We
all know, of course, that cheffing is a very male-dominated profession.
I do not pretend to be saying something groundbreaking when I make this
assertion. But this show does not help. It does not help at all. One of
the judges is a woman, yes - the fab Prue Leith - but only one
contestant is, out of 24 in total. (SPOILER! She doesn't win.) The show
is a total sausage-fest, which is ironic, because no-one cooks sausages.
I
cannot, of course, just blame the show. The fact that women chefs
either do not want to, are not invited to or are not good enough to
compete on this show is a symptom of a wider malaise - the dichotomy
between the (usually woman) cook, and the (almost always male) chef.
It's struck me recently that running a kitchen
is one of the few jobs that's still basically feudal. Much like working
in the workshop of a medieval craftsman, the underling-chefs are
expected to follow orders and replicate exactly the head chef's work
rather than going by their own inspiration and creativity, so as to
produce the same plate of food for every customer that orders it. In
Olden Tymes, the workers at an artist's workshop would do the boring
bits - sky, grass, people's bodies - of paintings or sculpture and the
artist would do the exciting bits like faces. Nowadays sous chefs pretty
much do the same thing, doing the prep and using their skills to
perfectly craft dishes to the head chef's instrutions; the top
chef, an artistic genius, provides the inspiration and does the fancy bits.
I'm not saying that this feudal system is a bad way
to run a restaurant or to learn a skill. But I do think that this might
have something to do with why more women aren't top chefs. The very
concept of the artistic genius is a traditionally male one, of
course – try to name five female geniuses. Geniuses are solo figures,
iconoclasts, sometimes social outcasts. Historically only men could be
geniuses in
fields where
one needs to be independent (financially, freedom of movement, of
education and so on) in order to excel, essentially by having the
freedom to be left alone and do whatever wacky thing you want to do - a
room of one's own.
Though women finally have gained
the freedom to work and to own property (hooray!) we still come up
against this
concept of the independent genius, with its associations of maleness.
Many of us were brought up in cultures which praised women's tact,
diplomacy and ability to make conversation and work well with others,
and men's competitiveness and ambition, despite the fact that many women
and men were evidently handed the wrong-gendered skills at birth (a bit
like getting the wrong Happy Meal in McDonald's). A
recent sociological study by Deborah Harris and Patti Giuffre of food
writing in America found that men chefs
were more likely to be praised for technical skill, and women for
working hard (especially 'in a man's world'); that successful male chefs
were lauded when they were iconoclastic and groundbreaking, and women
when they achieved excellent traditional cooking; that men's ambition to
build an empire of branded goods, TV shows, media exposure and so on
was praised, and women chefs' ultimate motivation was more often
described as the
love of feeding and nurturing people. Whether or not it is true that
these are the specific motivations and qualities of women chefs (and I am very sceptical), and
that there is a difference between mens' and womens' excellence in the
field, it definitely seems the case that at the moment it's the 'manly', sciency
stuff - the technical wizardry - that's somehow supposed to be better. In what
is supposedly the cutting edge of the modern chef-world, this
means things cooked sous-vide, foams (if you're SO three years ago),
spherification (e.g. making things that aren't normally the shape of
peas into pea-shapes for no reason), cutting potatoes into spaghetti,
and
turning various unlikely things into gels. Maybe that's why there
aren't more top women chefs on Great British Menu. They think it's stupid.
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