The Reach of a Chef Read Free Page B

better product, I can be a better chef than you.” Or to put it in more sweeping but no less accurate terms for the rest of us: We better take care of the earth or we’re gonna have shitty food, and having shitty food is no fun.

     

    For all chefs’ potential in society, though, much of the country has gone a little batty over them, according chefs a power and an intelligence few of them actually possess. This is a country, after all, that barely distinguishes an Olive Garden from an Olives, or an Outback Steakhouse from a Jean-Georges steak house; or even recognizes that all steak houses are a kind of fast-food restaurant dealing in heat-and-serve protein, no matter how fancy the side dishes. Nevertheless, what chefs do individually and collectively is important and potentially powerful, everything from running excellent restaurants to supporting good farmers and growers to raising money for countless causes. They’ve been especially productive, more so perhaps than any other industry in the world of commerce.
    One of the biggest organizations, the antihunger, antipoverty nonprofit Share Our Strength, for instance, marshals chefs to help raise about $20 million a year, according to its founder and executive director, Bill Shore. Shore guesses that nationally, the totals that chefs raise for charities are closer to $100 million annually.
    In this profession that has undergone rapid advancement and enjoyed a sudden elevation in esteem, the role of the chef has become increasingly specialized. For these reasons and the seemingly endless range of potential work, chefs often don’t understand their role anymore or who they should be as a chef. I’d set out again to explore the nature of this work and the ways it was changing, both for the chefs, in all their varying capacities and the decisions they face in this new food world, and for the people for whom they do the work—us, the cooking-struck, chef-adoring, restaurant-crazy consumers.

CHAPTER 3

Shadow Urge

    On the other hand, it could be me —maybe I needed to understand the work better, to get to the source of my own enduring fascination with it. Maybe it’s just me who’s chef-struck. Maybe I’ve had my head in ovens too long. Or maybe not long enough—maybe I’m not fully baked and that’s why I keep returning to the brutal-elegant contradiction of the restaurant kitchen and the work of the professional cook.

     

    I had first entered the mysterious world of the chef and the professional kitchen via the gauntlet of a “Skills” kitchen at the Culinary Institute of America, run by Chef Michael Pardus. I was thirty-two. I’d been a hobby cook since fourth grade when, an only child bored after school, I decided to bake a pie. I’d just seen Julia Child do it on TV. She’d made an apple pie seem easy and fun. It was the middle of a Cleveland winter, 1973, and I don’t think we had a fresh fruit in the house, but I located a can of pears in syrup back in a cupboard and so moved forward with my canned-pear pie. (I’d love to know a ballpark figure of how many people Julia inspired. I’m sure we’d circle the globe if we all lay down head to foot. Not even counting the people she inspired who went on to do their own teaching and inspiring, surely an exponential figure.)
    The pie itself was not worth eating as I recall (serious crust problems owing to the soaked fruit), but I’d loved making it, and so would continue cooking, just as I would writing, which I had also begun to do at this same age. The writing was no more worth reading than the pie was worth eating, but I’d liked the process of writing as much as I’d enjoyed the process of cooking, enough to keep on doing both. I’ve always suspected that for me, the act of cooking and the act of writing are linked, that the desire to cook and the compulsion to write arise out of the same spot in my unconscious, as two different manifestations of the same innate urge.
    In my case, the food got better