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  0:38  
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  1:13 
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 practice. But my problem is, is that I'm a sociologist of religion and I'm really interested in what gives people kind of meaning in their life, particularly outside of the realm of conventional religion. So it's basically impossible for me to show up for a yoga class – or, for that matter, you know, like, pick up a novel that I love – and not start thinking sociologically about why all these things matter to me and to so many other people in the way that they do. So, what seems like a normal new year's resolution suddenly becomes me just over analysing everything. But you know, the last few years, meeting so many amazing people on this podcast has been incredibly enriching. So I'm very excited about what season four holds. So if you already know what we're about, then thank you very much for returning, and if not, let me say that we are the show that sees the world through sociological ears and eyes. You know, sociology – though its language can seem complex, let's be honest – it's actually one of the most accessible subjects around and I think it's for everyone as well. I know for me, it opens up like these little portals that show me how seemingly very mundane and taken-for-granted parts of my life are shaped by these huge and historical social trends. So, you can kind of start really small and then go big, or start really big and then go really small.

Alexis Hieu Truong  2:48 
So each month, we take a word – like say, anxiety, madness, care – that we all use, maybe we think we understand, and we talk about it, we talk around it to see it kind of sideway with an expert guest, but without the jargon. And well, today we're actually joined by someone trained in baking and pastry.

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 to be with fellow podcasters.

Rosie Hancock  3:47 
Do you want to explain for us this certificate in baking and pastry? It's not the usual qualification that we get on this, on this show.

Ellen T. Meiser  3:56 
Yeah, it's definitely not one that people ask for in the academy at all. So I – gosh, too many years ago, when I was very young – I told my parents I did not want to go to school. I didn't see any value in college. I wanted to be a chef, right? So one of the things that I decided I was going to do was going, go to culinary school. That was my kind of happy medium to them. And so I went to the Culinary Institute of America, and I got a baking/pastry certificate. And then, of course, I got brow-beaten into going to school by my parents afterwards. I went to, did my undergrad in hospitality, business management. And then I realised I really like school. So, you know, you're wrong when you're young and sometimes you're right when you're young, I don't know. It's hard to, hard to foresee a future, but it ended up working out.

Rosie Hancock  4:46  
Yeah. I mean, it's all kind of led you to, to what you study, I guess. So it was, that was your path in. I love that. I feel like sociologists always have a great story for why they study the things that they do, and you've definitely got that. I mean, like we mentioned today's subject: scars, injury, kitchen culture and also what you call kitchen capital, which we're going to get to in a little bit. But I want to start off, do you watch The Bear? And just quickly, for those of you who might not watch it, it's this really beautifully made, high tension kitchen/kind of family drama. And in fact, the point is that the kitchen staff kind of are the family in this show. And I mean, I'm obsessed with it, so I had to bring it up.

Ellen T. Meiser  5:30 
Yeah, I like that you say it's tension filled, because that is one of the main reasons behind my answer of saying, no, I don't watch it. Mainly because it reminds me so much of the stresses that I've experienced in the commercial kitchen when I, you know, I worked in restaurants for about ten years of my life in baking and pastry occupations, as well as what we call the hot side, which is your kind of traditional idea of the restaurant kitchen. And The Bear is so good that it reminds me too much of the kind of stressful, horrible aspects of the kitchen that I just don't want to watch it. But that, again, that doesn't mean that it's not fantastic.

Rosie Hancock  6:13 
Yeah I mean it's so popular that the lead Jeremy Allen White – who plays The Bear's, sort of, very pretty tortured chef Carmy – was recently the, shall we say, face of a Calvin Klein ad.

Alexis Hieu Truong  6:27 
Yeah, I guess we'll come back to that very soon, and to the question of why there's this, like, popular obsession with food, with chefs, with their bodies, their behaviours, like from kids movies like Ratatouille, or maybe the truffle obsessed Nicolas Cage in Pig. But let's talk now about what this whole food studies thing is, but also what brought you specifically to studying that?

Ellen T. Meiser  6:53 
Yeah, for sure. So I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and there's not much there, but there are restaurants and a bunch of my family friends growing up, they all had restaurants, their families did. And so that's where I started working, my first job was when I was 13. They thought I was 14, which is the legal hiring age, and I worked at a Chinese buffet. That was my first restaurant. I got paid cash. I love that. I thought, oh, this is the space for me, you know, it was chaotic, there were personalities. And ever since then I kind of was bit by the the restaurant bug, and I kept working in restaurants ever since then. Anyway, so that initial experience – and then, of course, the culinary school experience – led me into the realm of food studies. And so when we talk about food studies, we're really talking about a much more kind of interdisciplinary field than just sociology. It's everybody. It's people who are really interested in not just food, but the people who grow it, the people who cook it, process it, sell it, how we consume it. There are many scholars within this, within this realm of food studies, people who look at it from like a cultural perspective, a labour workplace perspective, politically, emotionally. And there's some really good books just kind of about food studies in general. So one example, which is kind of a foundational text, is called Food and Culture, very straightforward, but it's a great compilation of food studies articles from varied angles and from international scholars, and it's edited by Counihan, Van Esterik and Julier, so if you're interested in that. Now, in the sociological world – you know, from a sociological perspective – we're really interested in kind of consumption and cooking patterns. Taste, you know, from the Bourdieusian world, but also tastes like the physical sense of taste and how that can be tied to your background and who you are and what you experience, right? What tastes good to me is something that may remind me of what my grandmother cooked for me. What tastes good to Rosemary is something that she ate while she was hiking on the Appalachian Trail, or whatever it is, right? Maybe, maybe some trail in Australia. So there's also this kind of social, psychological and emotional lens that sociologists take. So if we think about kind of the trends in what sociologists are interested in, in this world of food, in the Eighties scholars, particularly in the UK, were interested in looking at symbolic meanings that we attach to food. In the Nineties, we start to see more of a Bourdieusian take, where we're looking at culture and taste and consumption. And nowadays I see the biggest trend is we're looking at inequalities and kind of social problems associated with food, the people who make it, people who distribute it, right? So an example of this would be gentrification in neighbourhoods with cafes who sell really bougie avocado toast and overpriced coffee, as well as you know racial inequalities and gendered stuff. So that's kind of the way the trajectory of sociology of food studies, if we want to kind of narrow it down.

Rosie Hancock  10:11  
Thanks for that potted history. But I think we should turn to your book, Ellen, which is called Making It. And for that book, between I think 2018 to 2020, you interviewed about 50 chefs and surveyed many more kitchen workers. You did participant observation, so you actually worked in kitchens yourself, all to try and understand the reality of kitchen culture and what things like success look like in kitchen culture. And as you say, it's not a small demographic who are involved in this, something like one in 40 people in the USA were working in food prep in at least some way during the period that you were writing this book. And it's also this really fascinating field. It's blue collar and highbrow. It's a world of artistry, but also of precarity and hierarchy, exploitation and then sometimes also performance. So you write about kitchen culture, could you tell us what that actually is and what's sociologically interesting about it?

Ellen T. Meiser  11:19 
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so kitchen culture is something that I argue is distinct from what we think of as restaurant culture. That's usually how we kind of lump them together but I say no, no, no, no, they're a little bit different. Kitchen culture is referring to the, really, the many societies – as Gary Alan Fine would say – the many societies that you're going to find in the confines of the kitchen of the restaurant solely. So what I'm talking about is what we think of as the back of the house, the bear of the house if we want to go back to The Bear, right? What happens between these cooks? How they interact with each other, with the chef, with purveyors? And then also especially the hierarchy within the kitchen itself, which is a very distinct thing and, and one that we see is kind of translated across most western-based kitchens. You'll see the same similar hierarchy, what we call the, call the brigade system. And we'll also see across most western kitchens this shared sort of rough and tumble values, where it's a male dominated, kind of raucous atmosphere. There's stoicism that's, that's prized, especially in the face of pain and stress and we're going to be talking about pain a little bit more. It's all about kind of productive chaos and territorialism and productivity. There's all of this, this stuff that really makes it into a very entertaining culture.

Alexis Hieu Truong  12:48  
So you're, you're talking about, like, the, the behaviours, like the rough and tumble values, the stoicism, and I feel like it, it's kind of self-fulfilling in a way, like these representations, right? It's, there's something fascinating about that, the idea that, like, if we believe something to be true, right – in this case, like, stereotypes of like kitchen culture, for example – it maybe like shapes our behaviour, or it sort of becomes true. And I mean, like, we see that in the case of like the open kitchen trend, I guess, with people expecting a certain kind of theatrical performance, right, or theatrical experience? And maybe that attracts also the kind of people that can give that. So, and it's actually an interesting side of you that also has a background in social psychology, so how would you approach that?

Ellen T. Meiser  13:35 
Yeah, yeah. So when we're talking about the self-fulfilling cycles that you're you're discussing, I attribute it more to kind of media representations of chefs, so going back to kind of the opening question that Rosemary had for me, which is that when we are aware of a workplace or a cultural space, and we're aware of it through media and those media representations of chefs and cooks are aggressive and violent and cursing all the time and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, right, just this really stressful place, we assume those spaces to actually be it, right? And what I actually have found in my research with my interviewees in particular was that they engaged in these media representations of very extreme kitchens before even going into the field themselves, and then when they went in to their first job they expected that, and they behaved in that way. And it was only when somebody didn't behave towards them in that really extreme, aggressive way that they thought it was weird. So they expected to be abused, they expected to be cursed at, right? And in return, they're doing it as well.

Alexis Hieu Truong  14:52 
It kind of like links to in social psychology, like Zimbardo's work of like prison and how people were like imitating guards and prisoners and stuff like that, and it kind of turned out in a specific way because of those representations that they had in movies and stuff like that, right?

Ellen T. Meiser  15:08 
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we perform as we think that we're expected to perform, right? And I would even say something that's kind of embarrassing for me as a sociologist and as somebody who thinks of themselves as a researcher, I didn't even think this was weird, or – I don't know if weird is a good word, but – abnormal, until my advisor, when I was talking to him about what I was finding in my research, he said, well, people are doing what? They're closing oven doors on each other's arms, and they think it's funny, or they're poking each other with knives and they're giggling about it? And I said, yeah, that's what we do. And he said, no, that's not what we do, right? And it wasn't until he kind of reframed it like, for example, if I told you all, if you all ask me, how's your new job doing, going? And I said, oh, great, you know, the chair of my department hasn't called me an idiot yet, and she hasn't even thrown a stapler at me, you know? And you'd say, well, oh my gosh, or we giggle about it, right? That's because only the violence that we see in the kitchens, or that aggressiveness that we're seeing in kitchens in the media and in real life, those are the norms, right? And it's not normal anywhere else. And it wasn't until my advisor told me that's not normal, that I saw it myself, right? So I was even playing into the performance, performative aspect of it. And I even continued to do so when I was doing participant observation. You know, there's times when I was not purposefully, but kind of putting myself at in danger's way to prove that I was, you know, kind of one of the guys and, you know, I was rough, and, oh, a burn, it's a burn. Who cares? I'm not going to talk about it, even though I'm in pain.

Rosie Hancock  16:46 
And we were just talking a little bit about social psychology, and I just wanted to clarify that that is the study of feelings and behaviours as shaped by others or our perception of others. But I'm thinking about the fact that kitchen workers are often quite a transient population, and surely that would play into kitchen culture, and that would shape it in some way? And I reckon, isn't it kind of opposite to at least a slice of, of academic life, because you don't get a tenured sous chef, right? Like, that's quite a different culture.

Ellen T. Meiser  17:22  
Yeah, yeah. I mean, and there's also, like, you know – with tenure, at least – we get some sort of, hopefully, health insurance, a solid paycheck, all of these things, that is not mostly available in, at least in America, in cooking professions. Yeah, so, so when we're talking about the population of chefs and cooks, we are talking about a very transient population, and one of the contributors to that is there's burnout. There's a lot of burnout. In fact, many of the people that I talked to, and many, many a times when I observed, it was actually worked into the way that chefs and cooks are managed, is that, you know, you work them hard, work them long, and they're going to leave anyway so get as much as you can right? Extract as much kind of labour and capital out of these people as you can, before they say it's enough and they, they move on. The other thing is, like you mentioned, it's the norm. It's not penalised by any means. You know, if one of us were to switch jobs and go to a different university every single year, after maybe the third university, people would say, what's wrong Ellen? Why are you, you know, what's wrong with you Ellen? Why can't you stay in a particular place? That's not the case in restaurants. The case in restaurants is actually the moving around is one way to kind of hop up the hierarchy, hop up each time that you move. So it's actually, it's seen as a really good thing. Now when we think about how that contributes to some of the more socially destructive or kind of bad behaviour – quote, unquote, bad behaviour – that we see, is that when you have a transient population, you have fewer people who are in a place for a long time to hold people to account, right? In addition to that, you have people who just move automatically when they experience abuse or violence or, or can't take what is happening in the restaurant. They just leave.

Rosie Hancock  19:17 
Ellen, it kind of feels like a lot of kitchen culture centres around bodies, right, like and their really embodied practice in, in a, in a flow state. I mean, saying that just reminds me of yoga but, you know. This is this idea that the, that people are, that the workers are really at one with their task, you know, but that also involves people getting hurt, and you have some great findings on what scars and injury mean within this context. And you, I mean, I think in your, you tell a really gory story that involves tobacco, lemon juice and a really healthy pinch of risk. Could you tell us about that?

Ellen T. Meiser  19:59 
Sure, yeah. Yeah, so you're right. Cooking is absolutely a physical occupation, right, most blue collar labour is. So you have to use your body to create dishes, you have to use all five senses. Getting into that flow state is one of the good or the rewarding aspects of cooking, which a lot of my participants mentioned. So the physicality of it is actually can bring about a lot of joy. So there's a lot of physical joy that comes with this work, but then there's also a lot of physical risk, danger and pain that also comes along with this work. In fact, we have this statistical library that you can go to or data source that you can go to here, called the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. And it found that even though restaurant workers or kitchen workers make up 2% of the worker population here in the United States, they actually make up 13.5% of all on-the-job cuts and 53.5% of all reported burns to governmental agencies, right? So there's a huge, 2% compared to 13.5 and 53%. And I would argue that those numbers are actually far higher, it's just that they go unreported because of norms that say, nah, don't go, don't go to the, don't go report, right? We'll deal with it here, or I'll super glue something shut. So the body becomes this kind of canvas for cooks to, because of all of this injury, in some ways show off their injury and show off their expertise through the display of scars and through storytelling of injury. And this is actually something that I found with my research, that is something that is beneficial to cooks and chefs, to go through an injury, to cut yourself on accident, right – so I'm not talking about anything intentional, unintentionally injure yourself in work – to have a scar and to be able to show it off and say, hey, I have grit. I know what you're talking about when you're talking about a hard, risky job. And so it's, it really becomes this beneficial thing. And the stories are really intense. You know, I had one cook who told me about how they were part of this chef's group. One of the fellow group members told a story about getting a cut on her hand, and the chef – who was somehow in the military – told them that they could cauterise their wound by shoving tobacco from a cigarette and lemon juice into the cut and then binding it up really, really tight. Another person talked about just cauterising a wound directly under the stove, so they had a cut and they just pressed it down onto a hot saute pan. I had people tell me that no longer were they buying just regular super glue to close up wounds. They went and bought veterinary grade super glue, and that was something she was very proud of.

Alexis Hieu Truong  23:03 
So you, you've been talking and evoking, like these aspects of, like risks, injury and so on, and also mentioning like the military, it feels like a strange kind of intersection, right? Because some of the things that you talk about right on scars and so on – like I'm thinking about, like maybe wounds from combat – it feels like there are some parallels with, like, maybe military culture, but also some differences?

Ellen T. Meiser  23:25 
One of the things that I've found is that when you talk to chefs and cooks, they use militaristic language in how they describe their work shift, right? So they say, oh, we're going into battle. Or right before the restaurant opens, they say, you know, we're gonna gear up and we're, you know, ready to wage war. So there is, of course, this, this militaristic language.

Alexis Hieu Truong  23:49 
I guess, like in the kitchen context, like thinking about these scars resulting from, like, of course, like injury, mistakes, these scars that become a bit like trophies and stuff like that, it certainly feels as though it's not just damage to the body, right? It's also capital, capital on the body and, and these are kind of like, they become, like resources that you kind of carry on your body, wear them and so on. And, and I guess, like, being the devil's advocate, I would wonder about how, like, how this is actually different from wider work culture in countries like the US generally? I mean, like the idea that you have to suck it up, be resilient, feel rough, but kind of carry on, take one for the team kind of seems to tap into a bigger discourse.

Ellen T. Meiser  24:36 
Yeah. I mean, there is definitely extreme work cultures in, in every field. Pulling an all nighter as an office worker is, I would argue, extreme. I think most of us would say, well, you know, we don't want to do that and that's not necessary. But there's a physicality that's really distinct to kitchen workers. The other thing is, like, when you have a physical marking of being a part of an extreme culture, and having been injured by this extreme work or profession that you're a part of, you can bring it to other spaces, you can show it off, and you can tell the story about it in a really gory, entertaining way, and kind of accumulate more capital that way. That's really not the case with office workers. If I went up to you, Alexis, and I said, you know, oh my gosh, four years ago, I worked eight hours straight on this one paragraph, you know. And you'd say, okay, so? You know, there's, there's really no payout for me to tell. Even if I amped up that story and I never used the bathroom for eight hours and I didn't eat. And you'd probably say, oh, okay, you're dedicated. But with kitchen workers, you can parlay something that happened four kitchens ago into something that's valuable.

Rosie Hancock  25:48 
I mean, I'm wondering about, you know, the gendered and racialised dimensions to all of this, like, surely certain types of scars on certain types of people are valued differently than others on other bodies? I mean, you write about the culinary world as being plagued by inequality.

Ellen T. Meiser  26:10 
I would say it isn't necessarily, at least from my, my observations, it isn't necessarily that scars on certain bodies are perceived differently. I would say that it's certain bodies that have or encounter greater risk to scarring due to those hierarchies and inequalities. So by that I mean like people who are largely marginalised in, in kitchen spaces, and that would be women and people who are brand new to the, the field, so junior workers. They tended to show and talk about far more social pressure to kind of prove their ability to withstand this like machismo and the pains and the pressures of the kitchen than already established male and whiter counterparts. So, you know, they talked about, you know, feeling pressures of grabbing things right out of the friar with their bare hands, because that's what everybody else was doing, and then unintentionally, kind of, you know, hurting themselves. But don't cry, don't don't say anything, you know, prove that you have the grit. So it was more kind of the risk factor, that's what was really amplified by somebody's gender or race or, or kind of status.

Alexis Hieu Truong  27:23 
I guess, like, we're really talking about, like the US here. But I'm wondering how this can kind of connect, or maybe how it, it's taking a specific form in this specific, like, geographical context, right? And if so, why? Like, say, for example, in the context of heigh neoliberalism, deregulation, risks on individual etc. I mean, at one point someone talks to you about stoicism in how people deal with scars, and she says, well, people don't want to go to the hospital, let's say, right, due to the cost of it, I'm guessing. Yeah so I feel like it's important to remember there's concrete, socioeconomic, political stuff going on here too?

Ellen T. Meiser  28:01  
Yeah absolutely. I mean, you know, in the UK and Canada and Australia, you're all much more smarter and humane than us in the United States. You know, people have a subsidised or provided medical services that, that we just don't have here, and that's a really real reality that people have to contend with here in the States, especially when they're working relatively low paying jobs. These are not, you know, tech workers who are making six figures. These are people who are working, you know, last time I checked, the median wage was about $26 an hour for a chef, not for those lower down on the rung. In the UK, and I also looked this up in the morning, it's like £13 per hour for somebody who's a mid-level cook. But you also have all of those kind of safety nets that help you, and can say, you can say, oh, I can go get stitches because I need the stitches. So absolutely, there's, there's kind of political and geographic concerns that prevent people from getting the care and acting in ways that we kind of expect them to. But I would also say that there's been researchers in Australia, in the UK. Robin Burrow is one that I think is really amazing, who does research out in the UK, who has found that despite having these safety nets in place workers in your countries, they still partake in this very extreme culture and the kind of kitchen culture, norms and values that we see in the United States. You see them in, all over, all over the West, yeah.

Rosie Hancock  29:36 
I mean, you're mentioning kind of work that's happening in the UK and in Australia. And it's worth thinking about how kitchen culture is related to sort of these broader global trends, I think. And so, you know, inequality and exploitation in terms of dark kitchens and how that's related to patterns of migration. But also we can think about, I mean we've been talking about people but, we can think about how harm and injury in the food world also gets sort of transferred out into the environment itself. You know, the way that particular types of food are produced, for example, or the way that waste is handled coming out of kitchens. And environmental problems are also in, in and of themselves, they're sort of global issues. So this, this sort of like specific, some of the, some of the specific things we've been talking about in the US kitchen culture also sort of blows up into this big global scale as well. We're going to come back soon to talk about someone who's shaped your work, Ellen, but right now it's time to hear from someone who has shaped our work, and that is our producer Alice.

Alice Bloch  30:49 
Hello. Thanks for joining us to think about scars and injury and, I guess, work with Ellen T. Meiser. If you're enjoying this, I'd recommend our other shows on subjects like taste, privilege, success and also performance – thinking of that open kitchen question earlier – all over at thesociologicalreview.org. Also there, you'll find a really great 2020 edition of our magazine with pieces all about food, from eating in the flatlands of LA to hunger in remote Australia, and eating fish or not in West Bengal. There's loads to enjoy. And you know, this is the fourth season of Uncommon Sense, which is one more than The Bear. So we really hope by now you know how much of a valuable resource we can be, whether you're listening for pleasure, for work or for study, whether you're sharing us with your students or maybe with your friends and family so they can really get what you study and what you're into. If you've been to thesociologicalreview.org you might have seen that the Sociological Review Foundation is a charity. We're all about advancing public understanding of sociology, and I'd say in this year 2025 we need that more than ever. So we want to ask if you can please consider making a contribution to help the Foundation keep bringing this podcast to you. Just go over to donorbox.org/uncommon-sense – and you can find that link in our show notes – and there you can make one-off or repeat donations and directly support the making of Uncommon Sense. Everything is really gratefully received and, of course, we're also just really glad that you've lent us your ears to listen to this show. Any feedback, you can message us at Uncommon Sense at thesociologicalreview.org, thanks for listening.

Rosie Hancock  32:43 
Okay, now we're going to hear about someone who has inspired you to think, or perhaps to write differently, given you some uncommon sense. We've had heaps of people talked about in this section before, not all of them sociologists by any means.

Alexis Hieu Truong  32:59 
And today Ellen, I think for the first time, we're actually going to be talking about someone who wasn't an academic, and that's the late chef, author and TV host Anthony Bourdain. And so Ellen, can you tell us who was this man, his biography, but also his output? I mean, academics talk about impact, but his was vast.

Ellen T. Meiser  33:19 
Yeah, for sure. So Anthony Bourdain, here in the United States, was a really, really big figure in food media – he still is, he's still somebody that we refer back to – beginning around the 2000s all the way up to when he passed away in 2018. And he was this like rugged rock star chef, in New York City for much of his life and very charismatic. When he was younger, he goes to the Culinary Institute of America. He becomes a chef in New York and kind of makes his way in the restaurant industry there. But it's not until his forties, when he becomes famous for his many food travel shows like No Reservations or Parts Unknown. He's also becomes a writer that people really focus on, and he does fiction and non-fiction. The book that I really got drawn in with him was his first book, which is called Kitchen Confidential. It's a memoir-ish type of book where he tells stories and it came out in 2000. So it seems like it's an old, dated book, but actually if you go on to, say, Amazon or any big book website, and you Google chef writing, he's always up there in the top, top five or top ten. So it really has staying power because of just how good of a writer he was, and how – I would argue – how much of a sociological imagination he had as a writer in understanding the people that he was writing about, his co-workers, understanding their behaviour from kind of this kind of structures, culture, psychological perspective. I mean, he's just, he was always inspirational to me.

Rosie Hancock  33:19 
I mean, that's so great. I mean, I think of non-sociologists like fiction writers who really inspire me sociologically, like people like Margaret Atwood or Barbara Kingsolver, right? Do you have an example to hand of, like, something where Bourdain is being really kind of sociological in what he's talking about?

Ellen T. Meiser  35:14 
Yeah. I mean, if you were to watch any of his television shows, at the very end of his television show after he visits, you know, some market in Vietnam or some kitchen in the Bronx of New York, or whatever, he always would kind of have this rumination over what he observed and what he ate and the people he met. And sure it was about food, but it really wasn't about food. It was about everything else that kind of surrounded the experience that he had with those people in Vietnam or in the Bronx or wherever he was.

Alexis Hieu Truong  35:47 
I, if I understand correctly, like Bourdain believed in the importance of breaking bread with strangers, bridging divides and so on. Do we need more of this in sociology? Like, can eating in this way even be used as a sort of method, a setting for sociological research beyond the US context, perhaps? Or I'd be interested to know, like, even in your own practice, like, is it, is it something that, that you integrate in a certain way?

Ellen T. Meiser  36:12 
Oh, yeah, that's, that's a really great question. You know, when I do my interviews, especially for this project, but the in-person ones I always make sure that I am sharing a drink or, you know, having a meal with somebody, and I always make sure that I'm the one who's treating them because, you know, they're giving me their time and their openness and I think that's really important. And I think that part of it is because of what you mentioned Alexis, which is this meeting of people at a table and just having something to consume as maybe a distraction and saying, oh, okay, Alexis, you like matcha lattes with seven scoops of matcha? Interesting. Let's talk about that. And having that be a segue into the bigger things that are happening in their life and into the social forces that they are feeling pressured by or encouraged by, or, you know, all of the things that, that we're really interested in sociologically. So yeah I think it's a good, maybe it's a good methodological tactic, right? Maybe that's what we should all be doing, is, is getting together with our interviewees or with our participants and breaking bread with them.

Rosie Hancock  37:21 
Okay, so for those of you who are new to Uncommon Sense, this is where we normally wrap the show with a chat about stuff that's out there in popular culture. It could be high, it could be low, it could be what's on Netflix. It could be opera, to be honest, I don't think we've ever spoken about opera yet, but there's, there's always, always time. But you know, we try and pick something that resonates with whatever it is that we've been talking about. And I mean, Ellen, we asked you, I asked you right off the bat about The Bear. So we've sort of covered that, but I do want to go a little bit, a little bit broader, kind of picking up on that. And you know, why are people like me so drawn to shows about cooking and chefs, or, you know, let's be precise here, male chefs? Like we seem to valorise these kind of scarred, angry, high-pressured chef guys. And, you know, let's be honest, they're usually white as well.

Ellen T. Meiser  38:17 
Yeah, yeah. So I would say, well, you know, there's a lot of gendered aspects that go into who gets a television show, or if it's a fictional show, you know, who gets written about. Which we're seeing more diversity come into play, and that's exciting. We have Samin Nosrat being featured and, you know, people of colour, so that's great. But I would say, you know, one of the reasons why we're drawn to these shows about angry chefs doing angry things is it's entertaining, right? We are drawn into drama. Another thing that I notice is there's always these like redemptive story arcs that we see with media or in these media representations of chefs. And so maybe that's why we see so many flawed characters like Jeremy Allen White's protagonist in The Bear. And then just, you know, talking about Jeremy Allen White, there's this glossy romanticisation of people in these, in these positions, so much so that we feature them in Calvin Klein underwear ads.

Alexis Hieu Truong  39:21  
This aspect of entertainment and like the things we like to see or don't like to see, it's kind of like we're circling back to this question of representation that we talked about, like earlier. Yeah, so scars and injuries, like, how are they typically represented and understood in popular culture. I feel like maybe some scars are deemed more palatable than others, right? So for example, I don't think I've ever seen a C-section scar on TV. How can we think about that like sociologically and what could we make like visible and invisible through that process?

Ellen T. Meiser  39:59  
Yeah. So one of the big things that I think we have to understand which dictates which scars have value is the cultural setting in which they take place, right? So maybe we haven't seen C-section scars on television because we don't have a network yet that's targeted primarily at women who have given birth or women who are pregnant, and we don't have a TV show where women show off their scars and they talk about how long they were in labour for. Maybe that's going to happen in the future, right? But there's not that quite setting yet where that type of scar can have value. So we have to understand kind of the setting, and then if that setting is one that prizes injury and prizes danger and prizes scars, then that's what creates the value itself. And then, of course, the entertainment value of it, if you can tell a story about that scar then the value increases even more.

Rosie Hancock  41:00 
Yeah. I mean, I kind of want to think about how, you know, the society that we live in, in a way, is scarring. Like we live in a traumatogenic society. We carry that in our bodies. And so, you know, lives of hardship and harm – not so much injury in kitchen culture, let's say, but – like more, injuries caused by things like unsafe workplaces generally, precarious working in like constantly new environments, you know, journeys of extreme endurance or danger in order just to be able to find work like, you know, I could really keep going, right? But like these all take a toll on bodies, and it feels, I don't know, it feels to me like it's really important for all of us who create writing and work, whether that's sociological writing or documentary, photography or like if you're writing a novel or something like that, you know, to attend fully to that kind of marking on the body.

Ellen T. Meiser  41:56 
Yes. Scarring is, happens in every occupation, right? It doesn't and it doesn't have to happen in a physical occupation by any means. And I think that it hints at physical scarring or emotional scarring, or, you know, whatever form that we want to talk about, having gone through a traumatic or an injurious experience that these scars impact workers' bodies, but also in turn workers' bodies impact the industry itself, if that makes sense. So what I mean is that the industry itself scars the body, but then the workers' bodies respond in some way, either by – when we're talking about kitchens – amping up and saying, okay, yeah, let me embrace danger and the culture shifts, and it kind of reinforces. Or it could be that we're seeing in other workspaces where people are saying, no, this, I have a line, I have boundaries, you know, I need to protect myself. This is something that we, you know, millennials are called snowflakes for reason, and I think it's because we're, we're saying, you know, previous generations of workers, maybe they went through a tonne of really horrible things and were traumatised, and we are saying no to it, and then other generations are saying, ah, well, you know, you're all snowflakes, right? So it's like the bodies themselves also change the occupation. So there's the cycle and there's a back and forth between industry and body and body and industry.

Rosie Hancock  43:24  
And I mean, talking about scarring in the context of food, we can also think about the way food production itself scars landscapes and scars ecologies. And, you know, I mean, there's just, you can think about whether it's, you know, you know, ripping up the Amazon Rainforest or the Indonesian Rainforest, or whether it's what, what happens with these massive monocultures and what that does to the soil. You can think about the huge impacts that animal agriculture has, and the way that we've completely restructured our landscapes around the production of food on this mass scale, and that that has been a scarring thing in and of itself. And, you know, it also connects us all globally as well because, obviously, the food system is global. So, you know, like the corn that we eat or the blueberries that we eat or the coffee beans that are making my coffee, you know, like this is this huge interconnected thing. 

Alexis Hieu Truong 44:21
Yeah, thanks Rosie. Actually briefly Ellen, before we close the show, we just wanted to say we love The Social Breakdown. I know it's had a recent break, but there's so much to look at in the archive, including a recent episode on food studies. I wondered, like, why do it on top of your day job?

Ellen T. Meiser  44:41  
Oh, okay, we've been on hiatus for, I think, maybe two years and the hiatus was supposed to be six months, so. But we always talk about bringing it back. Yeah, so I guess the short answer to that is that the purpose of the podcast, of The Social Breakdown was to do something sociological for people who are not in the academy and not already attuned to what sociology even is. And perhaps that's even most, more important today in, you know, Trump 2.0 where we're seeing so much happen that is pulling resources away from, you know, sociology departments or from thinking or policy that is sociological or that prizes diversity and intersectionality, you know, we can go on and on. So the, the goal of the podcast was to really expose people who are not part of sociology to the beauty of sociology, which I think we all are very aware of in terms of how, how great this field is.

Rosie Hancock  45:45  
That makes me feel really good about being a sociologist. It is so great.

Ellen T. Meiser  45:49  
Yeah, we're amazing.

Rosie Hancock  45:51  
Thank you so much for joining us Ellen, it's been a real pleasure talking to you today.

Ellen T. Meiser  45:56 
Thank you. Thank you for having me and keeping your show going. It is so much work to do a podcast and to be hosts and to be producers and so bravo to you all.

Alexis Hieu Truong  46:06 
And that's it from us for today. Next month, we're back with Fady Shanouda, talking about ideas of fat and mad. As ever, share us far and wide, like a great meal with strangers, loved ones, friends new and old, right? The hungry, the peckish, we want everyone at the Uncommon Sense table. You can find The Sociological Review on Instagram and Bluesky too, and find more over at thesociologicalreview.org of course.

Rosie Hancock  46:34  
And you'll find show notes there, reading lists, our other podcasts. If you work in education, why not use us in your teaching?

Alexis Hieu Truong  46:43  
Our producer was Alice Bloch, our sound engineer was Dave Crackles and thanks again Ellen T. Meiser, see you soon.