Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: 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.Transcript Rosie Hancock 0:05 Hi and welcome back to a whole new season of Uncommon Sense from the Sociological Review Foundation.I'm Rosie Hancock in Sydney, Australia, and I'm back for season four with my co-host Alexis Hieu Truong in Ottawa.And I reckon, Alexis, that we can call ourselves long term co-hosts now.We've been working together for four years.And, I mean, I haven't seen you since 2024 so how have you been since we last recorded our show on joy?Do you have any sociological new year's resolutions that perhaps you've broken by now?Alexis Hieu Truong 0:39 I'm doing good, Rosie, as like, as we're recording this, actually, we're just coming out of the Lunar New Year which I celebrated with my family.So that was cool.But to answer your question, actually, recently, talking with colleagues, we've come to the conclusion that new year resolutions might be a capitalist tool to motivate and heighten productivity at a time here in Canada when it's really cold, it's dark all the time and, yeah, I just want to take it easy.So my resolution is to not take any resolutions until summer maybe, and I'm sticking to it.Rosie Hancock 1:12 Yeah, fair enough.I don't have that excuse.Summer is New Year for me, so.And I did give myself a resolution.It was a very ordinary one.Probably like lots of people, I wanted to rebuild a long neglected yoga Rosie Hancock 3:07 And we're not joking about that.So today we're thinking about kitchen culture and, ultimately, injury and scars within that world.And we're doing that with a fellow sociologist and podcaster Ellen T. Meiser, who with Penn Pantumsinchai and Omar T. Bird host The Social Breakdown, which they call -too modestly, for sure -the sociology podcast nobody wants, but everybody needs.Alexis Hieu Truong 3:32 Ellen teaches at the University of Hawaii, where she's interested in things like emotions and food, and her book "Making It: Success in the Commercial Kitchen" has just come out.Ellen T. Meiser 3:41 Hi, thank you so much for having me.It's exciting, exciting
Source: The Sociological Review Magazine
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4408614402