatures in the kitchen. It's
just let you go in at like six am, five
am and it's a quieter, it's cooler, and then you
leave probably when things are really heating up for dinner service. Well,

(17:15):
and that that can sound a little flip, but I mean,
we'll we'll touch on some issues, some more issues later
in the podcast about why women might feel unwelcome in
a kitchen if they're not a pastry chef but sweets aside.
If we go back to our women in restaurants timeline,

(17:36):
in the early twentieth century, there there weren't restaurants run
by women, but rather tea rooms and cafeterias which were
considered appropriate for women, that women usually staffed in terms
of like top down, every single position. Yeah. This is
coming from Jan Whittaker in an article for the Boston
Hospitality Review. I thought it was really interesting that it's

(17:56):
not that these things were these places were literally only
for women, but it had a lot more to do.
She wrote, with the fact that men didn't want to
eat at a feminine woman's staffed establishment, especially somewhere like
a cafeteria where it's like it's run by women and
I have to pick up my own tray of food,

(18:16):
Like this is ridiculous, This is not what a restaurant
is um And I thought it was interesting too that
here in Atlanta we've got Mary Max tea Room and
it wasn't started in the early twentieth century, was started
in the forties. It's one of Atlanta's only remaining tea rooms.
But it was started by a woman. And in the
history of the restaurant on the website, it talks about

(18:37):
how well, you know, a woman couldn't just walk in
and start a restaurant, so the owner started it as
a tea room. So when then did we get the
first professional chef who was a woman in a restaurant.
I don't know that she was necessarily the first, but
she was certainly the first famous one. In World War One,

(18:59):
we have an Attack Meyer who was appointed as chef
at E. M. Statler's Hotel Pennsylvania. Yeah, and this is
all A bunch of this information is also coming from
Jan Whittaker, but also a fabulous nineteen profile of tack
Meyer and Woman's Home Companion. Uh So, tack Meyer got
her start making sandwiches and other lunch goodies to sell

(19:22):
to employees at the Public Library on Fifth Avenue in
New York, and they liked her so much and liked
her food so much that they ended up giving her
a space for a lunch room. She switched things up
a little bit by working as a traveling saleswoman for
the General Chemical Company, but she apparently took this opportunity
in all of her travels of staying at hotels to
note how bland and boring much hotel food was, and

(19:46):
so she she basically approached E. M. Statler and told him,
what's what? Like, dude, you're cooking is like so dull.
So he ends up hiring her for his hotel. But
it's a separate woman only home cooking kitchen, as is
appropriate and should be, Caroline um So. In that Women's

(20:09):
Home Companion profile, though, it raves that tack Meyer has
quote pointed the way to a new field of woman's
endeavor and one which women can make peculiarly their own.
And the whole angle of it was like, well, you know,
what I'm just I'm just doing this home cooking. We're
gonna make lots of fried chicken and gravy and offer

(20:29):
weary travelers a kind of food that their wife might
be serving them at home instead. So we still have
that woman as nurturer, you know, replacing like the domestic role. Yeah,
and as um Whittaker points out, this ties in with
both tea rooms and cafeterias, and with tack Meyer's role

(20:52):
that for most of the twentieth century, she writes, women's
cooking was directly related to what was going on at home.
Women weren't coming in and taking apart those three hundred
pound pigs and cooking massive dinners of meat and potatoes
for an entire hotel of guests. There was just a
lot of boiling, baking, pan frying, and stewing, because, as

(21:15):
Whitaker says, the drama of big knives and high flames
was absent. A kitchen run by a woman was likely
to be staffed by women also, as men disliked taking
orders from the opposite sex, and they even asked in
this profile, this woman's companion profile. They asked Tackmeyer what
the male chefs thought of her, which I thought was

(21:36):
great because I was like, this is exactly what would
be asked in an interview in what do your male
colleagues think of you? And apparently she gave the reporter
a knowing smile and said, they have nothing to say,
but I know that they are keeping up a powerful
lot of thinking. We do not attempt to compete with
them in any way. We were specializing in a sort

(21:57):
of cooking which they do not do. I'm or that
when they get used to us, they'll see the matter
in the right light. And she she made it made
it a point to emphasize like, we're not trying to
compete with the men. We're not taking their jobs. We're
not doing any sort of man cooking. We're doing very
specific home cooking. And so that Woman's Companion piece encourages

(22:18):
women like, look, you two can maybe run your own
segregated woman's gravy cooking kitchen one day if you're lucky.
Listen and all ladies, gravy kitchen sounds amazing to me.
I'm going to open a bar and name it that
gravy kitchen, as long as there's like a little nap
room in the side, because gravy just sounds like a

(22:40):
real recipe for sleepy time. But if we fast forward
to ninety three, hotels reported that they had female chefs,
but that number didn't really last. It wasn't like the
trajectory just went up, up, up, and now we have
parody in the kitchen. No, if we look at the
modern lady chef landscape today, we're still asking the same

(23:03):
questions that tack Meyer would have been asked in the
World War One era. And we're going to talk about
that when we come right back from a quick break. So,

(23:24):
like Christian was saying before the break, the lady chef
landscape today is really not that much better. According to Bloomberg,
there are more women's CEOs than there are head chefs.
What is going on? First, let's look at a couple
of numbers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fifty

(23:45):
four point seven percent of food prep and serving related
occupations are filled by women, but that drops to for
chefs and head cooks, which itself ladies and gentlemen. Is
down from the two thousand six pre recession number of
twenty three point nine. So if we back up, though,
and look at cooking school, what's going on? Um, of

(24:06):
International Culinary Center Classic i e. Non pastry graduates are women.
So that's a healthy percentage, I mean, but it's still again,
we have more men pursuing culinary arts than women. Uh
even fewer enrolled in the New York Culinary Institute of
America's Culinary Arts Associate program, thirty of them being women.

(24:27):
In then, if you look at Johnson and Wales, female
graduates actually doubled from ninety two to two thousand twelve
UM and there were two more women than men who
graduated in that year. And so we're starting to see
at least more women filling the second and third tier
jobs like sush chef. But breaking that culinary ceiling and

(24:51):
getting getting that head chef hat on, because I'm just
imagining that once you are promoted to chef, they give
you a really fancy chef hat. That's still a big
question mark. I think that's a thing though, Like your
hat does designate who you are the height of it.
I mean, I would if I make it to chef,
I would want to really really like a ten gallon

(25:11):
chef hat. Yeah. I started to accidentally off ramp in
the research of this because I started reading about the
hats and what they mean, and it's all a bunch
of like mythology. Who e It's nobody can really pinpoint when,
where and why all of these hat traditions originated. I
bet there are stuff I ever told you listeners to
who can give us chef hat insight. I bet. But

(25:33):
you know, anytime I'm at a restaurant and I see
a chef come out of the kitchen with a big
top on his head, I'm always like, how do you
keep that in your head? It's not win resistant. Maybe
do they have like a chintz strap, maybe like a
marching band hat that they should and also they should
play marching band instruments or they should just wear marching
band hats. Well, yeah, we are really solving a lot

(25:55):
of problems. We're solving all the problems. But looking at
all of the relatively positive culinary school stats, it led
me to wonder if there's just a leaky pipeline like
there is any time we talk about STEM women in
pursuing science, technology, engineering, and math careers. And the answer
is basically, yeah, it's not that women are dropping out

(26:18):
of culinary school. There are plenty of women who are going.
There are more women than ever who are pursuing these careers.
But so, what then is stuck in the pipe that
is making women sort of fall back instead of pursue
a longer career in chefery. Well, some people think that
women just don't want the job. They don't want to
have to pursue and go through all of the trouble,

(26:40):
the literal kitchen trouble that you have to go through
to prove yourself in order to achieve the rank of chef.
And this is something that Katie Grieko, who is head
of human Resources at Craft Group and Craft for Top
Chef Fans is Tom Calichio's group. She's quote, there just

(27:01):
aren't as many women who want to do the jobs
as men, and I think that executive chefing might be
one of them. So are like, why why wouldn't women
aspire to these kinds of jobs? Oh? Yeah, babies, Family,
The whole structure of working in a professional kitchen, especially
if you are a chef, that means that you are
working at night and really like all day. It doesn't

(27:24):
really leave much time at all if you want to
be a parent as well. Yeah, and this is something
that Mary Blair Lloyd in her book calls the Family
Devotion Schema. Basically, they're more societal expectations on women to
have a family raised that family, be home with a
family and rather than dedicating themselves to high power, high

(27:47):
stress careers that take them away from the home. Um.
So yeah. Within within the restaurant industry, of course, it's
not surprising that maternity and paternity leave are super rare.
Those long hour end up really requiring creative childcare options.
Like that couple we mentioned earlier where the wife is
the pastry chef, she works early hours, the husband is

(28:08):
the classic chef, he works at night. They basically switch off.
I wonder when they see each other. Now I'm worried
about this couple that I don't know. I thought the
same thing Caroline when I was reading about them, Like,
but where's their couple times they have date nights? What
if they're one night off a week doesn't overlap? Um?
But so any who? Uh? The Delightful chef Jean George

(28:29):
von Richton, who runs twenty four restaurants in North America,
basically laid it out that Hey, by the time that
it becomes Sioux Chefs and they're hitting almost thirty, they
want to have a family and it changes everything. He says,
the ticking clock makes a difference. Thanks Jean George for
your perspective. Well, we should also note though, to Carolina.

(28:49):
In the same interview, Jean George commented that his sole
female Sux chef is just she's very talented. Yes, yes,
but she's also so attractive she should be a model instead.
Ha ha ha. Well, I'm glad he has so many opinions. Well,
and in that interview too, was cited in a number
of our sources we were reading as a snapshot of

(29:11):
sexism in professional kitchens. Well, and people might be wondering, well,
where's the sexism in in women, you know, wanting to
have children at or whatever. And it's like, well, no, no, no, no,
that's not sexist. You can want to have kids whenever,
never want them to happen at all. It's more of
the assumption from people like this guy that oh, well

(29:32):
you're just gonna leave, you're gonna I'm gonna hire you
as a Sioux chef, but you're never going to really
rise up the ranks because you're gonna want to start
popping out babies. And he even continued on in his
thought to say something like women just want more of
a life. No, yeah, I mean no, George Um. Nicole Brisson,
who's the executive chef at Mario Batali's Las Vegas restaurant, UM,

(29:57):
has talked about how she often works nineteen hour days.
She's so tired of people assuming that she's the pastry
chef because gender again, and said that if she ever
wanted to have kids, she'd probably have to quit her job. Yeah,
because if you don't have the type of partner at
home who can fill in that gap, or you don't

(30:18):
have those child care options, no matter who you are,
that's gonna make you, know, man or woman, that's gonna
make having kids and having a family pretty pretty tough.
Not to mention, the money for the hours you work
is not great, and this is also coming from the
Beer of Labor statistics. The average for US chefs and
head cooks in general is just over forty six thousand,

(30:40):
five hundred a year, but women's median income is eighty
three and a half percent that of men's. But the
thing is, when you think about that, it gets even
worse because so restaurant industry jobs are already pretty tough,
but women are concentrated at the lower ends. So when
people talk about why does women's representation at higher rungs

(31:02):
of their industries matter, it's things like this, This is where,
if this is your passion, this is where you make
the most money. But not as many women are rising
through those ranks as men are cracking that culinary ceiling.
But also when they do, they're still making slightly less. Yeah,
and not to mention the scarce health benefits or insurance vacations,
sick time, et cetera. I mean this, this puts our

(31:25):
maternity leave episode UM in a different light where it's
just like it just seems impossible. You know, you are
either going to be a chef and that is it,
or you're going to be something else. You figure out
another way to make it work and try to have
a life around that UM. And if you want to
be a chef, if you really want to try to

(31:45):
bust through that culinary ceiling, then there's a very good
chance that you're going to have to deal with some
hostility in general and possibly sexual harassment. This is something
that a lot of women in very important kitchens around
the world have talked about, and some women who don't
want to talk about it at all. There was an

(32:05):
interview in Fortune magazine with a chef whose name I'm
forgetting at the moment. She um at the time though,
was became the third woman in the US to receive
two Michelin stars, and the interviewer asked her if she
had ever experienced sexual harassment, and she said, well, of
course I have, but I don't want to talk about it. Yeah,

(32:30):
and and it's something that dep Tran, who's the chef
owner of The Good Girl Dinette in Los Angeles, talked
about that she basically did not let stuff like that
dissuade her, but she says that she has watched other
women stay away because of it, which she says, quote,
they shouldn't have to do, that these are unacceptable conditions,

(32:51):
and that she makes sure that in her restaurant, uh,
people are outright fired if they won't cut out the
Not only is sexual harassment behavior, but really any sort
of racist, sexist, any type of phobic behavioral language. She
just doesn't tolerate it. Well, I wonder if that generally
hostile which someone just called macho environment and a lot

(33:12):
of these kitchens goes back to a scophier and the
militarization of the kitchen hierarchy and the entire way that
kitchens are run. And I'm also thinking about just watching
episodes of Gordon Ramsey's Hell's Kitchen where he's just screaming
at people and the assumption that if you are going
to work in a kitchen, then you need to be

(33:34):
ready to be cursed that continually and hear all sorts
of awful things and to just be sweating constantly. I mean,
it just seems like a very unpleasant place. I mean,
but that just makes me think of so many other
career type topics that you and I have talked about
where it's like, it doesn't have to be like that.
You know, people are like, well, women can't stand the pressure,

(33:57):
so they just shouldn't even bother. You know, women obviously
aren't cut out for this environment because this is the
environment that kitchens have. And it's like, well, I mean,
obviously not all kitchens function like that. Obviously there are
restaurant owners who don't tolerate this crap. So why don't
we just agree to change the environment. Yeah, I mean,
you can influence the you can build whatever kind of

(34:19):
workplace culture you probably want to have, even if you
are in a high pressure environment. But I wonder too
if there's that almost locker room esque resistance embedded within
an institutionalized within this industry to not want that many
women in the kitchen and certainly not wanting them to
call the shots, because if you have women in there,
then you're gonna have to watch what you say. You're

(34:41):
gonna have to watch who you might smack from time
to take the same thing we talked about in our
pin up episode about like, well, we can't fart in
front of people anymore, we can't have our kel are
dirty calendars in front of people anymore. What is the
world coming to? But it's that idea that we need
to change the people instead of the culture that has

(35:02):
a lot of women feeling like they have to walk
this fine line in terms of fitting in. Sociologist Debra
Harris and Patty Geoffrey, uh we're writing a guest post
over the Feminist Kitchen, and these are two women whose
names you'll see a lot when you start reading about
issues of gender and cooking. Um. But they talked about
the fact that the women they have interviewed really report
this pressure to conform to that macho environment. They end

(35:25):
up feeling like invaders and have to constantly fight against
managers and higher ups ideas that women cannot physically or
emotionally handle higher pressure and higher status jobs. But then
on the flip side, you act to masculine and you'll
get labeled a bit or someone who is undermining authority.

(35:48):
So it does become a bit of this catch twenty two.
It seems like, yeah, you've either got to like fit
into the sexual harassment joking culture basically and be like, yeah,
I'm gonna make all of these jokes to whether it
makes me uncomfortable or not, or I'm just gonna like
be cut and dry. I'm just gonna give orders, and
when I do, people are gonna, you know, ask me
where my sense of humor is. Yeah, like have to

(36:10):
desex yourself almost. Um. But as Laura to day Know,
who is a well known chef de cuisine, told The
New York Times, it all depends on the kitchen, she says,
in a good kitchen, male and female really doesn't matter anymore.
You get the work done, you handle yourself professionally, because
kitchens can still be crazy places, and you go home

(36:31):
and a lot of people say that us I've seen
a lot of quotes about like, gender doesn't matter. Male
versus female doesn't matter. It's your passion for the cooking,
it's your passion for the craft. And yeah, sure, I
agree with that genders shouldn't matter, but it obviously does,
and it even affects well in a cyclical way. It
affects how women chefs are then covered in the media,

(36:53):
which then affects the trajectories of a lot of people's careers. Yeah.
There there's a lot of concern and conversation within the
culinary industry over the ghetto wising of female chefs, of
whether it is useful at this point to spotlight female
chefs and whether that's just again continuing the cycle of oh, look,

(37:17):
it's a woman who can cook. Yeah, the editors in
chief of both gourmet and food and Wine magazines who
are both women, basically we're saying no, no way, because
once you start doing those like top women lists, that's
just another way of pointing out differences or emphasizing that
male and female are inherently different. When they're saying no.

(37:40):
Once you're holding the knife, you're holding the knife. It
doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman. But
then you have the issue of what happened with Time
magazine a couple of years ago when they put together
this Gods of Foods spread, you know, showcasing whom they
selected to be the most influential chefs and toural tastemakers

(38:01):
in the US, and I don't know, it might have
also been around the world and people were not too
pleased with it because the Gods of Food, as God's implies,
we're all dudes. It was like that Vanity Fair photo
not too long ago that came out where it was
like the new face of late night TV and it
was just all dudes and suits, mostly white dudes. Yeah. Yeah,

(38:25):
it was Trevor Noah in that picture. Yes, okay, well
there we go. There we go, Trevor Noah, diversity, here
we go. Um and a lot of people of course
then called for well, if you're going to only feature dudes,
we need to have a Goddesses of Food thing. And
then that again was like you said, Kristen criticized, is
just ghetto izing female chefs. It would be like saying, oh, well, yeah,
these are good for girls, like good for them. But

(38:47):
Amanda Cohen, who's the chef owner of Dirt Candy, which
is a vegetarian restaurant, which I was like dirt Candy, vegetables.
I get it. I know I had the same moment
at the exact same moment, like dirt Candy. All right,
she said on Twitter, as long as women are under
recognized by most mainstream awards, they need their own awards
hashtag necessary evil. She went on to blog that press

(39:12):
gives disproportionate attention to men, which means quote deadline oppressed.
Nomination committees and food writers focus on just those people,
creating a cycle of recognition, reward, and fame. Well, speaking
of Twitter and this whole question, Anthony Bourdain tweeted out

(39:32):
something in response to theteen S Pellegrino Award for World's
Best Female Chef, whom that year was Italian chef Nadia Santini,
and when it was announced, he tweeted out something along
the lines of do we seriously need a female chef category?

(39:52):
Isn't that kind of demeaning hashtag? Which I really appreciate
that he hashtag that, um and it sparked a lot
of conversation yet again, but it was also kind of
funny because initially it was a lot of prominent male
chefs like tagging all of their other dude chef friends
trying to have this conversation about whether female chef categories

(40:16):
are helpful or hurtful designations, to which a lot of
female chefs were like, seriously, this, this, this is it.
This is what we're talking about, guys. And I mean,
and it is a good question to raise, Like does
and this has come up in so many of our podcasts,
a question of whether you know female director or female doctor,

(40:37):
which kind of just makes it sound like a kind
of collegist is progressing anything at all. Yeah, No, I
absolutely get the idea. I get the gist you need
to be like, hey, no, seriously, guys, there are women
who are chefs and they're amazing, and they're at these
wonderful restaurants and you need to go eat their food
and recognize them and give them awards just the same
as you do men. And I mean, I think Cohen

(40:59):
was right in saying that, like, hey, some media people
are not going to dig down deep enough to get
these names. We need to put them out there. But yeah,
it's that, it's that idea of inserting differences between male
and female chefs because, of course, there is no gender
difference when it comes to how you cook or how

(41:20):
you taste, although some would say that there is a
difference in how men and women cook at least when
you look at how the media does cover male versus
female chefs, because even when female chefs get great attention,
which is critical for their careers. Of course, if you

(41:41):
look at how men are covered, they're usually given credit
for intellectual and technical work in producing dishes, their masters
who dominate the food, their rule breakers. I'm thinking of
David Chang and Anthony Bourdain now, um, and they're usually
seen as these like culinary empire builders, whereas women in
usually get little mention of technical skill, and they're likelier

(42:04):
to be praised for being hard workers, following tradition and
cooking from the heart, you know. They just want to
feed people. They just want to nourish as women do. Yeah,
and like we'll talk about in our next episode, they're
frequently portrayed as either mothers or sex objects. So comfort food.

(42:24):
But Harris and Jeoffrey, those sociologists mentioned earlier, wrote that
our research on media definitions of great chefs tends to
reaffirm the cooking and career choices made by men, even
though our interviews with women chefs show that they face stereotypes,
sometimes even hostility and family demands that make it very
hard for them to reach the same levels as their

(42:46):
male colleagues. And so basically looking at art, they looked
at a bunch of articles and how men and women
are written about and how we define success, and it's
so often from the male point of view talking about
those empires. Why haven't you built an empire yet? How
many restaurants do you own? Where are they? Where As
women who don't get the same type of media attention

(43:09):
and who then don't end up winning the same types
of awards, they don't get the same platform that a
lot of these famous mail chefs do in terms of
people even knowing who they are so that they can
go buy their branded cookwear or watch their television show
or eat at one of their fifteen restaurants. Well, and
a couple of examples of how this works if we

(43:30):
look at Lydia Boston. She's the owner of four restaurants
and a partner in a number of others. She's a
cookbook author, she's a TV host. Um I was personally
introduced to Lydia, not on PBS as I probably should
have been, which I believe she got her start TV
wise on on PPS, but rather as the mother of

(43:53):
Joe Boston, who was a former Master Chef judge um.
But because she is an Italian cook, partially because she's
an Italian cook, I think it also because she's a woman,
she's often framed as cooking, comforting, nurturing food. The food
is always being linked to her family, to her grandmother,

(44:14):
even though I mean, this woman is a winner of
multiple James Beard Awards, means she's a legit chef, but
it's usually always she's always framed as mother, wife, nurturer. Yeah,
and and same thing kind of with Alice Water. So
she's a self taught chef who was at the forefront
of the organic food movement in California. She started the

(44:37):
restaurant Cha Pennice and Berkeley in the seventies. Gourmet named
it America's best restaurant two thousand one. It earned a
Michelin star in two thousand and six through two thousand nine.
But still she's typically portrayed as this nurturer, educator, caretaker,
you know, adorable small businesswoman, rather than the culinary powerhouse

(44:57):
that she really is. Well, it's probably because with her
and a lot of others. I think this is particular
two women chefs on the West Coast, which some of
the I think it was Gastronomica was suggesting, is friendlier
in general to women chefs versus the East Coast. A
lot of those female West Coast chefs like Waters are
more interested in having this one amazing restaurant that they

(45:22):
cultivate and have a strong hand and rather than building
out a franchise. Yeah, we did read uh several different
sources that said that that women tend to be thriving
today in the smaller standalone restaurants scene rather than those
empires like your gravy kitchen, Caroline, Exactly what kind of

(45:42):
gravy do you want today? It's just just bacon meat gravy,
feminist gravy. It would not be bacon pour it on everything.
It wouldn't be no, would it be uh, I don't know,
unicorn something menstral lord. Uh. Well, so what can help

(46:04):
us get over this hump of not being able to
recognize more women as the incredible chefs that they are.
One commenter on that feminist kitchen post that we referenced
was talking about how when you just continue to talk
about how bleak the landscape is for lady chefs, it's

(46:25):
not really going to help us. She said that what
I'd like to see is less focus on how awful
and hard kitchens are for women and more focus on
building networks of female cooks and chefs who can support
each other in material ways. Now, if you're talking about
separating women out from men, I think this is an
actual smart, productive way to do it. Maybe not having
the fifty Best Chefs list and then the fifty best

(46:46):
women chefs like that sucks. But to have women forming
their own networks, whether they're huge corporate things or more
grassroots efforts, that is a great, I think, way to
to spend your energies in whatever industry you're in. Yeah,
and that's something that's happening with the Toklist Society, which
is a networking group for women in the restaurant industry,
which was founded by Momofuko Group brand director Sue chan

(47:12):
Um and I love it's it's named for Alice by Toklist,
who was Gertrude Stein's partner who would stay home and
take care of the house and cook the meal as
while Stein was out being you know, out being Gertrud. Yeah,
and there's also mentorship programs available within the Women Chefs
and Restaurants Network and the group she Chef and slowly,

(47:35):
very slowly, so slowly that there are a handful of examples.
Um restaurant groups are seeing the need for better insurance
and vacation policies and better maternity and paternity leave options
because I'm sure that we're, you know, at a point
in history maybe where I don't know, men also want
to take time off for their families, and so I

(47:55):
think people are starting to realize the need for better policies.
For instance, in that Momo Fud group that you just mentioned,
Kristen employees who are with the company for a year
get free health insurance, paid vacations, and maternity and paternity leave.
The Altimira group offers medical, dental and vision insurance plus
paid holidays. And I know people are like, what's the
big deal. That's a huge deal for the for the

(48:16):
restaurant industry. And Alice Waters. Speaking of Alice Waters, shee
pioneer job sharing programs between parents, instituted a six months
off furlow system for head chefs and developed this roster
of impressive cooks and chefs which allowed all of this
allowed chefs to have that flex time to spend with
family as needed, to take time off if you're sick.

(48:37):
Can you imagine, oh my god, someone working in a
kitchen gets to take sick time as it should be
thinking of a sick person making food. There was just
an article the other day that I saw online that
was talking about how nobody in the restaurant industry takes
enough time off for for sick time because because you
could lose your job so easily, you know, the job

(48:59):
of a chef. I know we're talking about chefs specifically,
but if you can't show up for your shift for
multiple nights, like they still need to cook the food
and beyond that too. One thing that Alexandra Gorna Shelley,
who's the executive chef in New York City's Butter Restaurant
said was quote, when women chefs get media attention, it's

(49:20):
for bucking the norm. How about we just become part
of the norm. Can we qualify for norm status? And
that's an excellent point. I mean, male chef is normative
at this point, female chef is the other. She's in
the gravy kitchen. When you heard about the movie Chef,
I bet you didn't picture a lady chef. No, And

(49:43):
you know what, speaking of chef movies, I don't know
if it's his next role, but an upcoming role for
Mr Bradley Cooper, who just made waves on the Internet
and the media cycle in general for UM saying that
he would be sharing his salary infoe with female co
stars to make sure they're getting equitable pay in Hollywood

(50:03):
for all of his upcoming films. And he will be
doing that, I hope on his upcoming film Burned, where
he plays a chef. But you know if if he
is um making grilled cheese sensually, I might tune in.
And with that, we got to close out this podcast
because I think it just got hot in here, all

(50:26):
that melty cheese. Well, so we have, We've talked about
a lot. We we started talking about ancient soups and
now and now we're talking about ancient beat coops. Not
so ancient, No, no, handsome, handsome though hot and fresh. Okay, So,
so I would like to hear because I know you're
out there chefs, lady chefs and and and gent chefs alike.

(50:50):
What's it like working in the kitchen? Does any of
us resonate with you? Are you sick of hearing about
the gender division in the kitchen or do you think
this is still a conversation worth having. I hope so,
because we just had it, and I think it's worth
remembering too, especially if you're listening to this as someone
who works in a kitchen, You're like, that's not the
way it is at all. What we're pulling from is
media portrayals of what is going on in kitchen. So

(51:12):
I'm really curious to know how this where are the
women chefs angle headline that's repeated over and over and
over again, how that does compare to the day to day.
So mom Sabit, House Stuff works dot com is our
email address for letters. You can also tweet us at
mom Stuff Podcasts or messages on Facebook. And I've got
a couple of messages to share with you right now. Well,

(51:40):
we've got a couple of letters here from our Couple
Speak episode, and this one from Brianna not only references
couple Speak but also friends Speak, which I love, and
so I wanted to read it, she says, Oh my gosh,
I have never related to an episode more. My whole
life feels like it's centered on speaking to people I
love and baby talk. My husband and I who also
called each other boyfriend and girlfriend when we dated Caroline

(52:02):
and do husband and wife now, but not boyfriend and
girlfriend dog, which is way too adorable thanks, she says.
We talk in high baby voices at home constantly. Words
are mushed together and mispronounced. We throw around sweetie and
baby and the like all the time, and it's definitely
nauseating for anyone around us. We've done it pretty much
since we started dating. The weirdest part is we often
communicate and baby speak through our dog, speaking as if

(52:23):
we were announcing the thoughts of our Boston terrier Luna
Love Good. We refer to each other as mommy and
daddy when we were talking for her and mentioned us both.
It's always mommy daddy, never mommy and daddy. But it's
usually things like mommy, I love you, but also I
love daddy, or when she's snuggling between us, I love
cuddling Mommy daddy. Who are we talking to? It has
me very very concerned about our future children and what

(52:45):
voices and terms will use. But after the podcast, it
made me feel pretty good about our relationship. I also
use this with my best girlfriends from elementary and high school.
My friend Ashley has always been my little red haired
girl because I called her a little red haired girl
in second grade before I learned her name. My friend
Danielle is my kindred because when we met, we felt
very much alike. My friend Abby, who unfortunately passed away

(53:06):
in April eleven, was always Abigail last syllable said with emphasis,
or Babs, a nickname of her own choosing and junior high,
and she always told us you're my best brand or
best friend. In texting and Facebook messages, all of us
called each other visps or very important sexy people. From
the summer after high school to today. It is so
serious that our holidays are vispmas visps giving and the like.

(53:30):
Boyfriends are visbos and husbands are vicious. I used to
think all of this stuff was just goofy names and
patterns of speech left over from our younger years, but
after your podcast, I realized how it's bonded us. People
I've run into from high school have said, oh, I
love seeing you girls hang out on Facebook through photos.
It's so great to see you all together. I mean,
of course we do, why wouldn't we, But I wonder

(53:51):
how our pet group naming is played into that. It
certainly worked as a way to strengthen our bond and
help us cope while grieving Abby's death, for sure, and
that has only made our friendship deeper. I don't care
if people think we're ridiculous, because I wouldn't have my
visps any other way. So thank you, Brianna, and I
love all of that so much, um as much as
I love this letter from Katie, who wrote, I just

(54:13):
finished listening to your most recent podcast, Couples Speak, and
it made me smile to hear Caroline say she and
her boyfriend called each other girlfriend and boyfriend because an
X and I used to call each other girlfriend and girlfriend.
Also because same sex couples are often referred to as partners,
and we both found that a bit I roll inducing,
we began to refer to each other as partners in
different law firms as a way to poke fun at

(54:34):
the terminology. She became girlfriend of girlfriend, girlfriend and girlfriend,
and I was girlfriend of girlfriend and associates When we
called each other. We would often play out a kind
of long winded salutation, thank you for calling girlfriend and associates,
this is girlfriend speaking. How may I ussist you with
your girlfriend needs. It all sounds so silly and a
bit iroll inducing, but it's something that makes me smile

(54:57):
so to think about, and I thought you too, My
also get a kick out of it. In the end,
our two firms never did merge, but we've remained the
best of friends and still maintain a unique way of
speaking to each other and so many inside jokes that
others often feel like we're speaking a different language. So
thanks so much, Katie and listeners, I have to tell
you that a couple speak. Letters have been so fun

(55:20):
to get um and if you would like to send
us your letter, you can do that. Mom stuff at
how stuff works dot com and links to all of
our social media as well as all of our blogs, videos,
and podcasts, including this one with links to our sources
so you can learn more about gender and chefs. Head
on over to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com

(55:45):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com