August 25, 2008
Gender Gap at the Food Network
Still Not Getting Women Out of the Kitchen?
Last weekend I was browsing in a Santa Monica bookstore when a book display caught my attention. Nestled among the actual cookbooks were two biographies, placed side by side: Sandra Lee's From Scratch and The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef, by Marco Pierre White. The former shows a closeup of Lee's angelic face, her blue eyes and blonde hair bathed in heavenly light; the latter shows a black-and-white photo of a wild-haired White, cigarette dangling from his mouth, issuing challenging stare at the viewer.
Lee's book tells the story of her childhood neglect. She became the child-mother to her siblings due to their negligent (or altogether absent) parents, but turned the skills she learned into a semi-homemade empire worth millions. The title says it all for White: he's a bad boy and proud of it--but that, the book implies, is the essence of a great chef. You hear a similar message from Gordon Ramsey or Anthony Bourdain. Chefs are defined by their machismo.
It's not just the books; I've been noticing the same gender gap on the Food Network for a long time. In the first place, the men are generally professional chefs, while the women are not. Think about it: Emeril Lagasse, Tyler Florence, Bobby Flay, Robert Irvine, Anthony Bourdain are all academy-trained, restaurant-proven chefs. Rachel Ray, Paula Deen, Nigella Lawson, Ingrid Hoffman and even Ina Garten are not. Some of the women (like Giada di Laurentiis and Sara Moulton) are academy-trained, or at least hold some accreditation (like Ellie Krieger's nutrition degree) but they're essentially presented as home cooks and not restaurant-proven top dogs. There is only one exception, also the only female iron chef, Kat Cora, whose impressive resume practically screams "one of the boys."
The type of programming also caters to gender stereotypes. Bobby Flay's thing is to find the best possible cooks or chefs in any arena and challenge them to a "Throwdown." Tyler Florence looks for the "Ultimate" in any area of food. On Dinner Impossible, first Robert Irvine and now Michael Simon ask to be given impossible food preparation tasks, only to revel in each new challenge. And of course there's Iron Chef. All of this competition is very macho. Though Emeril (soon to depart) and Mario Batali (already departed) don't display quite such excessive machismo, they are still rather fussy, albeit charismatic, artistes. And that's the problem with these shows: they aren't concerned with time efficiency or pragmatism, they're showcases for highly trained men to do professional chef tricks.
