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Women & Food: Same Song Different Verse for the "Gender Disparity in the Workplace" Debate?

Robyn Metcalfe's brainchild, The Food Lab, hosted a "Women and Food Symposium" (back on January 18), exploring the role and voice of women in today's food culture--with Addie Broyles (@relishaustin & @feministkitchen & @broylesa) introducing the day and framing the issues evocatively along with Robyn. 

(Robyn and the first panel (not necessarily listed in order of appearance): Melanie Haupt (food writer; author, Historic Austin Restaurants); Toni Tipton-Martin (The SANDE Youth Project; author, The Jemima Code); Meghan McCarron (Editor, Eater Austin); Jessica Elizarras (Food and Nightlife Editor, San Antonio Current); Kim Voss (Journalism Professor, Univ. Central Florida, author, The Food Section (on the TV screen off to the side, via video)).

Food culture, as I am calling it to describe the day, comprises everything from new social media affecting the reporting of food ("Writing About Food in the Age of New Media), women of color in the "foodie" world, the co-opting of local, community foodstuffs for global mass marketing (Pioneer Woman), "Peace through Pie" (thanks to author Toni Tipton-Martin, @thejemimacode), to entrepreneurship in the food space ("Making a Living at Food" featuring food editors/journalists (Virginia Wood, Austin Chronicle; Julia Moskin, NY Times) and chef owners telling their stories (Sonya Coté, Sharon Mays)).  And the day closed with what may have been the best panel of the day:  "Gender in Cookbooks," featuring spunky Laura Shapiro, culinary historian and author of, among other things, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. I should have brought the book along and had her sign it, as Kate Payne (The Hip Girl's Guide to Homemaking) was smart enough to do.

You could not get closer to what makes my psyche tick than this combination: Literary theory (light version), social anthropology/social constructs, history, business creation -- superimposed onto the food culture of today, a culture that both annoys me (elitist, pretentious (I may be guilty of same just by thinking that), overdone) and delights me (notions of community, origins of nostalgia, the profoud satisfaction and magic of simple fresh food and wine with good friends). 

The day had a good reference point: the recent Time magazine cover "The Gods of Food" and accompanying article, in which not a single female appeared in their "tree" of influential chefs.  Eater posted this article by Dirt Candy's Amanda Cohen, who interviewed the editor about what ON EARTH they were thinking. An excerpt from the EATER article, which is attached at the previous link:

Some people have a problem that the centerpiece of the TIME article, a family tree of chef influences, doesn't include any women. Duh. How stupid is everyone? As Mr. Chua-Eoan says of the magical chart, which was put together by Aaron Arizpe:

"It's all men because men still take care of themselves. The women really need someone — if not men, themselves actually — to sort of take care of each other."

So see, women don't take care of themselves or shave their legs enough or something, and they don't have men doing it for them, so they're not on the chart. As Chua-Eoan continues: "It's unfortunate, the women who are there are very good, but very few of them actually benefited from the boys club, as you can see from the chart."

Which is a chart of the boys club.

A counterbalance is found in the recently article by the New York Times, by the same Julia Moskin who participated in The Women and Food Symposium (by video).  

The upside: we are talking with our outside voices about the issue of exclusion and getting enraged about it. At least we (women) have some say in the matter, and access to media outlets--and powerfully influential ones--to get a different view out there: witness Julia Moskin at the New York Times and Amanda Cohen via Eater.   

More from Amanda because she just so owns her anger about the whole system.  She does not use the term "unrecognized privilege" to speak of the boy's club (you can't recognize it when you're in it), but its spirit is there:

And let's give him a pass on comments like how his article:

"…reflects one very harsh reality of the current chefs' world, which unfortunately has been true for years: it's still a boys club."

Actually, no. I've never found restaurants or the world of chefs to be a boys club. I've worked with and for lots of women, lots of female chefs run restaurants across the country, and heck, there's even a lady chef running the White House kitchen. Also female chefs like Dione Lucas, Madeleine Kamman, Josefina Velazquez de Leon, and Julia Child were some of the earliest and most famous chefs to popularize cooking by teaching and appearing on television and radio. On top of that, I've never found male chefs anything but awesome and supportive, and if they have a boys club they must be keeping it very secret. But Mr. Chua-Eoan says it's a boys club, and so it's a boys club.

She inspired some debate, to put it mildly.  Some commenters to that article said the chart in the Time article was right on, and no chef of the female persuasion did belong there as an influential force.   Well, ok (but not even Alice Waters?).  

As the food culture evolves into an ever more massive revenue-generating industry, it is no surprise that the same theme of gender disparity is resounding in the food world, like it is in the tech world, and like it has been for decades in other professions (accounting, law, academia). (See, e.g., this article in Forbes for that problem in tech.)  But thank you, The Food Lab, for getting more of us thinking about the issue again -- and caring about it.  Remind me to get my Eden East reservation in to support Sonya's local endeavors. 

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Goat on the fire...and other surprises: LongHouse Food Revival

I got back from France on Tuesday, with what I have taken to calling "my Parisian cold," crammed in the work, and made it to the Food, the City, and Innovation Conference at UT (specifically, The Food Lab at UT) this past Friday/Saturday.  In fact, that trip to France was compelled for many reasons, but primarily for getting up-to-date intel on what the France start-up scene looks like in the food systems sector.  Not just so I can be a part of that dialogue as well and connect us with the innovations over there, but also to figure out which one of the many ill-fitting, half-made hats I am trying on these days -- putative food entrepreneur, food system critic/problem-solver to entrepreneurs -- suits me best.

Between the head cold, the work, the brain-smashingingly awesome new jargon I learned (e.g., "hyper-local" and "restorative ecosystems" and "food system resiliency" and "bio-economy") that infuses the debate about local, sustainable, urban agriculture, by the time Friday night's dinner rolled around I was doing good just to get myself there.  I had no idea what it was that I had purchased a ticket for months earlier.  But someone had come all the way from Delaware just to see her friend, Molly O'Neill, run this show.  I started to take it all a bit seriously. 

All I knew was the space was gorgeous.  We were there early, Melissa and I, to be almost first in line at the bar (tequila tasting, etc. and an actually pretty darn good Texas wine) and take in what this place, this thing was going to be.  

As in many, many things, I was starting to learn that I am a little late to the party on this food systems stuff.  Yet I come at it from such a different perspective - funding/legal challenges these folks face as they (we) seek to change the world (lawyers, we're such total buzzkillers) - but even though I am late, I am delighted to be seeing my city in a whole different light.  Much like I saw Paris for the first time in a very different way this time: the young, hipster, smart entrepreneur/challenge the system side.  (Young being an operative word.)  

I had just learned about Hope Farmers Market that day, and it so happens that this particular market, when it happens, is at this Pine Street Station where the LongHouse Food Revival Dinner was happening.  It is a complex of old barn buildings or lean-tos, with rafters, soaring ceilings, and metal siding and roofing, just east of I-35, which can be rented out for private events.  Exquisitely rustic.  I take pictures.  I look for snacks to accompany the really not bad at all, and really pretty good, Texas red wine.  Melissa finds Iliana de la Vega. They do their gorgeous Spanish thing.  I do not even try to keep up.

Soon we are herded from the now very energetic crowd of folks around the bar, under the lights, into a separate room, one that is not the dining room.  This concerns me, as I am very hungry.  And the dining room looked so adorable all set up improvised like in a farm to table dinner-at-the-field/farm dinner.

But as the music starts -- guitars, some percussion, some singing -- I am easily distracted from the crankiness of no food. (The tamales out for aperitif dining were great, but I stopped after a couple of halves....practicing moderation.)

I am handed a gorgeous program.  I am very critical of printed products.  This one is really well done: lovely font, lovel graphics, right size.  I sit on a back row with new friend, whom I figure out I must have partied with here in 1990 in the early post-grad school transition year to law school, and long-time friend Melissa from that same era (who also knew said new/re-met friend).

Now the magic begins.  LongHouse Food Revival is a multi-media performance art statements of sorts about food.  Our food stories.  Our communities and our food, our personas and our food.  Including recipe demonstrations -- Iliana de la Vega - poems, with powerful visual background of a daughter's recounting her memories or mother's soup juxtaposed against the loss of her mother to dementia; more music, interviews - with Gustavo Arellano of the Ask a Mexican column - with Melissa Guerra, a Nortena, whose husband, Kiko, we learn is the one out there cooking the cabrito. Ah, so there's a goat on the fire.  That's what that's all about out there.

We hear this other Melissa's back story, her 300+ year old cattle ranch around the border, the many hours of getting here, the many hours her awesome husband (her words) has been tending the cabrito - just for us to eat.   

It is cumulatively charming, inspiring.  Even with the flawed sound system. 

Molly has some serious verbal skills.  I was a little jealous, yea, but between my cold and the red wine, I just sat back and delighted in her prose in setting up the various stages of this event, in explaining what she does - to those of us who were clueless.

LongHouse Food Revival is this:

Based on the 19th century American Chautauqua movement, LongHouse Food Revivals are a series of annual gatherings of thought leaders across the United States. The Revivals are designed to stretch the boundaries of how food stories are told, raise the bar on the nation’s food news agenda and, most of all, foster the community between generations, regions, cultures and media platforms that support innovative work of the highest quality. Produced by CookNScribble, the online educational resource and virtual editorial office for food writers, bloggers and producers, LongHouse Food Revivals are intimate gatherings that are large in vision. No two Revivals are alike. All are serious fun 

After that, I lingered.  I loaded up on beads, set up in the bottom bin of a rustic wood display stand.  Molly applauds me for getting that I needed to get some beads. The NOLA thing in me I guess.  I see beads.  I grab.  Told Molly, genuinely, this was so well done.  I love it.  Needed it.  Have found my people.  

At the end of all that, and then the meeting of new friends--the Shrimp Boat Projects guys, a landscape architect professor specializing in urban agricultural designs and rhetoric (I felt very out-intellectualized)--there were small cups of Mexican hot chocolate.  Some ice cream.  I went for the chocolat chaud.

Said newfound old acquaintance of mine, who does a lot of cool things in Austin, echoed my own random thoughts at about that same time when she said:  This is the coolest thing I have ever done in Austin.   

  (Cabrito being distributed in the buffet line; which line of food also had the best tortillas I have ever had (good thick rustic corn tortillas))

UT Food Lab Taste Tests

I'm a recent groupie of the University of Texas Food Lab - and just in time.  Just in time to get in on a food tasting the other day.  The deal:  food startup founders test their foodstuffs with you.  Tell them/grade them on taste, what you would pay, texture and size of the product vis-a-vis the packaging and price.   The Food Lab is tied into innovation, technology and commercialization - but focused on food systems.  So I kind of love it.

Turns out I had a lot of opinions, such as how one company could not be serious about naming their company "XYZ" - clearly trademark infringement, though I was not offering legal advice was not their lawyer and nothing I said should be taken as creating an attorney-client relationship and they should consult a lawyer of their own choosing.  Just a passing observation I could not help but make.

Forms were available to fill out to answer standard questions for each product, but index cards, color-coded to each offering, were there to allow you more room to voice your opinion.  After the protein bars, there were the sticky marshmallows in these two pans, from Sugar Puff.  Icky sweet did not sound tantalizing at all after the nicely done organic protein bars with the fire-roasted nut taste.  But I was there to taste, so taste I did.  The lightly crusted ones - which I thought might have a toasty salty flavor combined with the icky sweet - was not that at all.  Lesson: freaky to have a food not taste how it looks.  

Next, and winner, to my mind, in terms of most interesting and challenging as a food startup concept: the Indian snack food tasting. The founder wanted something tied to his growing up in Southern India and the tastes and textures of those street foods.

Tasting a new potential snack food or party side dish - when it's at this baby stage - makes you appreciate the myriad decisions to be made.  With this snack, it's substantive, spicy, but not too spicy - great size - or is it too large such that we would not know what to do with it.   It's too dense to be eaten seriatim like a tortilla chip.  And price-wise cannot justify a large-enough bag of smaller sized individual chips.   So, yes, perhaps best to keep it this form (chosen because most efficient) but packaging will be key to ensure it conveys the appropriate high-end but healthy different nature of it to justify a premium price.

Next, this food startup founder's doughnut-like (his description) sweet treat, another food of his childhood.  

(As those who know something about Indian food have probably figured out by now, I know little to nothing about Indian food in terms of differences between North and South and types of flour, etc.)  

It is nothing but rice flour and unrefined sugar.  It is the unrefined sugar though, which sugar is very hard to find, that gives it the genuinely distinctive interesting taste.  Almost carmelized, not quite, not icky, just a sticky sort of spicy sweet - like honey.  Took me eating through one, alas the whole thing, to wrap my head around it.  My last question for the founder: (i) what year are you; and (ii) are you in a Food Studies program?  Answer: (i) freshman; (ii) in the business school.  

Next, and last, or first depending where you started at the tasting table, there were the energy drinks.  

Not going to go into detail about some of the names given here, such as the one that is not the Brain Booster.  Give me a call if you want to know more.  All I will say is that there are some interesting aspects of pineapple juice I was surprised to learn about.  

And so because I was there to taste, I had to taste not just the pretty-colored drinks (light frothy pink for Strawberry Banana), but also the dark brown green gross liquid in the liter-sized Sprite bottle named the Brain Booster.  

Guess what.  Delicious.  Light.  Vegetal-esque.  Not too sweet. I liked the texture of the pulp.   Others did not.  My major issue with the Brain Booster: who but the wheatgrass junkies group would pay $2.00+ to chug down a dark brown/green drink?  

Yes, that's the real color.  

If we eat with our eyes, this would make you want to run away from the table.  A better color that connotes just how light and lovely it surprisingly was?  Pale celery or celadon.  

And you are welcome for that free food startup design advice.