style="font-size:15px;"> 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. While one's reaction to work is a function of individual needs and what we label “personality,” several components of cooking are frequently mentioned as benefits, including employment options, self-satisfaction, and the potential for pleasing others.
Employment Options. Throughout the 1980s, the restaurant and hospitality industry expanded rapidly. Americans increasingly ate outside the home, particularly as the upper-middle-class had more disposable income and more women were in the paid workforce. Since entry-level positions didn't require extensive training and positions were opening rapidly, opportunities to work where they wished arose for cooks. One cook explained that “you can always change [jobs]. It's so easy to find another job if you're good; if you have the skills” (Field notes, Owl's Nest). Several mentioned that kitchen work satisfied their desire to travel. They could relocate and search for a comparable position with the confidence that one would be readily available. One cook remarked that job security was no problem, even though restaurants frequently closed: “In my job hunting I wasn't that worried about finding one. I knew I would eventually, and now that I'm here in Minneapolis, and I do have a job, I think that even if La Pomme closed, I would be absorbed into another place real fast. Once you get attached to an area, established, I think it's pretty secure. One of the few jobs left that there's a need for, you always have to eat” (Personal interview, La Pomme de Terre). Job mobility permitted cooks to decide where they wanted to be. By changing restaurants, they could climb the industry status ladder.
Self-Satisfaction. Cooks are producers. They create products that can be beautiful and appealing to the senses. Anyone who can produce such things has the “right to feel proud”—to recognize his or her accomplishments. Skill is associated with an occupational identity (Grzyb 1990, p. 176). Cooks gain a sense of identity from their work, and from this they learn to identify with their occupation (Hughes 1971). These workers produce within an organization, and these organizations attempt to generate assumptions about the proper identity of workers—why they should feel satisfied despite limitations on autonomy, wages, and benefits (Leidner 1993). Many cooks commented that their prime satisfaction derived from pleasing customers. In the words of one cook: “That gives me a real feeling of satisfaction that I know that I've pleased someone” (Personal interview, Blakemore Hotel). For others, it is the ability to cook up to one's “internal standard” (Personal interview, La Pomme de Terre). For still others, it is the ability to know what one can do with food, and that one can control a situation that would be impossible for those outside the occupation: “It's interesting that guys come home, and there's nothing to eat in the house, and I come home, and I look around and throw all this stuff together, and I can make a really nice dinner. They don't even realize that it's possible to do that…. It's really an accomplishment thing. You feel like you've accomplished something when you're a cook. Like working at the [display kitchen]. Ron, when he has 160 people in there, he might be really tired out, but he can handle it. He was in control of the situation, and he could feel the accomplishment” (Personal interview, Blakemore Hotel). Through these skills and their public display, cooks persuade themselves that they matter in an institutional order that sometimes disregards them; they are worthy of self-respect and honor, achieving things of which others only dream.
Public Acknowledgement. Although cooks typically do not have direct contact with customers, they do on occasion; often these relations are mediated by servers who routinely inform cooks of a significant compliment. Many cooks
