Cooking is (not) for men – Visualeyed
D-Stories | Society

Cooking is (not) for men

Female chefs in top restaurants are always a minority. Why?

Of all the culinary institutions at an international level, the Michelin guide is the global reference point for the evaluation of the quality of restaurants.

Every year, in each country’s own edition, its inspectors award the famous “stars” to select restaurants in the world: a seal of quality born in the 30s and to this day craved by cooks all over the globe.

Cross and delight of every chef, to be awarded one, two, or three stars is a very serious matter.

So serious that, in the whole world, less than 150 restaurants managed to achieve three stars, the highest existing recognition. Due to the huge success and renown they bring, the three Michelin stars represent the peak of the carrier of many professional chefs. Unfortunately, however, of only a few female chefs.

In a list with more than a hundred three-star restaurants, today only five women have been awarded the recognition – Nadia Santini, Elena Arzak, Dominique Crenn, Annie Feolde, Anne-Sophie Pic. They represent less than 4% of the global Michelin selection. Three-star women are something rare, an exception; so is, generally speaking, the female figure in the field of professional cooking.

Only 5 women are now awarded with three Michelin Stars

Obviously, there is no scientific reason according to which women should be less able than men to cook. In fact, the first person who won three Michelin stars was a woman: the French Eugénie Brazier, who collected so much as six stars totally for her two restaurants in Lyons and Pollionnay. However, this female success, like many others, was not enough to overturn the (often male) perspective of the world of haute cuisine, where gender equality still remains a very distant goal.

According to Elisabetta Ruspini, sociologist of Milano Bicocca University, gender stereotypes work very well in this field. “Just look at tv and internet images. Women, even if famous, wear a nice apron and are filmed in interior spaces, or at home. Men in chef’s uniform dominate the scene in huge professional kitchens, perhaps holding a knife or a cleaver. Adjectives used for male cooks: creative, handsome, innovative, fascinating. For women: guardians of tradition”.

Unsurprisingly, women are always the first to be consulted when discussing the domestic sphere as grandmas, women, wives, girlfriends who provide and serve meals at home. But when more is at stake, men must have their say as Michelin-starred and award-winning chefs. Women are left to answer the questions on daily needs, men have the task of developing original, refined dishes.

In short, men are chefs, while women are cooks. A deep-seated belief that seeps through most professional kitchens quite overtly.  

In an interview to the Sunday Independent some months ago, the renowned English chef Marco Pierre White, for instance, hurled a stream of invective at women in the world of cooking. According to him, women are too emotional to handle the pressure of a professional kitchen. They are more precise, informed, coherent, have a better taste and sense of smell (why?), but they are slower and weaker physically.

The chef Gianfranco Vissani agrees. Interviewed during the Radio Radio broadcast Show Food last year, he stated that women cannot be behind the stove of a high-level restaurant. At most they can aspire to desserts. «I employ women, but they stay in pastry-making. This is what I say: let’s take a steel false-bottom pot and see how women cream. When you cream, you need shoulders. I have a brigade of 30 cooks, I have eight women and they all succumb. Women can’t make it physically. It is 50 years that I have been working in kitchens and I still can’t figure out where women are».

Even Oldani, years ago, thought that “there are no female chefs because they can’t make it, the job is too hard for them”.

As these sentences show, it is not the physique that matters: it is male chauvinism that hampers the entry into the most prestigious kitchens. This is also what emerged from a recent survey by the French newspaper Libération, which collected evidence from female chefs working for important French restaurants. Unsurprisingly, the picture drawn by their accounts is unsparing: the world of professional cooking is toxic, dominated by a macho sub-culture and by comradeship. To make matters worse, women also face verbal violence and harassment. But this issue does not concern only France.

The hierarchy within professional kitchens borrows many words from the military sphere. Kitchen staff notably call themselves “brigade”. This imagery is mirrored in their behaviour and mentality: competitiveness is high and women are not allowed to cave in, if they want to preserve the respect of the group and not to be exposed as the “weakest” elements. «I already had a strong personality: since working in a kitchen, I have developed an armour. To avoid being trampled on you must have a strong personality», Julia Sedefdjian explains, one of the youngest French starred chefs.

The difficult balance between private life and work, quite complicated in the world of restaurants, furtherly penalizes women. Those employed in professional kitchens have to work shifts of 10, 12, 14 hours, often 7 days a week. It is almost impossible for female chefs wishing to become mothers to handle children without a partner. 

Therefore, the keystone lies at the basis of the issue and does not consider women quotas. The solution, therefore, is to re-write the role of the chef including women, and rejuvenate the masculine tradition that dominates kitchens all over the world, thus paving the way for inclusivity as a source of enrichment and harmony. The whole process should be backed by a culture that promotes gender equality within families, so as to cultivate equal rights and duties also at a domestic level.

It is not easy, but new generations are already moving along these lines and some countries have started to follow them. Italy is one of these countries, as the figures from the 2019 Michelin Guide show: out of 367 starred chefs, 45 are women. A small step at first sight, it is actually the highest percentage in the world for now; hoping that it can be overcome in the next years, together with the old prejudice of all-male professional kitchens.

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