WHO'S AT FAULT?
The Globe and Mail recently published an article entitled "Why female cooks stay out of the kitchen", authored by a Toronto restaurant owner. They wrote of the restaurant industry's "dark and gritty underbelly", of how "hyper-masculine" and "sometimes even unjust" kitchens can be – focusing on the rampant sexism therein.
What I love most about this piece is how far the author appears from understanding restaurants and their culture (though they own one and have spent their "whole career entrenched in this business") that they feel men talking disrespectfully about women is among its worst features. This reality is terrible and needs to be rectified for sure; but as written it cannot be read as anything but satire. I mean, while the author notes fear and despotism as key operational tools of any kitchen – and even mentions staff commonly physically assaulting one another – she thinks "unpublishable slurs" are somehow far worse? This appears to be her argument. She thinks "deeply crude discussions of who the 'hottest' women in the restaurant" makes the environment noticeably less pleasant? No, not really. Even if all restaurants were unique, gender equality enclaves, sex and sexuality shangri-las, restaurants would easily remain among the worst places to work.
As a starting place, as noted by the author, restaurants commonly operate on a mixture of physical and psychological abuse. (As an owner she somehow missed or, more likely, chooses to ignore the economic.) On top of this, these fundamentally anti-social places are then staffed all-too-commonly by folks engaged in and suffering various forms and degrees of substance abuse and mental illness. (Yes, far more than your local elementary school or government office.) So poisonous and destructive is this environment, and its personnel, that the blatant sexism has got to be, very sadly, the least offensive or destructive element. For all the clear and abundant abuse and exploitation in most kitchens and restaurants, the male employee to female employee sexism is, by either potency and volume, a fragment so infinitesimal as to be almost irrelevant. (I frame it as "male employee to female..." because of course the article ignores all the ways the industry is inherently sexist and disgusting that we all happily pretend not to notice.)
To be somewhat specific, and speak from experience, I've worked with career chefs who intentionally burned people or whipped them with towels hard enough to break skin. They did this more for sport, not discipline (I say "not discipline", as though that would make it alright, because the author tells us she feels using cruelty and fear is sometimes "the only ways to lead a troop of young [male] cooks.") This behaviour was known to and seen by everyone working at this location of this popular restaurant – just as it is in every establishment in which it occurs. The folks behaving this way were before, and remained after, the highest ranking, best compensated people in the kitchen. (To be clear, it's only people who have never worked in a kitchen who think celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay is a unique, harsh, or even temperamental character.) Importantly, in all my time in kitchens I've never seen this violence and abuse enacted male on female, while I saw male on male and female on male stupidity of this sort almost daily. And yet while knowing as she surely must this kind of behaviour is the norm, the author seems to feel that within such an environment men talking about women positively is just going too far.
Worse still, the author seems confused about why this is all happening. She argues that what's at work here is European chef culture, something about sex or maybe has to do with brotherhood. No, this all happens because of restaurant owners like the author. Essentially all of the restaurants you've ever eaten at hire people who are otherwise unemployable: people who can't pass a criminal record check, who can't legally work with vulnerable populations, people who are at best unreliable and at worst deranged. And these people are there because they're cheap labour who don't complain about the terrible pay, hours, or conditions restaurant owners create and maintain. Virtually all restaurant owners I've come across in Canada insist upon paying people nothing (far below a living wage, to work a brutal job, under terrible conditions, with precariousness as a foundational feature. Surprise!) None of this creates a culture calling to and honing the best of humanity. And most restaurants do this in a setting where everything a cook touches has to be perfect and from every angle: visually, in terms of taste, texture, timing, and now nutrition and health as well, etc – and must simultaneously please the owner, his boss, his servers, and his customers; all of whom are staring over his shoulder the whole time. For this perfection he gets $13.50 per hour and little, or often nothing, in tips. (Every restaurant does this while happily handing over $200 to guy for spending seven minutes operating a plunger and running a snake through a drain or for someone to sharpen a handful of knives or take away some dirty laundry and return it clean...) Myself, I left the food world because, over a decade and on two continents, I was unable to find a dignified workplace. We know without even asking that the author does not operate a dignified workplace herself (one in which she pays a living wage, the hours to survive upon, or offers her employees respectable working conditions) – and she openly tells us as much. Without this admission, we know this to be the case because it's simply not done in this industry.
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