Applying former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's cultural calculus to America's post-revolutionary food scene, I qualify as a gastronomic "girly man." That would be a wussy femme boy who confuses cooking with shopping, and preaches, or at least tolerates, the left coast's mantra of local, fresh, seasonal, sustainable ingredients. However you characterize my culinary/gender orientation, it's surely true that I shop, cook and eat at the feminized ingredient-driven western edge of America's gastronomical map.

But neither American coast holds a monopoly on foodie foolishness. Check out the super-masculine, technique-driven eastern edge of the map where the "manly men" live, like New York chefs David Chang of Momofuku, Wylie Dufresne of wd-50, and Anthony Bourdain. Just read through their three-way nose-to-tail bull session -- "Mediocrity: A Conversation" -- in the pages of Chang's new ultra-hip, McSweeney's-produced quarterly food journal, Lucky Peach. You'll get a good taste of modernist male gastronomy in word and image, if not deed.

I'm using the word gastronomy here ("the art and science of good eating") as contextualized by food and women's studies scholar Alice McLean. McLean, a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Davis, taught at Sweet Briar College in Virginia until recently moving back to the Bay Area. In her just-published book, "Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women's Food Writing," she writes:

"Since its invention in 1801 [by French poet Joseph Berchoux], the word gastronomy has been tightly linked to masculinity -- a well-educated, cosmopolitan, witty, and articulate masculinity to be precise."

That would certainly describe Lucky Peach's three gastroteers, though in the case of their "Mediocrity" article, I would add to McLean's list of flattering adjectives the word silly.

Fed up with mediocrity

Using sports metaphors, references to "going soft," and enough potty-mouthed F-bombs to earn Gordon Ramsay's seal of approval, Chang's gang is up to here with culinary mediocrity -- like those dread Kraft's Parmesan cheese shakers (Chang) and New York's overabundance of playing-it-safe Italian restaurants (Dufresne). Bourdain, shockingly un-boorish when he confesses to actually liking New York's Italian eateries ("Sometimes I don't want to think when I go out to dinner!"), nevertheless can't resist dropping an anti-mediocrity A-bomb of his own. That's "A" for "Alice," as in Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, the media's poster girl for California cuisine divinity and a favorite punch puppet for New York's predictable critique of California's "simple food" aesthetic.

Here's Chef Dufresne's case in chief:

We're talking about cooking. We are cooks. We should have a responsibility to cook. The fact that we're talking about the ingredients rather than what people are doing with the ingredients is a mistake. Do something to it. That's showing that you have a skill.

Well, we have heard all this before. But just as Chang, Dufresne and Bourdain can argue, with merit, that great ingredients are, by definition, assumed in great cooking, California's A-word polemicists could, and should, present a strong rebuttal: that great cooking is likewise assumed in its ingredio-centric, low-tech "home cooking." Simple is, after all, not so simple.

The pinnacle of good taste

With professional mediation for our feuding culinary coasts unlikely, and hoping to better understand, at least, the gender divide behind our tedious national food fights, I approached McLean for her scholarly take on the battle of the gastronomic sexes. Having built her new book on a solid base of earlier scholarship, McLean updates the gender analysis of gastronomy and takes it in new directions. She reveals how pioneering 20th-century women writers like M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas and Elizabeth David were able to penetrate male-dominated gastronomical discourse and challenge age-old stereotypes about men and women in the kitchen.

"Cookery," McLean responded via email, "has long been rigidly gendered, with women in charge of home cooking and focused on creating a sense of community and cohesion...." McLean's email continued:

Men, on the other hand, have long commandeered public cookery and, by extension, codified the techniques at work in professional kitchens. Male chefs also work competitively to be the dominant figure in their field. Modernist high-tech (aka molecular) cuisine exemplifies the masculine reach toward prestigious, elite cuisine that can only be prepared (and, for that matter, eaten) at considerable expense. It strives to define and materialize the pinnacle of "good taste."

Good taste is good. Manly good taste is, evidently, better. And what could be more gastronomically masculine than Lucky Peach's cover image, a close-up photo of a guy's hairy forearms and big meaty hands holding a huge dead chicken by its feet over a stock pot. Not exactly McLean's "pinnacle of good taste," but definitely manly.

Peaches and cream

After digesting Lucky Peach, I once again appealed to McLean, this time for her reactions to the new journal and its self-described "rant" on culinary mediocrity. And this time I invited her to my house for a traditional British cream tea, a girly man entertainment style if ever there was one. McLean confirmed over the phone that she had purchased Lucky Peach and would be delighted to come talk about it.

Over cups of Peet's Lion Mountain Keemun tea and slices of rich lemon shortbread from Berkeley's La Farine bakery, the food and women's studies scholar and I discoursed. And when I asked McLean how she would characterize the gastronomic sensibility of Chang/McSweeney's collaboration, she answered with a subtle blend of scholarly restraint and sly dig: "If I had the time, I'd love to gather a critical set of responses to the publication. I'd call my own contribution ‘Bruised Peaches.' "

"Perfect," I chuckled, "and my contribution to the collection could be an inverted spin on the Chang, Dufresne and Bourdain piece: ‘Conversation: A Mediocrity.' " McLean chuckled and asked me to pass the cream.

Zester Daily contributor L. John Harris, a native of Los Angeles, lives in Berkeley, Calif., where he attended art school at the University of California in the 1960s. In the 1970s, he worked at food shops and restaurants in Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto and wrote "The Book of Garlic" (1974). In the 1980s, Harris' publishing company, Aris Books, published cookbooks by Bay Area chefs and food writers, including "Women Chefs: A Collection of Portraits & Recipes from California's Culinary Pioneers (1987)" by Jim Burns and Betty Ann Brown. Harris' "Foodoodles: From the Museum of Culinary History" (www.foodoodles.com) won a 2011 Bay Area Independent Publishers Assn. (BAIPA) award in the category "Graphic Memoir."

Image: Chef's gender select headwear. Credit: L. John Harris

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I'm sorry that my article could not delve even deeper into the question of gender in contemporary American gastronomy. It would take a book to do a proper job, and even that might not be enough. In 1987 I published Jim Burns' book, Women Chefs: A Collection of Portraits and Recipes from California's Culinary Pioneers (Aris Books), and that was just a beginning. It was uncomfortable for a man to write about women in cuisine back then, so Jim invited his wife, Betty Ann Brown to co-author the book. Madeleine Kamman wrote the introduction and there were essays on women in the kitchen by Jane Grigson, William Rice and Lois Dwan. Of course California played the featured role in the book--that was over 20 years ago when California had finally established itself as a credible gastronomic force. It was a bit of a sensation back then, but the book was pretty much ignored on a national level. In my current Zester article Ive tried to expand the debate with a bicoastal perspective on gender and the feminine vs. masculine principle in the American restaurant scene. Lucky Peach's inaugural issue came along and virtually made my points for me, but I never set out to critique the magazine as a whole, nor its featured theme, Ramen. (Note the components in the word ramen--raw men!) What's sad, I think, is that there always seems to be an either/or element in these debates over modern vs. traditional, technique vs. ingredients in America's culinary discourse. Why? Can't, and shouldn't gastronomy embrace all persuasions? This kind of polarization does not exist, as far as I can tell, in Europe and especially France. The French model, with regional cuisines revolving around Paris as the hub, is inclusive. The strength of that model, it seems to me, and despite its trials and tribulations in recent years, is that Paris celebrates its diverse regional influences and serves as a showcase for them. Yes, there is high-tech modernist French food in Paris, but it does not discount or judge the simpler regional cuisines that have fed it. New York will never be Paris, an American gastronomic center celebrating American regional cuisines, though there are of course plenty of restaurants in NY that reflect American gastronomic diversity. The Lucky Peach/NY view expressed by Wyley Dufresne and David Chang, is that simple traditional/regional dishes, whether from California or Tuscany are technically boring and by definition "mediocre." Because they do not push the gastronomic envelope. Now that's ridiculous. But like I say, it would take a book to explore these issues and if I were still a book publisher I would look for the right author to write it. L. John Harris

ljohnharris , November 09, 2011

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I so agree with Nancy! He stopped just as it got interesting! I am no not interested in "molecular cuisine" and "modernist cooking." I was very disappointed in Lucky Peach and would like to see some real reviews of it!
Laura H

a guest , November 08, 2011

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Well, this is interesting, amusing, provocative, and beginning to be thoughtful. John Harris touches on a lot of issues that have troubled women involved with food (could that be 75% of the gender?) for a very long time. But it doesn't go far enough. Harris dropped the discourse just when it started to get interesting. Please continue the conversation, John, or is your mouth too full of lemon shortbread?
Nancy Jenkins

a guest , November 07, 2011

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John,

This is funny and fine. It illuminates for me my complete disinterest in molecular cuisine. And as anyone who's gone even two inches into their own psyche knows, the best men are a mix of masculinity and feminine soul, and the best women are a mix of femininity and masculine spirit. And that's also true of all great artists, male or female.

And I'll never forget your cartoon.

Thank you!

Kaaren Kitchell

a guest , November 03, 2011

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Delightful read. Honestly, I think I actually miss the days when I first worked in restaurants (1967) and no one knew who the chef of a particular restaurant was. There were no celebrity chefs.

cliffordwright , November 03, 2011