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Somewhere between Julia Child and Gordon Ramsay, our daily bread became a form of worship and chefs our high priests in aprons.
Anyway you slice it, food has gotten a little weird.
Of course, high-end chefs can holler and harass — have we not made them into geniuses with sizeable public profiles and pots of sizzling oil?
For better or worse, “celebrity” chef Matthew Carmichael’s name appeared on Citizen and Sun pages at least 69 times in the past few years. I flip through the lively Kitchissippi Times — after a full day of Carmichael news — and find three big stories and photos about talented chefs and hot restaurants in my corner of the world.
Is anyone just quietly eating baloney anymore?
The public confession by Carmichael to sexually harassing women in the workplace holds bizarre fascination. Why say this? Why now? And was it — in our current climate of deifying chefs, glorifying restaurants, making cooking a competition, ranking eateries on a “best” list — inevitable?
Related
Carmichael’s problems are his own but surely his travails point to, or at least remind us, of troubles with sexism and harassment in that entire industry. And it’s not just big-headed chefs on coke. The evidence suggests the real problem with inappropriate sexual comments in the restaurant industry is customers, not co-workers or bosses.
A big survey in the U.S. found that 90 per cent of female servers had been subject to some form of on-the-job harassment. Several factors were cited: Servers are usually young and female, with little job protection; the bosses are probably male; the wage scale makes them dependent on tips, which means looking good and acting friendly to sometimes obnoxious patrons; there is an in-house culture of after-hours booze and drugs to navigate.
In the interview with CTV Ottawa, Carmichael called harassment “almost normalized” in the industry and referred to himself as “a man in a position of power,” also characterizing the restaurant business as “full of male-dominated bravado. I’m a product of that.”
The recent history suggest this is a deep-seated problem that goes way beyond what Carmichael may have scribbled on Facebook.
Joanne St. Lewis is a professor of law at the University of Ottawa who has studied sexual harassment in the workplace. She sees the restaurant trade as especially vulnerable because attractive servers are part of the atmosphere of an eatery, but in a business that is male-dominated at the top.
It leads to a culture where women form part of the “purchasing power” that keep restaurants alive, she continued. Now add to this a place where “the customer is always right” and a female server is vulnerable from both sides, she explained.
“One of the things I’ve always felt, is the more sexualized the workplace is, the more women are part of the process of assisting for the product to be purchased,” she said, “the more vulnerable they become in a range of ways because it just creates an atmosphere that they are a product, you know?”
She has been a customer in chains where the female servers are dressed in more sexually suggestive ways and wondered: “If the men serving can wear pants and a white shirt, why do the women wear what I would call oversized belts?”
Good question, easy answer: It is exactly the way too many men want it. So, absolutely, this is bigger than one man with a big rep misbehaving at a grill.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
查看原文...
Anyway you slice it, food has gotten a little weird.
Of course, high-end chefs can holler and harass — have we not made them into geniuses with sizeable public profiles and pots of sizzling oil?
For better or worse, “celebrity” chef Matthew Carmichael’s name appeared on Citizen and Sun pages at least 69 times in the past few years. I flip through the lively Kitchissippi Times — after a full day of Carmichael news — and find three big stories and photos about talented chefs and hot restaurants in my corner of the world.
Is anyone just quietly eating baloney anymore?
The public confession by Carmichael to sexually harassing women in the workplace holds bizarre fascination. Why say this? Why now? And was it — in our current climate of deifying chefs, glorifying restaurants, making cooking a competition, ranking eateries on a “best” list — inevitable?
Related
Carmichael’s problems are his own but surely his travails point to, or at least remind us, of troubles with sexism and harassment in that entire industry. And it’s not just big-headed chefs on coke. The evidence suggests the real problem with inappropriate sexual comments in the restaurant industry is customers, not co-workers or bosses.
A big survey in the U.S. found that 90 per cent of female servers had been subject to some form of on-the-job harassment. Several factors were cited: Servers are usually young and female, with little job protection; the bosses are probably male; the wage scale makes them dependent on tips, which means looking good and acting friendly to sometimes obnoxious patrons; there is an in-house culture of after-hours booze and drugs to navigate.
In the interview with CTV Ottawa, Carmichael called harassment “almost normalized” in the industry and referred to himself as “a man in a position of power,” also characterizing the restaurant business as “full of male-dominated bravado. I’m a product of that.”
The recent history suggest this is a deep-seated problem that goes way beyond what Carmichael may have scribbled on Facebook.
- In 2012, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario ordered a manager at Marshy’s Bar-B-Que & Grill in Centrepoint to pay $15,000 to a female server for “explicit and degrading” sexual harassment. The waitress, then 23, was so traumatized, or “uber creeped out” in her words, by the repeated sexual remarks that she left the restaurant and eventually sought treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
- In 2011, a former assistant manager at Moxie’s Classic Grill in Toronto said it was a common practice to rate applicants for serving jobs on a scale of one to 10. There was also a written code for so-called “uglies,” which meant they wouldn’t even get an interview once their applications were graded. The company denied the practice. (And we won’t even get into Hooters, a chain famous for how it portrays human hills and animated owls.)
- In 2016, the Ontario government announced it would commit $1.7 million in training to help identify and stop sexual harassment and violence in the bar business. It came on the heels of complaints by a Toronto pastry chef that she had been repeatedly harassed in a high-end restaurant, an episode that resulted in a complaint to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal.
Joanne St. Lewis is a professor of law at the University of Ottawa who has studied sexual harassment in the workplace. She sees the restaurant trade as especially vulnerable because attractive servers are part of the atmosphere of an eatery, but in a business that is male-dominated at the top.
It leads to a culture where women form part of the “purchasing power” that keep restaurants alive, she continued. Now add to this a place where “the customer is always right” and a female server is vulnerable from both sides, she explained.
“One of the things I’ve always felt, is the more sexualized the workplace is, the more women are part of the process of assisting for the product to be purchased,” she said, “the more vulnerable they become in a range of ways because it just creates an atmosphere that they are a product, you know?”
She has been a customer in chains where the female servers are dressed in more sexually suggestive ways and wondered: “If the men serving can wear pants and a white shirt, why do the women wear what I would call oversized belts?”
Good question, easy answer: It is exactly the way too many men want it. So, absolutely, this is bigger than one man with a big rep misbehaving at a grill.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
查看原文...
