Nonna got none

Watching Jamie Oliver traipsing around Italy pre-quarantine praising all the nonnas he meets along the way for their amazing cooking. All of these nonnas are home cooks though. One of the things that really annoys me about the food industry is that all these male chefs run around thanking their mums or their grandmas for inspiring their careers and being the best cook they've ever met, and yet none of these mums or grandmas are ever professional chefs in their own right, and the industry itself might be very sexist.

Cooking is the same labour, whether performed in the home or in a professional kitchen, and yet the returns are so different depending on which sphere you perform that labour in. What's more, women are much more likely to perform that labour in the household, but the same labour in a professional kitchen is much more likely to be performed by men.

When a woman performs that labour in the household, her anticipated return is the health and wellbeing of her family - not saying this is a selfless incentive, but it certainly isn't selfish. When a male chef performs that same labour in a professional kitchen, the returns on his labour go to him alone.

This is almost an appropriation of sorts - when members of an advantaged caste (a gender-based one in this case) adopt elements of cooking and food culture from members of a disadvantaged caste (homebound females) for their own gain and distorting certain elements of that culture so that its original meaning is lost (i.e. the fact that home-cooked food is made with love without expectation of direct reciprocation, especially that of a monetary kind).

Alice: It's not fair, women don't get paid for doing any of this work in the home and their sons get to go out and sell something that their mums and grandmas provided that wasn't for sale [or I said something like that]. Why aren't there more female chefs? 

Standard bloke: But what if cooking at home is what women want to do?

Alice: Is it what they want to do or is it what society tells them to want?

If we expect context, culture and norms to have no effect, we would expect 50% of people who cook to be females and 50% to be males, and we would also expect the same breakdown when we look at who cooks for money and who cooks at home. And yet among home cooks, 80% are female, whereas among professional cooks only 17% are (I'm just citing rough stats from different countries, but you get the gist). Are you telling me that this is somehow a naturally occurring phenomenon? That somehow a majority of women independently came to the (rather unselfish and surprising) conclusion that instead of commanding a much higher rate in the market for their cooking, they'd prefer do it at home for no recognition or money? You may say that cooking is something people should do out of love, but then that begs the question - why do men only cook when they get paid to do it, can they not do it out of love too?