Open question: just how sexist is the culinary world? I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling the answer is “a lot.” Furthermore, I think there’s a strong bias towards Western European cuisine, specifically French and Italian.
This has become an irritation while watching Iron Chef America (a show I love) and even more pronounced in The Next Iron Chef. What makes me say this?
* There are four Iron Chefs, three of which are male. Rumor has it that Cat Cora was a late addition because Food Network was afraid of charges of sexism if they didn’t have at least one female chef.
* Contestants on the show are predominantly male; they predominantly “select” (though I’m not sure if the selection process is real or “reality tv”) the other male chefs. I understand that ICA selects top chefs who run their own restaurants, but that would suggest that chefs who run restaurants are predominantly male which again begs the question as to sexism at play in the culinary world…
* For The Next Iron Chef, there are eight contestants—six of which were male. The two women were the first two chefs voted off the Institute. NIC made a nod to this in Episode One when judge Donatella Arpaia specifically used the pronoun “he” when describing what she wanted in an Iron Chef; the cameras flashed to the wry smiles of the two female chefs, Traci Des Jardins and Jill Davie.
* What really burned my cheese last night was Andrew Knowlton’s comment to chef Aarón Sanchez, paraphrased to “We know you can cook your Latin-inspired stuff but you should instead be completing the task at hand.” I.e. “Latin-inspired” food from Mexico and the America is gimmicky. It’s pseudo-culinary. Would they have ever said “We know you can cook like the French but you should be completing the task at hand”?
* In ICA, the stats show that Bobby Flay and Mario Batali (white, male, and Western) have competed in 43 of the 69 contestants and have a combined record of 30-11 with 2 ties. In comparison, Cat Cora (woman) and Masaharu Morimoto (male, Asian) have competed 26 times but have a combined record of 13-12 with 1 tie.
May I humbly suggest that something is afoot?
Look, the knee-jerk answer is that those guys deserve their success because they continually achieve peak the culinary achievement. The question then is, who decided what the peak of culinary achievement should be?
The answer to me is pretty clear: most of the chefs and the judges are taught that a certain school (namely French, although there is some leeway for Italian and “inspiration” allows for diversity from such exotic locations as Spain, Morocco, the Orient, etc.) is superior, that this school sets the standard for all cuisine to meet. This is precisely not what made watching the original Japanese Iron Chef so much fun, which was all about the Japanese eating weird seafood and judges commenting on the culinary quality of the dishes.
This argument about “quality” is the same as the same one surrounding literary canons and countless other cultural debates. In short, white guys make the rules for the rest of the world to play by. It’s not a question whether the product from Western Europe is in any way inferior—clearly, French cuisine is incredible—but rather whether everything ought to be judged by those standards.
And if you don’t think Iron Chef America knows this, then explain why do they usually have Akiko Katayama as a judge when Morimoto is competing. I happen to think it’s because she has a better understanding about the height of Japanese cuisine and therefore gives Morimoto a “homer” on the panel, but that’s just me.
Current Mood: Pensive | 
Currently Listening To – Oasis – “Standing On the Shoulders Of Giants”
6 Comments
ICA has also put an Italian expert on the judging panel when Mario’s been taking on another Italian specialist, so one could argue that they judge on the basis of food in general and the style in use. The original Iron Chef also had regular judges, expert judges and celebrity judges. Morimoto was very popular on Iron Chef, but as I recall he didn’t have the highest winning stats — Hiroyuki Sakai did I think — but because Morimoto cooked in the U.S. and did modern reinventions, he was often challenged. He’s been doing IC and ICA for a l-o-n-g time. And now that ICA has stabilized on a format that actually works for them, it’s time to come up with some new chefs and perhaps retire some.
The Law of Small Numbers is always going to be a problem. If you have only two women in a group of eight, it’s going to be rough to lose one, then the other. On the other hand, people will cry foul if you go out of the way to keep the women in the competition. And on the gripping hand, in a group of eight, 2 of 8 versus 4 of 8 is only a difference of two competitors — so how do you choose?
The Next Food Network Star went down to two women in the Finals. Gordon Ramsey on Hell’s Kitchen seems to have a bias towards the women. There were three Finalists in Top Chef 3, two men and one women — can’t have 50% participation with an odd number. One of the men, Hung, won that competition, but the woman had a hard time cooking at a club in Aspen CO at 10,000 feet.
Anyway, I too wondered some about the Latin food comment, but in a lot of these cooking competition shows, all sorts of chefs have been picked on for only trying to do seafood or pork or heavy French sauces, etc. Yet given the constraints of working with da tech in that episode, one wonders about the logic of suggesting one experiment outside your comfort zone while using new and unfamiliar technologies? Seems a bit too early in the competition for such warnings. Of course, maybe an editor just thought it was “good TV”. During the Reunion Show on Top Chef 3, we found out that the judges typically argued for six or more hours — we only ever saw part of the debate and never realized how long the competitors were sitting around waiting to be called in. Yikes!
Dr. Phil
Damn french! With their theory, and their culinary traditions, and their Foucault! And there French Revolution inspiring Marxism, Fascism, Feminism, Conservatism, and every major modern political ideology that annoys me today!
I also don’t buy your French Cuisine argument, particularly where you use it as a reason that Batali and Flay get more action on the show. That’s just silly!
I don’t think ICA is doing anything wrong per se, just that I think the culinary world (or at least the American culinary scene) is unfairly biased towards a certain style of cooking, which is European based.
Eric, I don’t even know how to respond to that since you’re not really making a point. I will simply quote myself and hope you think about it in the context of your comment:
“It’s not a question whether the product from Western Europe is in any way inferior—clearly, French cuisine is incredible—but rather whether everything ought to be judged by those standards.”
The thing that always seems to separate Batali from challengers is his “Taste” score. But Batali’s menus are arguably conventional–not unoriginal, but you won’t have any trout or bacon ice cream from Signor Batali (not that I recall anyway). Judges aren’t tasting things from Batali (or Flay) that are particularly unusual to their palettes, as most strongly ethnic or non-Western European regional cuisine would strike them. This is not to say that the judges simply go with the food that is most familiar to them regardless of taste (even Batali’s frozen-food line is tasty stuff, for crying out loud), but I think there is a “strangeness” factor that plays against most challengers.
As to Cat Cora, I thought her inclusion smacked of tokenism, largely because my first impressions of her were that she wasn’t in the same league as the other Iron Chefs, especially based on her ICA results. But recently I have begun to wonder much as you have if the whole operation (cuisine, not ICA) is somehow biased against women. Is her ICA performance a knock on her ability, her food or her sex–when it should really just be about her food? It’s also possible that she simply doesn’t do the Iron Chef bit as well as the others, which is something that could be true of many challengers, too.
Well, actually Dr. Phil hit the points I was going to make but then decided to discard for a quick rejoinder instead because I got tired last night while typing.
Basically I suspect your “racism” ultimately comes down to the style of cooking. Batali and Flay cook in the most “American” styles (or the styles most Americans are used to), Italian and Southwestern respectively.
It should be no surprise that in the American culinary scene there is going to be a bias towards European style cooking and in Asia you’d probably find a bias towards Asian style cooking (as broad a category as that actually happens to be). My only response to that can be, “duh!”
It should also be no surprise that the guy who cooks Italian is challenged more than the woman who cooks Greek. It should also be no surprise that given Southwestern cuisine and BBQ dominates large regions of our country, that the guy who kicks in that style is challenged more than the Japanese cook.
I don’t think it boils down to racism in the slightest.
The only thing that strikes me as being a serious cultural bias is the judge telling the chef more or less to “stop fooling around with your Latin cooking and do the task at hand.” I don’t think this thought would ever occur to them if a chef was consistently going to French or Italian cuisine.
If you read what I wrote I think you’ll see that I’m making a straightforward case—the judges are supposed to be deciding “whose cuisine reigns supreme” but in actuality, they’re really looking for chefs coming from a certain tradition. It strikes me as being off that in America, where we have so many intermingling cultures, that a Mexican chef is being told to stop “milking” his specialty.
John pretty much hits the nail on the head on the sexism bit. I’m not quite sure Cat Cora is up to the same level, but why is that? I’m not entirely convinced that it’s all about her food.
The problem with the argument as you frame it Eric is that racism and sexism aren’t always conscious. I’m not suggesting that people are picking on Cat Cora because she’s a woman; I’m suggesting that Cat Cora often seems to be treated differently than the other three chefs who are all male. That could be for a number of reasons—she’s a lesbian, she’s short, she’s from the south… whatever. But I tend to think that she’s held to a different standard from the get-go because of her gender.
Judging non-western cuisine in a western format is a bit less straightforward, but I still don’t agree with the judge’s comment. If you want to be generous, one could argue that the judge was telling him that he needed to push himself out of his comfort zone— which was probably what he meant but not what he said.
And besides, I think if you looked into the culinary world I think you’d find that it is dominated by men. Men own the restaurants and hire the chefs. France and Italy are not well known for their gender equity…