The Union Club of Cleveland’s Lawrence McFadden, CMC, GM/COO, explains why culinary careers require passion, not glamour.
A recent MSN headline posed the question: Is the Culinary Profession Losing its Coolness? The truth is, culinary was never cool. The craft of culinary requires tremendous dedication, personal sacrifice, and heaps of talent.
Long before exposed and open kitchens, cooks worked quietly, enjoying countless years of normalcy, hidden from the prying eyes of the public. It was an ideal atmosphere for an introvert to excel, hence the reason cooks weren’t waiters.
Never would Escoffier, Thomas, Daniel, Emeril or Bobby call our culinary craft “cool.” Those terms are a result of the growth of the Food Network and proliferation of YouTube celebrity chefs who ha have glamorized the industry.
For many of us, a kitchen job provided an opportunity out of poverty. Kitchens were the original venue for “on the job training” suited best for those who would rather learn with their hands. Culinary careers allowed an artisan to be educated on his or her feet, slowly learning, honing and perfecting classic technics under the tutelage of numerous mentors.
Only when the Food Network started to invade our sanctuaries did it shape the perception of what Hollywood wanted a chef to be.
A view of the world from the kitchen
Professional identity is often found while perfecting a craft, learning the generational technics and traveling between world locations or haunts. The military-like migration in our work force created a cultural view of the world through the back doors of kitchens.
The traditional culinary system was set up for sameness with uniforms, grooming and classical technics. These standards were put in place to ensure the very fact that individuals didn’t bring attention to themselves. Instead, we focused on the center of the plate, with cooks operating under the cloche of normalcy.
For many of us, the recent popularity of our profession has been an interesting conundrum. It was never the norm. Often cooks would feel under-appreciated, dreaming up career opportunities if fortunate to ascend to greater platforms. Most often the kitchen brigade got the attention, and being part of this team was as important as global continental caste systems.
For me, the first culinary rock star wasn’t a TV personality on a highly publicized cooking show. It was a culinary icon on the cover of his famous cookbook, “White Heat.”
In the simple black and white photo on the cover, Marco Pierre White embodied how I felt as a cook. He was the demigod of the professional kitchen, portraying evidence of pain and exhaustion in his eyes and posture. Any cook who had ever walked home in the wee hours of the morning in sweat-soaked shoes, with smelly armpits and throbbing hands could relate to White’s picture.
We finally had our generation’s Escoffier or Ferdinand Point, casting a successful, recognized and celebrated view of the hard work a professional kitchen demands. Finally, his sacrifice was enough validation that what we were feeling wasn’t wrong.
Marks of a passionate career are to be embraced
My generation of chefs were often covered in “tattoos” that only kitchen friends knew about. These were not ink images on forearms, hands or necks, but the scars from sheet pans and oven doors placed across tender forearms and fingers. Other “tattoos” came in the form of bubbling fluid filled blisters around cuticles or fingertips. Never did anyone have an actual tattoo, there wasn’t the time or money for body art when you earn minimum wage.
Our scars couldn’t be bought or recreated. In fact, they were often hidden out of shame as they represented our lack of dexterity in the learning curve of our craft.
Just as tattoos were not widely accepted at one time, neither were beards. Yet interestingly, some of today’s professionals risk hosting a beard or ungroomed body for individual identification.
Self-expression is often not always achieved by an artist’s look, but in the magic in their talents. The painting of a tomato soup can is more identifiable than Warhol himself. Starry night is more likely to be cast into the mind of most school-aged children than the mug of Vincent van Gogh. Never did New York’s Lutèce owner bring his face forward before the John Dory Darns created the visionary impression of perfection in the diner’s eyes.
So, no culinary isn’t cool, nor does one achieve success through glamor. Culinary is a calling, craft and creative conundrum built by faceless, passionate professionals. None of us asked for a glamorized “cool” portrayal of our profession. Media and producers needed something to sell television time and thus created that persona for the public to talk about. I more accurately relate to that unassuming worn-out Marco Pierre White portrait that reminds me that coolness isn’t tangible, rather it’s built on hard work, on reaching for dreams, and experience.