From TV’s “The Bear” to the simmering restaurant thriller “Boiling Point” we seem drawn to angry-but-vulnerable chefs in pop culture. But how do such stereotypes shape who works in kitchens and how they treat their colleagues? Is “kitchen culture”, with its macho rough and tumble norms, always so different from the work culture so many of us face – including in academia? Sociologist Ellen T. Meiser joins us from Hawaii to discuss this and more, reflecting on her new book Making It: Success in the Commercial Kitchen. She tells us about her lifelong fascination with kitchens – from teenage shift work in Anchorage, Alaska, to studying baking and pastry at the Culinary Institute of America and entering the field of Food Studies.

We ask: how do scars serve as a kind of currency in commercial kitchens amid values of stoicism, perseverance and pain? How does the transience of worker populations make kitchens sites of risk and low accountability? And how does “scarring” take place beyond the kitchen, in a traumatogenic society where individuals, but also our planet, face significant harm?

With celebration of the late chef and author Anthony Bourdain.

Guest: Ellen T. Meiser; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense

Episode Resources

By Ellen T. Meiser

• Making It: Success in the Commercial Kitchen
• “It Was, Ugh, It Was So Gnarly. And I Kept Going”: The Cultural Significance of Scars in the Workplace
• The Social Breakdown (podcast co-hosted with Penn Pantumsinchai and Omar Bird) – including the episode Culture and Systems: An Intro to Food Studies

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Food and Work – The Sociological Review Magazine issues
• Taste, Performance, Success, Burnout, Toxic – Uncommon Sense episodes

Further resources

• “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• “Food and Culture: A Reader” – ed. Carole Counihan, Penny Van Esterik, Alice Julier
• “Takeaway: Stories From a Childhood Behind the Counter” – Angela Hui
• “Scar Cultures: Media, Spectacle, Suffering” – Pramod Nayar
• “‘Yes Chef’: life at the vanguard of culinary excellence” – Robin Burrow, Chef John Smith, Christalla Yakinthou
• “The Forms of Capital” – Pierre Bourdieu
• “Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body” – Phillip Vannini
• “‘I see my section scar like a battle scar’: The ongoing embodied subjectivity of maternity” – Sally Johnson

More links to resources available at thesociologicalreview.org

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