My jealousy of those who write without trouble is peaking right now.
While my plan was to finish up this paper and turn it in today, I have found that my normative writer's block has really kicked in this time.
Anyways, I decided to do some more research on the whole women as cooks and men as chefs depiction on Food Network. Pretty much all of the men who are depicted in chef-ly attire do indeed have professional culinary training-- save for Guy Fieri (who I mentioned last time)-- and interestingly, Mario Batali- who dropped out of Le Cordon Bleu,but gains his professionalism from owning/cooking in his own restaurants. The women that wear professional attire have also gone to culinary school EXCEPT for Sandra Lee (host of Semi-Homemade) and Giada De Laurentiis, who masquerade as home cooks only. I'll be exploring these two individuals more thoroughly in my paper. But other than that, Rachael Ray has restaurant management training and basically a personal love of cooking. So I am concluding that this is just fine for Food Network. Why would those who weren't chefs, wear chef-ly attire? However, the fact that there is a disproportionate amount of male chefs to female chefs (all I can think of is Cat Cora & Anne Burrell-- let me know if you know others) is bothersome. This might reflect the real-life atmosphere of a male-dominated professional cooking world, even though culinary school has about 50-50 male-female enrollment. So then the fact that Food Network goes along with what may be an oppressive real environment for gender equality is something that needs to be changed.
Back to writing.
Cheers!
I was watching The Next Food Network Star one day after your presentation and I noticed that the male contestants seem to get more comments from the judges about teaching and being authoritative, while the female contestants mainly get comments about being warm. I thought it was very telling as to what the Food Network looks for in it's stars.
ReplyDeleteIf you have not already thought about this, you could also talk about how on Iron Chef America, there is only one woman chef (Cat Cora), and she is a lesbian. If you notice, on Iron Chef, Cat Cora comes off as sort of masculine, but when you look at pictures of her or see her on other shows she is much more feminine. This just gives you one concrete example of the under-representation of women as chefs on the Food Network.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the input Leanna. That really does provide some insight as to whether Food Network is endorsing an agenda that perpetuates stereotyping. But I still do think that those kinds of comments are somewhat unconscious, as I know I'm guilty of making similar commentary too. Kendra, that IS a really good point. I have thought about sexuality as another dimension in gender and cooking, however, if you take Cat Cora at face value, you probably couldn't tell she was a lesbian. Similarly, the gay Ted Allen and the metro Bryan Boytano aren't particularly eccentric.
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