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The Fame Game: Why Do Women Chefs Get Shafted?
Food For Thought
New York, 10:04 AM
Thu Nov 12
67 posts in the last 24 hours
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The Fame Game: Why Do Women Chefs Get Shafted? |
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01/14/09
I think one thing that is often left out of the discussion about women in the professional kitchen (which, I agree, is rife with sexual harassment, though if you read the works of major male chefs, the women who can hack it in the professional kitchen -- who can give as good as they get -- become untouchable) is the amount of time one needs to devote to the job.
A double shift for a professional chef is from 4 a.m. to well after midnight. A single shift is at least 10 hours, if not 12-14. If you want to have a child, ever, you're going to have to stop working. Unless, that is, you're wleathy enough and okay with having someone else raise your kid.
As long as women cntinue to want to have families, their ability to devote their entire lives and entire days to food is going to be diffult. But the female chefs who do make it, and who do gain celebrity, do so because they are every inch as talented as their male peers, and you better believe that they are every bit as respected.
01/14/09
School is full of women, yet when you get into the real world the majority of the "stars" are men...being denied a job for being a woman...interesting...
01/14/09
Big names on the left coast include almost as many female chefs as men: Alice, Susan Goin, Traci des jardins, whatever her name is at the Zuni Cafe.
Even the up and comers: Naomi Pomeroy at Beast and Jenn Louis at Lincoln in Portland, Corina Weibel at Canele in L.A.
We don't lack for female chefs, sorry.
01/14/09
Proportionately, male to female ratio, there are hundreds more male chefs than women, from your newest line chef straight up through people with names in lights.
I'd also argue that you can find better food on the right coast, but that's just me.
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01/14/09
I am sure glad patriarchy's over kids, because that time when we were "actually" oppressed by men? Must have been horrible.
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There are few women sommeliers, and even fewer women masters. Many people will ignore you, harass you, etc. But what I've found is that I don't care, and as sad as it is, you eventually learn how to accept/ circumvent it. Find a restaurant or company that makes you happy, and as long as you still keep the same passion about food, you'll never regret it.
01/14/09
Luckily, banks don't look at your vag when handing out small business loans. Some female chefs I know got tired of the shit and just opened their own places.
(And a popular route among chefs I've known, for men and women both who are more family-oriented or just more balanced-life-oriented, is to leave a BIG city like NYC or Chicago and to go to a smaller university town where there's community support for fine food, but rents are lower and you can dare to experiment a little more. And the pace tends to be a bit slower. Might not get you a show on the Food Network, but you can own your own place, be your own boss, and cook what you want to cook for an appreciative audience.)
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Or better yet: get a job in a restaurant for six months (CIA requires that, anyway, before you can be accepted.)
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01/14/09
The only thing that could make it cooler is if he actually did make canapes for the lions. :D
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01/14/09
This makes me sad.
01/14/09
the job after that? the chef told me, AT THE INTERVIEW, that he'd have to ask the guys in back how they felt working with a woman. there i was, a good cook, but i had to be approved by every dick-suck busboy and dishwasher (not to bag on either position, as i've done both and they are important) my first night there he buttonholed me in the walk-in and smarmed all over me, talking about how he hope i could put up with a little bit of fun without screaming "sexual harassment". ugh ugh ugh. sorry for the bible length screed, but this subject gets me aaaaaall kinds of worked-up.
01/14/09
01/14/09
now i'm a food anthropologist/activist.
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But my dreams of being a pastry chef live on!
01/14/09
This is marketing. Not a reflection of the lady's skill.
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But my dad will still only think of her as a bobble-head with too much cleavage for daytime tv.
01/14/09
Of course, hair and boobs haven't done Nigella Lawson much harm...
01/14/09
I think my point is that we should not allow gender to make us think of one cook or the other as a chef. it should be skill, or at least i hope that it is.
I guess we have a long way to go in the regard.
P.S. I just had an onion-and-pepper cheese panini. it was awesome.
01/14/09
01/14/09
Even though I agree with your point let me say this:
i'm too poor to go out to any of those places. i just buy stuff at the supermarket and make my own food. I made a homemade tomato sauce which, and i am not kidding here, is so good it will cause angels to cry.
01/14/09
Look at Iron Chef and Next Iron Chef. They have women underrepresented because we are underrepresented as chefs. Then look at Top Chef, where you have chefs and people still striving to reach the level of chef, and you are much more gender balanced.
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01/14/09
I did that when I worked in Chelsea. Nothing says "this is the good life" quite like eating a slice and a root beer at Two Boots on 12th and 7th. Yum.
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Or morimoto. God it never works. YOU ALWAYS LOSE!
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"Hey! Get your bitch-ass back in the kitchen and make me some pan-seared scallops!"
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But I don't know.
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I think it's because yes, cooking well is something we're supposed to do.
I used to hate cooking, til I found out I was reeeeally good at it. Turns out, it was just cause I'm a lady.
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01/14/09
telling insult: if something was rinky-dink or amateur, it was "betty crocker shit", or "housewife shit".
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When men come into traditional "women's work," they get paid more, the job gets prestigious, and people start to say, "Oh, well, women can't do that. At least not professionally. What they do at home, that's cute. But this is PROFESSIONAL."
(And when women go into traditional male bastiens and start to dominate them, the job gets "pink-collarized" and the pay and prestige drops -- like secretarial work or teaching, in the 1900s, and clergy work more recently.)
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