Eat the Ego

I have been resisting the urge to write another polemic about food in the time of Coronavirus. As restaurants and their employees face an unprecedented crisis, one from which we may never recover, it seems a tad trite to search for a silver lining to this, to deconstruct the culture at large, or offer some all encompassing critical theory about kimchi. But I am unemployed, at a loss, uncertain as to when I will go back to work, so here goes nothing. 

After my last piece, a friend of mine encouraged me to write something about the actual abuses of power I have seen in the industry. Patriarchal, psychological or physical abuse. In truth, I have seen my share of all three, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be a built in feature of the restaurant, not some accidental flaw or perversion of an otherwise righteous field.

This set me thinking, what if the entire industry is based on abuse, on a distorted culture of inflated ego and disproportionate power? What if the flaws slowly coming to the surface through #MeToo and #BLM, the outpouring of social media critiques from employees and patrons, the cancelation of the James Beard Awards, what if the evils hiding beneath the surface were a feature of our food culture, and not a bug? 

Should that surprise us? Afterall, the modern restaurant is built around a system of discipline and an hierarchy of power modeled on the French military -- that bastion of excellence -- so wouldn’t it inherently reflect the patriarchal institution on which it is based? Think of the military. Think of what we ask soldiers to do. How they are broken down in training, one might say brainwashed, into an unquestioning deference to authority. The general knows best and you might die if you question it. 

Our food culture has placed the individual, the chef, -- the general -- at the helm. We have bestowed celebrity and dictator-style authority in the hands of (mostly) white (mostly) males, deferred to and celebrated them on a level that would make Napoleon blush, and poured our attention and our money into their hands. What could possibly go wrong? 

Now think of how other food cultures, older food cultures developed. Tradition, family, and a communal culture driving development. A generational passing-of-the-torch of techniques and recipes. Grandma in the kitchen teaching the kids to cook with holidays and feast days dictating shared cooking and shared meals. No singular authority of right and wrong, but a cultural evolution adapting to seasons and economics and ultimately, survival.

Not since the Industrial Food Revolution has America not had enough food. Hunger and the necessity of taking modest ingredients and creating not just sustenance, but joy, long ago ceased to be the driving force in America’s food culture. Hunger has been replaced by hedonism, necessity by our overwhelming desire for novelty.   

These older food cultures, with their decentralized authority and history of nurturing and nourishing the hoards of hungry masses throughout history (not just the Industrial Food Era, like American food culture) might arguably be characterized as Matriarchal. 

Our current culture, even when a woman or a person of color is at the center of focus, can only be called Patriarchal. It thrives on the notion of expert and rewards that notion through attention and finances. Your worth, your place within the culture is defined by your ability to make a buck, to get clicks. It is expressly and entirely capitalistic. Communal progress has no place here. 

I remember when I first began cooking professionally and was paralyzed by the notion that there was some ultimate, objective standard of how things should be done and that the chef alone set, and more importantly, understood that standard. I second guessed everything I had learned about food in the almost decade I spent farming. I allowed a single person’s subjective judgement to override what time and the seasons and trusted friends and family had taught me. 

But as I began to dig deeper into the history of the cuisine I was preparing -- Thai and Malaysian and Singaporean fare -- I became sensitive to how out of place this deference to authority was for this food. I learned of concepts like ‘agak agak’ in Singapore, a little of this, a little of that, as the guiding force in a recipe. Of ‘bung rot dtam jai chorp’ in Thai, of ‘season according to your heart’s desires,’ not according to the dictates of the chef. And it began to dawn on me how these decentralized cultures encouraged complexity and depth of flavor to develop in ways as vast as the personalities and backgrounds and economic statuses of the cooks themselves. 

Unfortunately, the modern American restaurant allows for no such development. Cooks must forget what they have learned from their own individual backgrounds, pretend as though their knowledge pales before the all-knowing brilliance of the chef. 

And at times like these, when disease and civil unrest and climate catastrophes surround us on all sides, when the very stability of our culture is questioned at large, when the artificial abundance of our food system seems poised to collapse, these distinctions between the archaic, matriarchal food cultures and our own could prove much more than merely aesthetic. These distinctions could shape how we survive, how we feed ourselves when we’re faced with the scraps, the humble, inexpensive staples that other cultures have survived on for years. How do we coax flavor and create joy and sustenance out of life when we don’t have a restaurant to turn to? When all that’s left in the pantry are dry beans?    

My life in food has been motivated by an awareness of lack. A lack of a true American Food Culture. Nearly everything I ate as a child could be traced to corporate, not cultural, origins, and this ultimately motivated me first to farm and then to work as a chef in what I told myself was an attempt to shape this country’s future of food. 

Presumably this lack also represented the clear ground onto which chef culture and food celebrity could spread. Perhaps this pandemic and the ungodly fallout from its wake will expose this lack anew. Perhaps it will reveal our patriarchal, capitalistic food culture as ill suited for survival. Perhaps we will strive to cook and think of food as our grandmothers would, not as chefs, but as nurturers, as harbingers of meaning and sustenance instead of novelty and the profiting thereof.