Celebrities vs. Heroes in the Kitchen:
Are you idolizing the right people?
More than anyone else, who influences what we eat?
The answer is simple: Chefs.
A great Chef can be a taste maker, innovator and cheerleader for great food. However, not every great Chef has the exposure required to influence culinary trends. If not them, then who does? Well, the Chefs you see on TV have the exposure required to affect culinary change, and we accept their influence because they’re on TV. After all, a Chefs presence on television must mean they’ve attained some level of greatness in their field, right? True. No Chef gets on TV because they’ve failed at cooking. The problem is TV Chefs tend to forget what it is that has made them famous in the first place: great ingredients. Not their knife skills, or business acumen, or their hair cut.
No Chef has ever succeeded without having access to high quality, delicious ingredients.
What makes a Celebrity? I don’t know, but I think it has something to do with hair and make-up, and an ability to promote yourself as a brand. Yet in many cases, celebrities are so heavily pressured to maintain their personal “brand” that they forget what it was that made them famous in the first place. The point is, a celebrity — unless their only skill is being famous — must forgo that which made them famous in order to maintain their celebrity status.
This is nowhere more clear than in the example of the Celebrity Chef. I’m not talking about amazing chefs who have attainted a level of notoriety for their skill and are asked to consult, direct or create outside of their own restaurants. No, these chefs are the true heroes in the cooking world. Celebrity Chefs are the ones you see on TV competing against each other for their share of screen time, more so than competing for excellence in their field. These celebrities should not be our culinary idols.
The only way there can be a disconnect between Chef and cooking is through a greater disconnection between food and community.
In many ways, food is ignored, or at least taken for granted at the highest level of Chef worship. Plating is far more important when snapping a photo of your dinner for Instagram: you simply cannot take a picture of terroir, sustainability, or ethical farming practices on a plate. We might give a nod to the locale of certain ingredients (some ingredients have attained celebrity status of their own: Jamón Iberico, Perigord truffles, Champagne, etc.) but these celebrity ingredients are worshipped separately from the chef who made the dish using the ingredient.
There are humbler ingredients, and humbler producers that should be remembered more so than those people and ingredients we have been taught to idolize. A well raised, organic, heirloom potato (that can be as satisfying as any $900 tin of caviar or $500 ham from Spain) is my hero.
At Local Line, we think there’s a big difference between a celebrity chef and a food hero. True food heroes should be recognized for their efforts to revolutionize their field, but in many cases, they are overshadowed by Celebrity Chefs.
If you’re a food hero you’re committed to two things: innovation in your craft, and saving people from culinary ignorance. Your innovation goes deeper than pretty plating. You innovate with ingredients; the best ingredients. You save your guests from sub-par culinary experiences and cause them to acknowledge the ingredients, giving the food the credit it deserves.
But how can we measure a Chef’s heroic efforts?
Without celebrity status, how can a Chef affect the greater food community? A Chef’s heroism can be measured by their over-all impact on the culture of cooking, and the greater culture of eating that everyone on the planet is party to. As far as affecting the global culture of eating without celebrity status, we remember La Varenne, Careme, and Escoffier whose efforts to codify cuisine came long before the Food Network. We need to be cautious that the Chefs we idolize today are not the ones that have stopped innovating and started self-promoting. The world is not pushed forward by the hands of celebrities. Our world is moved forward by industry heroes who continually push the boundaries of their field in order to improve life for everyone. We therefore need not look at celebrity chefs to guide our food culture, but the unsung hero chefs supporting the communities they live in, and innovating with the products available to them.
Food needs heroes, not celebrities.
At Local Line, we believe the food heroes of today are the Chefs whose names you don’t know because they’re innovating ways to keep you fed sustainably, healthily, and deliciously. Our Chef heroes are working hand in glove with our local producers to strengthen local food systems and economies. In our ideal world, a Chef sourcing local food can prove through the menu that strong local food systems are sustainable, scalable and safe. This way, the food is actually the hero, and the chef becomes the facilitator of the relationship between the hero and the saved.
At the end of the day, we feel like celebrity chefs have stopped promoting the food, and started promoting themselves. They may promote themselves as an expert in their field, but here’s an interesting thing about cooking specifically: there is always someone better than the best, and I guarantee no one knows their name. Regardless of what the Food Network tells us, America’s best baker, or Canada’s top chef is someone you’ve never heard of. It’s someone who would rather be in the kitchen working with great ingredients, rather than on TV telling you how great they are.
So next time you’re out to dinner, find a Chef supporting their local farmers and food producers and give them your undivided attention. At the least you’ll have a great meal, and maybe, you might learn something about what it truly means to be a culinary hero.
