(Field notes, Owl's Nest)
The point is not that cooks always work harmoniously, but that—in American kitchens (and much of American culture [Stearns 1987])—an ideology of harmony prevails.8 Americans believe that cooks should be able to get along with each other, and that if anger is evident and full cooperation absent, the organization is “dysfunctional” and needs help. A therapeutic model applies to organizations as well as persons. Cooperation is a central ideological tenet of the lived experience of work.
BEING A COOK
To understand the experienced reality of cooking as a practical activity, we need to address how cooks and chefs see their work, how they perceive public attitudes, and how they were recruited to kitchen work. Occupational identity is tied to the pleasures and pain of work, and the imagined responses of the “other,” the consuming public.
Cooking is demanding work; it is experienced as hard labor. Like athletes, cooks must “play” in pain; like a policeman, a cook only rarely has the luxury to call in sick. Those cooks employed by small organizations find their presence is required daily. One cook described his severe back pains, necessitating physical therapy, but continued cooking (Field notes, Owl's Nest). I was often told that cooks must work no matter what:
I ask Mel if Paul will be in today. He seems surprised by the question and tells me that as far as he knows Paul will be here, adding “In this business, you don't get sick. You're either drunk or shacked up. You gotta drink or shack, so you better decide which. When I was young and working at the Lexington, I called in sick one day, and the next day the manager called me in and said that to me. Cooks don't often get sick.”
(Field notes, Owl's Nest)
Paul, Jon, and Mel joke about one of Jon's absences. Mel is cracking eggs, and Paul tells him: “You should let Jon do it. He was the best breakfast cook we had [at the hotel at which they both worked]—when he would come in.” This is a reference to one occasion on which Jon didn't show up; Paul jokingly accused him of shacking up with someone. The cooks then talk about the excuses that cooks use, including one who said that he was late because his mother tripped over the cord of his alarm clock. This joking colloquy has a strong element of social control.
(Field notes, Owl's Nest)
This reality would surely be disconcerting to customers, who might be horrified to realize that all too often the cooks are sniffling, sneezing, exhausted, hungover, distracted, or bleeding.
THE DOWNSIDE
In addition to being required to be “iron men,” other structural drawbacks mark cooks. They face challenges of time, pressure, working conditions, and a lack of personal satisfaction. Food preparation, although currently a trendy job for children of upper-middle-class baby boomers, will never have wide appeal.
Hours. Those in some occupations labor while their clients play—restaurant workers are among them. As the head chef at the Owl's Nest notes sarcastically, “What an exciting way to spend a Saturday evening!” (Field notes, Owl's Nest). Some cooks like least “the long hours, weekends, holidays…. Everybody else is out having fun, and you have to work” (Personal interview, Owl's Nest). Others most dislike “having to be here when you'd like a little time off to do some of your own things. Take time to be with your family. Things you should be doing, but you can't be. Being involved more with community things, home things, PTA meetings, kids' baseball games, and stuff like that. You have to forfeit a lot” (Personal interview, Owl's Nest).
Pressure. Even at its best, cooking is not known for its calm placidity. It can be a draining, pressured occupation—low paid, poorly regarded, and hard (see chapter 2). As one cook explained: “It wears you. Try to cook the way I [do] now, and I'd be dead by the time I was forty” (Personal interview, La Pomme de Terre). Another emphasized he wouldn't be a cook for the rest of his life because “I don't want to be forty years old and grouchy” (Personal interview, Owl's Nest). Cooking is a young man's game.
Working Conditions. A kitchen is a hot, dirty, close place—no expansive office with flowers and big picture windows. Over time this reality affects cooks. For some the prime frustration is the ill-fitting uniforms or hair nets; for others, the odors. One told me that cooking “gets into your pores. When I go home, my kids can smell me. I'm told by a lot of people that ‘you smell like vegetable soup’ ” (Field notes, Blakemore Hotel). Leaving the steak house, I was perfumed by cooking oil. Other cooks mentioned the stifling heat from standing over stoves and burners, and the pervasive dirt and grease. Although restaurant work is cleaner than some outdoor blue-collar jobs, it is far from the white-collar life that some desire.
Personal Dissatisfaction. Cooks feel unappreciated, which translates into a general sense of despair. One cook at the Blakemore reported a motto on a button that she found symbolically relevant to her situation: “The Torture Never Stops.” She joked that being fired might be the best thing that could happen to her. Another cook commented that “my job is worthless. There's so many incompetent people there. It's like a big joke” (Personal interview, Blakemore Hotel). Although her view is not universal, it is a feeling many cooks have experienced.
Public Suspicion. However cooks may judge their own work, they must cope with a widely shared belief that the public does not respect them. They are, of course, not alone in this concern. Even such a high-paid professional as a lawyer, or a credentialed one as a doctor, must cope with what may seem a tide of public scorn. Most, if not all, occupations are challenged by outsiders. Every occupation develops strategies to cope with public attitudes. If one asks cooks, one will hear that the public, often ambivalent, does not give them the respect that they desire. The images of the drunken, ignorant chef and the artistic chef may be superficially contradictory, but they can coexist. Genius and deviance are, despite their distinct images, compatible.9
The public frequently sees restaurant kitchens as brutal places. One cook felt this lack of respect especially deeply:
| AL: | I think people should know how cooks feel. They're human beings and some people treat them like they're robots, and they have to do this and that. They should have more respect than what we get. |
| GAF: | Do you think that if you had more respect, you might continue to be a cook? |
| AL: | Probably. I don't know…. Working at a place like this, a lot of people say you do a good job, but you just don't get the respect that you want.(Personal interview, Stan's) |
Many cooks felt that their contacts just didn't see their career as suitable for someone who could get a “professional job,” or who could be a success:
| GAF: | What do you like least about being a cook? |
| LARRY: | Right now the feeling of not being respected as much as being a doctor. Right away when you hear someone say, “Well, he's a doctor,” you think, “Well, he's got money; he's got a nice house, and a nice car, and a really nice family, and an airplane and a cabin.” I'm a chef. “I bet he's got a dumpy apartment, and he's not married. His plants die on him. He's a loser. He's a high school graduate. He's just a dummy.”…“Well, what do you do?” “I'm a cook.” “What are you going to do when you get out of school.” “I'm going to keep doing it.” “Really? Is that all you're going to do. You're not going to go [to college]?” There are times when I feel that when people ask me what I do, I'm not going to tell them. I just say, “Well, I don't know. I'm just doing it for now, so I can get through school.” I think it's a respectable job, and I'll stand up to anybody and say that I enjoy what I do.(Personal interview, Owl's Nest) |
This cook reveals the ambivalence within the occupation—the beginnings of an embarrassment bordering on self-loathing, revealing pride mixed with defensiveness. Cooks are unsure of how they appear in others' eyes—the stigmatized others are too polite to insult, like African Americans in a society that does not tolerate public racism. Cooks wonder about the thoughts beneath the veneer of toleration.
THE BRIGHT SIDE
Balancing the problems, satisfactions are an integral part of kitchen work.