The Chef vs the Homemaker

I have been seeing this image floating around the internet for the past few days.

Which was rather surprising for me: I’m used to being told to get back into the kitchen. It was rather shocking to be told to leave it. Before this I had vaguely heard of Top Chef; I knew it was a reality show about chefs competing by cooking. However this rather…interesting choice in advertisement made me wonder. A quick Google search brought up articles talking about the advertisement. Apparently it was for a new season of Top Chef that was going to have a ‘battle of the sexes’ situation. The advertisement in question was part of a set; the woman’s poster said “Is that all you got, boys?”

So the idea behind the advertisement became a bit more clear once I saw them side by side but the male poster still left me confused. Somebody had to come up with this statement. How didn’t it sound bizarre to them? Was this a norm when it came to cooking? Did chefs, cook book makers, restaurant owners, etc think this way?

I looked into Top Chef – the show in question – first. Top Chef is a show made by Bravo. Bravo is not a company with a strong history in cooking so I figured they wouldn’t have a good opinion on the matter. I turned back to Google to see if I could find any information about famous chefs. This Time Magazine article titled “The 13 Gods of Food” caught my eye. Out of a list of thirteen eight were men(technically seventeen two spots on the list were groups of people) four were woman and one was a company. I then looked up cook books and found this list of “The Top 10 Most Collectible Cookbooks”. Almost all of the cookbooks on the list had women listed as authors. Many of the title makes it clear that these are woman’s cookbooks or are made for the home.

So based on my (small amount) of research when publishing a cook book for the home it seems better to lean toward a woman author and woman cooks. This may not be the case when it comes to chefs; where cooking is an actual job.

I guess the next time I get told to get back to the kitchen I should ask if they mean one in the house or one in a restaurant.