Gender and Occupation: Reconciling Culinary Work with Self through Rhetoric

The Food Network has glamorized the culinary world. Would-be chefs are flooding cooking schools with more veracity than amateur actors are descending on L.A., lured by the possibility of becoming the next Gordon Ramsay or Anthony Bourdain. In the U.S., the number of cooking programs rose by 42% between 1997 and 2002 in response to rising applications (Berta). But just as there are a limited number of people in Hollywood making millions of dollars per film, so too are spots for celebrity and executive chefs few and far between. Yet Iron Chef America continues to portray chefs as Olympic athletes. Nigella Lawson is cast as no less than a “domestic goddess,” and Jaime Oliver is shown stopping the plague of obesity one cafeteria menu at a time. Professional cooking should thus, as portrayed by The Food Network, involve art, fame, wealth, philanthropy and world travel served up alongside the thirty-minute meals. The array of opportunities must surely line up as neatly as the mise en place prepared by one of Martha’s mignons, right? Despite the fact that all of these are indeed facets of the profession, very few cooks actually experience this larger sense of purpose or satisfaction in the day-to-day grind.
Apart from the long hours and low pay endured by the average line cook, much of the discontent stems from the fact that occupation is so closely linked to identity. In effect, the culinary industry allows neither male nor female cooks to feel fully satisfied in their positions, because professional cooking grates against traditional gender roles. For men, while cooking allows for the exposition of physical prowess, it does not allow for the capital power and authority generally sought by men. For women, while cooking has traditionally been a form of achieving moral authority through caregiving and the maintenance of order in the domestic realm, professional cooking does not allow women to achieve the female model of “delicacy” or to adequately maintain a moral, model “personhood” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 48).
Through a review of occupational rhetoric in the culinary industry, it is apparent that cooks use language to manipulate their standing in society and to reconcile work with gender identity. In the culinary industry, men craft a testosterone-driven subculture as a means of displaying the physical demands of the industry and to distinguish themselves from the average home cook. At the same time, men compare their jobs with traditionally professional, power-possessing careers. Women, as the minority figures in the industry, are obliged to operate within this framework, and the style of speech and personas they adopt reflect the desire to succeed in a male domain coupled with the need to preserve aspects of their womanhood. In the culinary world, both men and women are torn between the desire to present themselves and their work as unique and the desire to be accepted into the gender and occupational mainstream.


Occupational Rhetoric in the Kitchen


When two people are getting to know each other, one of the first questions that will inevitably be broached is, “What do you do for a living?” Occupation is inherently linked to identity in that a person’s work is one of the things by which he is judged. A named occupation is like a tag, for an occupation is a bundle of physical and cultural tasks that vary in the cumulative prestige, authority, status and stigma they impart (Fine, 90-91). Together they place a person within a social system, shaping who he or she is and how he or she will be seen by others. In this vein, occupational rhetorics are used to define the work of the individual and his or her social standing. As Hughes asserted, “[T]he people who practice an occupation attempt to revise the occupation and that of the people in it. In so doing, they also attempt to revise their own conception of themselves and their work” (Hughes, 338-339). By using language to justify their occupations, people vicariously shape how the world perceives them.
The culinary world is a rich place to explore the potential of occupational rhetoric because of the variety of professions it intersects. Sociologist Gary Alan Fine undertook such a study in 1993 in which he spent over 200 hours interviewing cooks in four “second-tier ‘provincial’” restaurants in the Twin Cities area. His primary focus was on the plurality of occupational identities and rhetoric. He chose kitchens as the setting for his study because cooking is “linked to production, service and management” (Fine, 93), an observation that parallels gastronome Jean Paul Aron’s belief that “The chef is not an employee in the common meaning of the word, but a practitioner, an artist, and a fabricator” (Aron, 89).
Fine ultimately determines that cooks adopt the rhetorics of professionals, artists, businessmen and manual laborers as part of their rhetorical strategies. This rhetorical breakdown certainly parallels the multiple facets of cooking, which are outlined by food historian Michael Symons:
[C]ooking quickly becomes so complex that its study, too, is broken down into self-important bits—nutritionist know the chemical properties of foods, architects the layout of kitchens, electrical engineers the laws of conduction, market researchers the weakness of shoppers, and so on, seemingly indefinitely. But these snap together again once all kinds of human activities are viewed as radiating out from cooking. Cooking is the point where production is directed, where social relationships are formed and maintained, and where the arts and sciences emanate. It is the starting-place of trades, the target of the marketplace, the object of philosophy. (Symon, 120-121)
Culinary work blends different skill sets and is highly diverse in the level of specialized knowledge it requires and the prestige it imparts. It involves manual labor, upon which is layered a need for business sense, people skills, knowledge of basic chemistry and mechanics, and sometimes a certain level of artistry.
The plurality of tasks is reflected in the language that cooks use to describe their work through analogies and metaphors that call on other professions. Not only are these comparisons used to articulate work; they are also used to express the self. I argue that the appropriation of other rhetorics is a sign of insecurity about the unadorned image that being a cook projects. Eighty percent of the cooks Fine interviewed were men, which begs the question, to what extent is this need for justification in the culinary world confounded by gender? Are female cooks as insecure about their professions as male cooks, and if so, does this insecurity manifest itself in a different way? Occupations are linked to identity, so to what degree is one’s identity as a man or woman linked to one’s occupation? In what ways does cooking allow a person to fulfill or surpass traditional gender roles?

Gender Ideals and the Need to Justify Cooking


Looking again to the Food Network, celebrity chefs and their audiences are gender coded. Female celebrity chefs such as Nigella Lawson, Martha Stewart, Rachel Ray and Lydia Bastianich are oriented toward women at home. Gordon Ramsay’s shows are based primarily on professional cooking, Anthony Bourdain is the erudite macho man of the food world, and while women can compete in Top Chef, a woman has never won . At home, daily cooking tasks are tended to by women, but men dominate the professional realm to the point that one could say that men have turned restaurant kitchens into an inhospitable environment for the “traditional” woman.
In order to understand why the realm of professional cooking is so problematic, let us turn to the division of labor that gender constructivism has set up. The existence of a division of labor is universal. While the way in which this division manifests itself differs between societies, in general activities that are guarded closely as being in men’s domain involve greater societal and public power. A woman, on the other hand, often holds more power in domestic and nonpublic domains (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 38).
Accepting Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that the woman is cast as the “the other,” it is logical that a task such as cooking, which at its core is motivated by the will to attend to the needs of others, is deemed more functional for women (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 38). Women are generally assigned roles of catering to people’s everyday needs, which manifests itself principally in child rearing and in the maintenance of the home. When women first entered the public sphere, it is no surprise that they found employment in the service sector, and the hospitality industry seems a natural for the feminine domain (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 39). But men have usurped the culinary industry. Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet argue that even a “nurturant” activity such as cooking acquires prestige just by way of its association with men, but I would assert that while yes, men have taken over the restaurant world, most of them do not experience the feeling of prestige. This dissatisfaction has its origins in the different ways men and women have come to define their personal worth.
There are two types of masculinity as defined by Robert Connel: physical and technical. Physical prowess is associated with the working class and technical (scientific and political prowess) with the upper-middle class, though to a certain extent physical power is also important in the upper-middle class. Conversely, women are expected to be small and delicate (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 48). Men are rewarded for their accomplishments and women for their personhoods, or “looks, personalities, [and] moral qualities.” A man’s personal worth is based primarily on “the accumulation of goods, status and power in the marketplace. A woman’s personal worth comes from domestic realm, her moral authority and otherwise “symbolic capital.” Even when a woman has acquired a respectable position in the public sphere, it is expected that she will remain “nicer” than a man in an equivalent position and will maintain personal relationships (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 124).
Gender is an achievement. We stylize ourselves to fulfill or break from gender patterns. But most restaurants are run like dictatorships, and any cook besides the chef de cuisine or his lackey sous chefs will normally be limited in the degree with which he or she has control over his or her work and feeling of self-determination. As a cook in even the most reputable restaurant, the sixty- to eighty- hour workweeks, the repetition of tasks, the uniform, the lack of health benefits, the minimum wage salary and the often unpredictable schedule take their toll. Despite the huge amount of effort and skill their job requires, cooks experience little feelings of authority in or outside the workplace, as they work for a usually unappreciative chef all day, can meet friends, family and lovers in the wee hours and on the occasional day off, and struggle to make rent at the end of the week. It is, to a certain extent, dehumanizing professionally and personally. In terms of how this way of life takes its toll on cooks and their fulfillment of gender roles, I have observed empirically, in my reading of Fine’s study and in my literary analysis of Anthony Bourdain’s Hell’s Kitchen and Hannah McCouch’s Girl Cook the following: male cooks overemphasize the physical prowess and militaristic hierarchy in their work in order to compensate for the lack of technical prowess and capital authority afforded to them by their occupations. Simultaneously, they try to raise their work to the status of socially sanctioned professions through metaphor. Female cooks, in their effort to work within the model established by the power-holding men, must negotiate between an adoption of the language, toughness and swagger of the masculine subculture, and a maintenance of the power that comes from cultivating a more traditional female personhood.

The “Professional Cook”: Justification through Metaphor and Simile


Fine writes that “A self-image of professionalism occurs when specialized knowledge and allegiance is critical to the doing of work.” Whether cooking is a true profession is, in and of itself, a question. Technically, an occupation is only a profession when it is characterized by “(1) systematic theory, (2) professional authority, (3) community sanction, (4) a well-developed ethical code, and (5) a professional culture” (Fine, 96). On the whole, cooking does not meet all of these requirements, but in the mid-1970s, the Department of labor, under pressure from the American Culinary Federation, changed the census category of chef from “domestic” to “professional.” Still, in reality cooks reside in the limbo of “quasi-professionalism” (Fine, 96). The adoption of professional rhetoric and metaphor allows cooks to gain credit and control in a status-oriented world.
The main function of a metaphor is to “provide a partial understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson, 154). Using George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s subjectivity-oriented metaphoric theory as opposed to the objectivist comparison theory, metaphors allow people to create similarities that they derive from personal experience. Metaphors are based on correlations we perceive empirically, and it is the existence of these correlations and the crystallization in metaphor that allow us to construct similarities (Lakoff and Johnson, 147-155). For example, let us take the metaphor used by one cook interviewed by Fine: “Cooking is chemistry.” Cooking and chemistry both involve physical and chemical reactions. Both an experiment and a recipe are subject to variables. Both have established methods to insure the proper product. The similarities and differences are isolated, but the metaphor allows us to find coherence in an overall structural similarity.
Cooks often draw metaphors between themselves and more visible occupations both to explain the complexity of their work and the variety of skills they employ on a daily basis, and also to compare themselves to work that already possesses the prestige of “community sanctioned” professionalism. The emphasis on specialized skills relates to cooks’ need to separate themselves from the universally achievable status of “home cook”, as is exemplified in the following interviews taken by Fine:
The chef is the carpenter, plumber, electrician, handyman, psychologist, psychiatrist.

We have to have basic cooking talents. We have to have creative cooking talents. You have to be a personnel director as far as hiring and firing people. You have to be a purchasing agent. You have to be a butcher… You almost have t be a psychologist… To be able to deal with problems, and not, if someone has a problem, tell them to shut up and go home or I don’t want to hear about it…. It’s almost like having your own family here. You’re almost like being a father… There’s a lot of responsibility.
These comments exemplify the valorization of cooking through the breadth of knowledge it requires. While some of these metaphors reference professions (such as “psychologist” and “psychiatrist”) most of the trades to which cooking has been compared have even less status than cooking. Collectively, however, they impart a certain level of respectability. Physical prowess and consequently, physical labor are ennobling, and as earlier discussed, particularly valued by men. Most male cooks admit to liking to work with their hands, in the feeling of competence they derive from this. They are grounded in the necessity of their work (Fine, 108).
However, just as the labor of rhetoric can create a positive image, so too can it can be used in negative contexts by cooks. When complaining about work, the toil can be described as being backbreaking, hot, sweaty, exhausting and mechanical. Not only is the work tiring, the assembly line-like nature of many establishments inhibits the use of the mind and consequently a cook’s self-esteem (Fine, 109). Part of being a manual laborer implies that you are merely a cog in a larger process, and that, consequently, there are others supervising you and exercising decision-making authority over you.
The cooks in Fine’s study could be said to transcend this lack of authority through analogy. Similar to metaphor, analogizing can act as a way of justifying one’s identity. By comparing the types of actions they perform with those of “consensually defined” professions, cooks can align their work with an elite status, as exemplified by the following interviews (Fine, 97).
If you take a doctor or lawyer, they go through years of training. And a chef goes through years of training. It’s years of discipline in doing certain things. Like with a doctor or lawyer, they always find out something new everyday. Laws and medical things. It’s the same thing with a cook. Every day it’s something new.

Law and medicine are practice professions. Cooking would be, too. What you’re actually doing is using an accepted method everyday and doing something… but you’re also practicing doing that at the same time. You’re trying new things.
Here, the system that is being identified as similar between cooking and universally affirmed professions is that of the prerequisite for specialized skills and experience. “Professional” cooking is different from home cooking in that it is based on knowledge that can only be acquired in school or in the field. It requires “discipline” and the fact that every day there is something new suggests that it also requires the kind of skills that extends beyond being able to read a recipe. As with medicine, it requires the astute interpretation of a situation based on prepossessed knowledge. As with law, it requires the creative combination of preset rules. This kind of specialized skill and knowledge procures its own kind of authority.
Professional cooking is different from home cooking and professional cooks are keen to emphasize the disparity between the “wannabe” Martha Stewarts and green-eared CIA students of the world and the cooks logging eighty-some hours a week in a 100˚ kitchen. Indeed, it would outrage any cook to read the example sited by Symons from the 1823, 6th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “[Cooking is] sufficiently familiar to every housekeeper; and, its luxurious refinements too copiously detailed in manuals and directories [to require elaboration], were it even a topic that at all deserved consideration in a work of this nature” (Symons, x). While professional cooking is still linked to hospitality, it is also bound by hierarchical, temporaral and material constraints that can only be navigated by a seasoned cook.

Cooking up a Subculture: Pirates and Profanity


The testosterone-driven “subculture” of the culinary world has been publicized most prolifically by Anthony Bourdain. His bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential, whose subtitle is “Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,” portrays kitchens as a scraped together military unit of delinquents, madmen and bon vivants, that is, of all the people too full of fire and spit to be bound by an office job. Bourdain uses the word ‘subculture’ in both his preface and “Note from the Chef”:
I want to tell you about the dark recesses of the restaurant underbelly—a subculture whose centuries-old, militaristic hierarchy and ethos of ‘rum, buggery and lash’ make for a mix of unwavering order and nerve-shattering chaos. (Bourdain, 4)

I’m asked a lot what the best part about cooking for a living is. And it’s this: to be a part of a subculture. To be part of a historical continuum, a secret society with its own language and customs. To enjoy the instant gratification of making something good with one’s hands—using all one’s senses. It can be, at times, the purest and most unselfish way of giving pleasure (though oral sex has to be a close second). (Bourdain, xvi)
The most sociologically significant word Bourdain uses here is “secret society,” for the nature of a secret society relates very closely to the idea that inequality is based on privileged knowledge. The secret is a boundary mechanism that separates members by their social patterns or groups. Its maintenance is motivated not by the secret itself, but rather, by the “rights, obligations, and privileges generated by the fact of secrecy” (Murphy, 193). Thus, male cooks can be said to gain a feeling of authority via a separation from the rest of society.
Bourdain says he can “speak the language of this culture,” and that, in effect, he has the passwords to this secret society (Bourdain, 4). In addition to implying the possession of privileged knowledge, the way Bourdain describes cooks conjures images of traditional masculinity and physical prowess. Bourdain portrays cooks as a motley crew of Don Juans, pirates, soldiers, and criminals.
Who the hell, exactly, are these guys, the boys and girls in the trenches? You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. The business attracts… ‘fringe elements,’ people for whom something in their lives had gone terribly wrong. (62)

In the kitchen, they were like gods. They dressed like pirates: chef’s coats with the arms slashed off, blue jeans, ragged and faded headbands, gore-covered aprons, gold hoop earrings, wrist cuffs, turquoise necklaces and chokers, rings of scrimshaw and ivory, tattoos—all the decorative detritus of the long-past Summer of Love. They had style and swagger, and they seemed afraid of nothing. (21)
The portrayal of a certain cooking team as a band of pirates implies that they have their own set of self-serving rules that pit them against society. By becoming “pirates,” these “fringe elements” are turning their marginalization into a profitable enterprise. Just as they turn detritus into jewelry, another man’s trash into gold, the institutionalization of their delinquency gives them a sense of power. Bourdain’s descriptions are also marked by his aforementioned “mix of unwavering order and nerve-shattering chaos.” The mixture of order and chaos echoes the military saying, “War is hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror,” and indeed the cooks are described as being “in the trenches.” These militaristic references not only connect them to other subcultures of society, they also evoke images of masculinity.
This said, the culinary subculture is not always hospitable for the traditional woman. When I interned as a cook in Paris, I was the only woman working in the Taillevent kitchen among twenty men. In order to be respected as a cook and given any sort of interesting responsibility, I went in with the expectation that I needed to work harder, better, and more efficiently than anyone else in the kitchen. While diligence afforded me this respect and opportunity, what was more difficult to manage was the extent to which I should embrace the masculine subculture. The fact that I stopped wearing a stitch of makeup after the first week on a hot station lowered how well I was treated, but if I wore tight jeans to work I was cat-called. I was supposed to giggle at the sous chef’s misogynistic jokes and let the grill guy spank me when I cleaned the grease hood, but I was chastised when my “feminine” sensibilities were bothered when burly Nicolas beat up 100 pound Makuto. Women are usually held to the standard that no matter what their position, they must maintain their “niceness” and cultivate a moral “personhood.” So how does a woman fit in with a band of pirates and keep her nose powdered at the same time? In addition to out-cooking her male counterparts, a female cook needs to learn how to be “one of the guys” without completely sacrificing her womanhood. This is a delicate balance, one that I will explore linguistically.
One of the ways cooks characterize the culinary subculture is through language and rhetoric. Burger slingers have their slice-of-Americana-diner lingo. Chefs have their French-named techniques. In addition, profanity is cultivated in the kitchen as part of the subversive, masculine subculture. Naturally, one of the primary ways in which female cooks link themselves to this subculture and separate themselves from the female norm is through the use of profanity. Ever since I began working full time in kitchens, I have, to the chagrin of my parents, developed a “potty-mouth.” In certain situations, especially in those when I want to identify myself as being tough, inflammatory, funny, confident or “not your average girl,” I pepper my sentences with the word "fuck” with more vigor than I season a steak au poivre. Even the opening line of McCouch’s Girl Cook is, “I’ve been tossing mesclun greens in the garde-manger at Tacoma for the past nine months, and I’m about to lose my shit” (McCouch, 3). Just as a group of teenage girls will dress a certain way to define themselves as a group or a female gang adopts a certain walk to exude its strength and solidarity, language is also part of the stylistic toolbox (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 307).
While taboo language has come into greater use with young women in recent years, many people find foul language unladylike. And herein lies the crux. While for men, swearing implies a kind of threatening anger (and authority over that language and emotion), for females, swearing is often cast as a loss of control. Less seriously, dirty language plays an important role in certain social contexts, acting as a bonding element (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 187). The kitchen is one of these contexts. The use of profanity exemplifies how in order to be accepted in the male culinary world women must adopt certain styles, even though these elements may not in harmony with the traditional model of womanhood they are expected, both in and outside the kitchen, to maintain.

Haute Cuisine: Can Art Transcend Issues of Identity?

A kind of occupational rhetoric explored by Fine and not yet examined in this review is that of art. Fine wrote that “Among cooks, artistic rhetoric is often a concomitant of the presence of an appreciative audience and occurs when there is a demand for novelty (creativity)” (Fine, 113). When a cook is asked his or her advice, is given a choice or is asked to create something, he or she feels in touch with the artistic capacity of cooking. Tasks that involve creativity engage cooks in a way that gives them authority over their product and their craft. Such an opportunity demonstrates respect for the intellect, palate and experience of the cook.
Cooks involved in haute cuisine, even if they themselves do not have a high status in the kitchen, often feel like they are engaged in an artistic process. When a person can take pride in his work to the point that he considers it art, perhaps he or she can derive a sense of worth not from the occupation, but from the craft itself. It is true that the value of art, like occupation, is socially determined. It must be won. But in the end a cook has more control over the daily preparation and perfection of his craft than he does over the universal opinion of cooking.
Haute cuisine is, in many ways, a return to the original purpose of cooking: to nurture and share pleasure with others. In esteemed kitchens, the cuisine is elevated to art. Perhaps it is only in this upper culinary echelon that the collective sense of purpose makes the kitchen an enjoyable and prideful place for both male and female workers. Here the aesthetic choices afforded by an appreciative audience give both parties the feeling of power, agency and control that allow them to hone their craft and their identities.























Works Cited

Aron, Jean-Paul. The Art of Eating in France. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

Berta, Dina. “Culinary School is in: Economy Boosts Enrollment to Record Levels.” BNET Business Network. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3190/is_12_36/ai_84237817.

Bourdain, Anthony. Kitchen Confidential. New York: Harper Perennial. 2007.

Eckert, Penelope and Sally McConnell-Ginet. Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Fine, Gary Alan. “Justifying Work: Occupational Rhetorics as Resources in Restaurant Kitchens.” Academic Science Quarterly. Vol. 41, No. 1, March 1996, pp. 90-115.

Hughes, Everett. The Sociological Eye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.

McCouch, Hannah. Girl Cook. New York: Villard, 2004.

Murphy, William P. “Secret Knowledge as Property and Power in Kpelle Society: Elders versus Youth.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute. Vol. 50, No. 2, 1980. pp. 193-207.

Symon, Michael. A History of Cooks and Cooking. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000.