 and welcome to the British Library food season which is generously supported by KitchenAid. My name is Angela Clutton, it's my complete pleasure to be the guest director of the food season working with Polly Russell who founded the season four years ago and is its curator. Thank you for joining us for tonight's event, it's set to be a fascinating conversation about food and gender and masculinity in particular. Little housekeeping to get through before we get started, you should be able to see tabs on screen where you can give feedback on the event, you'll be able to find a bookshop, you can read a little bit more about tonight's speakers or make a donation to support the work of the British Library. You might also feel the need to submit a question to one of our speakers and so there's a box under the video where you can do that too and you'll find social media links so you can join in the conversation on other platforms. Also there's a competition being run in connection with KitchenAid who are our supporters and you can win a copy of The Pyrene by Karen Franklin, a place on the virtual cooking class and a set of KitchenAid cordless appliances. And so to tonight's event, a conversation between Tom Carage and Professor Emily Kontoa led by Zoe Williams. I'm going to let Zoe introduce Tom and Emily but first a little background on Zoe herself. Zoe Williams has been a columnist on The Garden since 2000 and previously she wrote a column for London Evening Standard and reviewed restaurants for the Sunday Telegraph. Her broadcasting work includes Question Time, The Politics Show and News Night for the BBC, Dispatches and the Channel 4 News of Channel 4, a paper review for Sky News. Appearances on today's programme, Women's Hour, PM and the World Tonight for BBC's Radio 4. We are in the very same pounds for tonight and so Zoe over to you. Thank you Angela and thank you for that introduction. Good evening everybody. I will more or less guarantee to you that this is the last event any of us will do before we get our hair cut so forgive this disrespectful appearance. It's delightful to be hosting this conversation tonight between Emily Kontoa and Tom Carage. Emily Kontoa is the Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa and we're here tonight to discuss her book Diners, Dudes and Diets, How Gender and Power Collide in Food, Media and Culture. She's got qualifications up the wazoo in how the culture talks about these things, her PhD from Brown, three separate masters and she also writes widely in popular outlets, NBC News, Jezebel, Nursing Clio and has appeared on many popular discussion platforms. Tom Carage meanwhile works as a chef, worked as a chef in restaurants across Britain before he decided to set up the hand and flowers with his wife and it went on to become the first and only pub in the world to be awarded to Michelin stars. I've been lucky enough to go there and all I can say is you should too. He's also a well-known TV personality, his series includes Saving Britain's Pubs and he's been at the helm of the BBC's Bake Off, Creme de la Creme and Food and Drink. So welcome both of you and thank you so much for joining us for this discussion. Emily kick us off with describing your book. What does it explore and why did you think that needed exploring? Certainly so I'm looking at a particular kind of masculinity, the dude. This is the slacker, the average or the even below average guy and I was really interested in how he existed at a particular historical moment in a new and profound way during this great recession era in the United States. A moment when it was harder for a lot of men to achieve these sort of ideals of masculinity, to be a breadwinner, to be competitive, to be assertive, to be aggressive and so instead the dude just slacks off, right? He opts out of that struggle and so I was so fascinated as I saw the food media and advertising industries deploying the dude to sell products that had been perceived as feminine. Through the dude they could sell to men things like Diet Coke which the UK quickly called bloke Coke and making fun of sort of the entire premise. But then also things like yogurt, weight loss programs, cookbooks meant for everyday men to cook at home, cook television and so looking at these products tells a story about a moment of masculine masculinity crisis and about American identity in the 21st century. Why was he considered like such a surefire kind of persona for men to enter that characteristically female world? I mean what was it in the dude because he's not an aspirational figure? No, so the idea is that the dude engages with food at this cool insincere distance so there's no fear, right? This is going to impinge upon his masculinity whether he's going to cook every day the way that a mom would or to go on Weight Watchers, right? A popular commercial weight loss program. There's no risk to his masculinity when he dons the dude instead of trying to be Superman, right? It's a different way of being a man that carried less risk at a particular time. That's so interesting and when did he first appear? Is this a 90s thing? It feels very 90s. So we definitely see the dude in pop culture in a big way in the 90s. You might know the big Lebowski, right? The dude that might be what it made you think of. So there are definitely examples in popular culture and in cinema in particular, but the dude as you know an actual masculine figure goes back a hundred years. Maybe another example folks might know is the idea of dude ranches. In the early 20th century there was this fear that white masculinity was sort of losing its verve and its power and this idea that men could go to the American West, this wild untamed land as it was framed to sort of reclaim their masculinity. So we see that sort of the dude be discussed as well. And then there's also aspects of sort of the 60s, the 70s, a counter-cultural moment, the surfy drugger dude. Feel a little bit of that in this 21st century dude as well. And in a sense when you as you describe the dude as this kind of entry point for typically kind of female anxieties like weight and you know appearance and everything else, it sort of implies that the kind of classic picture of masculinity is somebody who never thinks about food. Do you think that's true? I don't think it's true, but I think there are a lot of areas of our culture that have applied this quite binary understanding of masculinity and femininity. What does a man do? What does a woman do? To the world of food. So we see it in things like domestic food labor versus who cooks in professional kitchens and the idea of the cook versus the chef. But food advertising has also been one of these spaces. We're very limited, constraining ideas of masculinity and femininity have come to be attached to particular foods, ingredients, flavors, appetites, bodies that circulate in lots of different ways. And do you think there was ever an intention? Because obviously with women there was always a drive to foster insecurity with a mind to selling more diet products. But is it possible to make the dude insecure about his body? Or is the definition of a dude that he's never insecure? I think that's what makes the dude work so well in a commercial space, right? That he's a way to skirt the anxiety. Part of what I argue with weight loss in particular is that these weight loss programs construct a sort of weight loss closet, right? The way we think about being in the closet with one's sexuality, about being able to be who you are authentically in the world and feel safe. That these weight loss programs actually sort of encouraged men to diet as a secret, right? When we look at the way Weight Watchers advertised their product to men in a way that no one had to know. And it was all online, right? And you weren't going to change your diet. It was just going to be easy and like a video game, right? They use this language. I think it's quite disrespectful, right? Even to men's intelligence as they think about their bodies and the right they should have to be emotional and to recognize weight loss is hard. You need support to do it sometimes. Then a lot of these weight loss programs sort of shut that down in the moments that I'm looking at their advertising campaigns. Yeah. Tom, do you recognize those kind of binaries? First of all, that binary between the chef and the cook, the chef being a masculine thing and the cook being a feminine thing. Do you think that's true universally, globally? Yeah, kind of because from my point of view, when I went into a kitchen started working as a chef, it wasn't about food. It's about the industry, the life, the job, the lifestyle. It's a manual labor. It's hard work. It's one of those spaces that it's kind of most kitchens of male dominated, particularly when I started cooking in the very early 90s. Most kitchens were full of male chefs with knives and fire and banter and late nights and party times and just kind of it was a very much a not a lad kind of culture, but it was very much that manual style of work. Very similar to if I hadn't been a chef, I may well have been on a building site or I may well have been working, you know, as a delivery man or it may well like those sorts of just full on manual laboring style of jobs. But the other thing that then came with it is the food. And then all of a sudden you see a creative element. You see the opportunity to go from being from cooking, which is what you're actually doing to becoming a chef, which is understanding the process and falling in love with the people and the passion that's surrounded with the world of hospitality and food. All of a sudden then for many chefs, it becomes a whole new career and a new space. Most chefs will tell you, particularly my age, that they fell into it was an accident, something that kind of happened in industry that they walked into and suddenly fell in love with as it grew. And that isn't much more to do with the environment, which at that point was much more in the way of manual labour without an Instagram world. You know, now the world of hospitality and the career itself is much more, it's glamourized. It is exciting. You can visit anywhere in the world by just visiting pictures on your phone. And that makes it incredibly exciting. When I first went into it, there was no internet. There was, you know, you just saw a French cookery book and the things that you heard of whispers and whatever else in other kitchens. And then you went to go visit other restaurants to see new food. So at that point, it was still very much hands-on working hard to understand what's going on in the rest of the industry. Now that it's a much more exciting and eclectic world of pictures and vibrancy and world cuisine that then does lend itself to being much more of a, I suppose, a more embrace world to be in. So yes, I think that there's many chefs and cooks and I suppose men my age that understand being a chef and being around food. There is a difference between being a chef and a cook, someone who cooks and someone who is a chef. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm really interested in you using the word lad there because there is, you know, there's a dude sensibility and there's a lad sensibility. I'm not sure how much an American audience would even understand the word lad, but it's, you know, it's hyper blokeish, but it's got a lot of that kind of playful Big Lebowski attitude to it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, if you think, I mean, when I first started cooking, you know, early nineties, Britpop culture was massive, you know, the Liam Gallagher, the blur oasis, the kind of, you know, that whole world, the art world, the, you know, where being slightly naughty, anti-establishment, you know, the Labour Party coming in with Tony Blair, all of this kind of, there was this incredible feeling that drove forward this kind of slightly more do what you want, say what you want attitude. Now, and there was a positive, strong attitude of where we were. And then in terms of cooking, we were beginning to set the world alive. We were beginning to become recognized, you know, for 30 years previously, we've been seeing some of the worst food culture in the world. And now, I mean, now, right here and now, this day and age, we're one of the best food cultures in the world, because we've been so eclectic in our world cuisines that we've taken on and the way we've driven it. But at that point, there was this drive to, to become, and it was quite laddish, but the whole of the country in the early nineties was quite laddish. People were, people were being recognized for jobs and positions that weren't doctors, lawyers, solicitors, you know, they were people that would be recognizers, artists, musicians, and then Marco Pierre White, that movement there, and chefs, it was all becoming quite rock and roll. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the rock and roll and the playfulness, I think, kind of tied in with each other. I mean, Emily, is there a sense in which this kind of initiation of the dude as a creature in cooking brought a sense of humor to food that food typically does not have? It's, it can be a source of guilt. It can be a source of pleasure. There's very little actual genuine amusement in food culture, or is that not fair? No, I think the optimistic sort of generous read of the dude is that he is ironic and playful. And so when we think about dude food as sort of a genre of cuisine, that it is, right, playfully exaggerated. I think one of the examples I often show when I give talks is, you know, this isn't just a cheeseburger when we're talking about dude food. Burgers Priest in Canada, right? They have two patties and gigantic onion rings within it. And then there aren't buns, it's grilled cheese sandwiches instead. It's this purposeful sort of playing with, you know, the grammar of a meal, really simple plating, and this sort of purposeful pushing back of ideas about like nutritional moderation and following rules and restraining your appetites that it is. It's a distinctly playful cuisine. I think where it pushes a line that we need to think about seriously, though, is sort of the inherent privilege to the dude and to the lad, right, to be able to push back, for example, against second-wave feminism, against the sort of increasing rights and roles of women that that's a part of both the dude and the lad culture. And so thinking about how, you know, dude food, if that's all you ate, if we extended that logic across a food system, it would be a quite destructive one, right? If we all just would eat and did whatever we wanted. As we think about a collective good, as we think about, you know, the future of food, the future of the earth that we're all working towards right now. Yeah. I mean, to linger for a second on that kind of what makes what makes a kind of masculine food culture and what and where food culture kind of intersects with gender expectations and stereotypes, what I thought was really interesting, what you were saying, Tom, was that, you know, it started off as a very kind of macho thing and you could have been on a building site, but it kind of, it went into somewhere very creative and it became almost like a frontier, a way you could be acceptably macho and extremely creative at the same time. If you think about kind of you and Gordon Ramsay, you know, that culture was like men are allowed to create and it doesn't diminish their masculinity. Was that something that ever occurred to you when you started out? No, absolutely not. No, I fell in love with the industry because you knew the social life was amazing. Like late nights, late night drinking bars, being able to party hard and that kind of world I fell in love with and absolutely still love it. You know, if you want, you can travel anywhere in the world, you get on a plane overnight as a bunch of chefs that you're cooking somewhere else and you can land in a city and within two hours, chefs would have found that bar, the place where everyone, where you're not supposed to be, you know, there is that kind of, that, you know, that enjoyment of being within that industry is exciting. It creates you, you're not scared of not going to bed, you're not scared of playing hard, working hard, getting on with things and then, but you're right, the creativity is something that has generated and grown, you know, so I've now been in the industry for 30 years and for the last eight or nine of it, I haven't drunk. So, you know, I'm not that person anymore and I've become much more in the world of a restaurateur and understanding and then, as I see young chefs enter in our world now and our kitchens and their energy for it is very different for the reasons why I entered into it because they are already in that world of looking at the creativity, the excitement, the travel, the places that they can go, the food that they can touch, seed, smell, you know, it becomes a, it's now become all about world cuisine. But the beautiful thing about the way that food and food culture, particularly in this country, has grown and I'm sure in the States as well, where chefs have been creative and they've seen stuff and we've talked about food and other, then from a male dominated world, it's now, there's very much, I mean, hugely eclectic, it's an amazing industry to be in that's very abrasive of both sexes, you know. So, the hours that have worked, that kind of aggressive hard kitchens as much more time down now, they're still adrenaline fueled, so they're still exciting to be a part of, but it's very much, it's much smoother, it's much more rounded and it allows people to grow and progress within their careers massively. But what that does, that creativity, that excitement is then through the world of media, television, social media, magazines, everything that you can, where we then try to explain cooking processes before it was very, you know, 20 years ago, no one shared recipes, everyone hid them away, nobody wanted to share anything, it was all about what we did. Now we want to share experiences, we want to teach, we want to show, and then that's then picked up by many people at home and this is where, where I think men, dudes, like my age that I've never cooked before, the last five, 10 years have started picking up cookbooks, have started being interesting in lighting barbecues, being interesting in slow-braising briskets of beef, or creating the best burgers that they can ever find. So that world of being, it's now been seen as something that everybody does, it's not just, you know, you don't just get married anymore and the wife stays at home and cooks for the kids and you go out to work, it's now become much more embracing as a culture and men are hugely involved in the cooking, in fact, you know, a huge amount of people that I meet and cook with and come across food demos and everything else are men and male dominated, where they thoroughly enjoy being a part of that kitchen and of that food world. And what, I mean, how much difference is it made to the world of the chef that women are now allowed in professional kitchens and is that even true? Do you have a good gender split in a professional kitchen? Yeah, I mean, the world of, I mean, they're allowed, they've always been allowed, but that adrenaline kind of buzz and spark is massive and it's still there and it still exists, but all of the aggression and the nastiness and the hard times that kitchens used to have in the early 90s that with reputation, completely died down. Okay, there's one or two spaces that are still very, still quite full on, but it could be full on and a nice place to work. And that has massively been a huge amount of the uptake of female chefs. And yes, okay, it is still slightly disproportionate, but you know, there's, we've got much within our team, we've got a huge amount of females that work within the industry. Sarah, who's my head chef in Manchester, she's been with us for eight or nine years and has grown within the company as a young commie chef up to, she's now head chef and head chef of one of the restaurants in Manchester and around her, she's built a team that naturally kind of gravitates being female and it's female led that with her, there's chefs in her kitchen, there's many more female chefs, because it becomes a safe space for them to be that they feel that they can grow. However, the environment is still exactly the same, it's no different, it's led, you know, it doesn't matter if you're male or female, it's still, Sarah is still head chef, when she says something people jump and it still happens. So it's still, you know, it makes no difference where, whether she's male or female or what it is that there appears to be a much, I suppose, other female chefs, young female chefs feel that they are in safer hands and the ability to learn from someone who's come through with those experiences. Yeah, Emily, if we can just drill back into the kind of gender implications of the dude as a type, what do you feel like it did have a policing imperative, like it was designed to police women or keep women in a certain sport? The dude created some flexibility for some men who already had a significant degree of privilege in society, right, white straight men, this made it even easier for them to be able to move through the world. But for women, it doesn't dismantle anything, I think that's what's interesting about the dude, that it celebrates the man who slacks, but it doesn't really do anything to dismantle expectations for women, for women's bodies, for mothers, for those sorts of things. And so when we think about, you know, that application of gender to the restaurant space, at least in the United States, right, like we definitely have gender equitable graduations from culinary school, but we're still at, I think it's around 80% of head chef positions are held by men, that there's still quite a disparity for women to get the loans that they need to be able to open up a restaurant to get the kinds of critical attention they need from reviewers. And then when we look at analyses of how critics write about male chefs versus female chefs, they're far more likely, although I think there's some awareness of this pattern now that we would call men, right, innovators, geniuses, empire builders, while women would often, right, be heralded that they were nurturing, right, and how they worked with their teams, that they had this home cooking sort of approach that they were using family recipes, that we sometimes still see these gender conventions play out in how we characterize the work of male versus female chefs. And media does have a lot to do with it, right, everything from, you know, newspapers to films to this social media world that has given chefs of both genders, right, some opportunity to have their own voice, right, to speak directly to their customers. But with a colleague, we just finished editing together a book about food Instagram and how it sort of changed the expectations for the food world, the idea of Instagram ability, right, are we creating dishes that are beautiful, so that we can get a line out the door versus these ideas, right, of sort of comforting ugly food, right, they're like really mean, it can be so delicious, right, but are they still aesthetically pleasing by sort of these logics and expectations that Instagram that others sort of visually forward social media expect? And does Instagram sort of lead people towards a certain way of cooking and eating and expecting that isn't necessarily about tastes, and isn't even necessarily about the plate appeal is more about photogenia? Yes, exactly. That's about what it looks like. Brilliant, Severin, right, is famous for saying, you know, tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you who you are. And with social media, we've sort of seen that transform of, you know, you are what you post, that what you're sharing with the world, right, is how you demonstrate what you've eaten. And so I think in looking at how things, you know, like TikTok videos, right, do those encourage people to cook, to try a new recipe, to actually sort of get into the kitchen. I think one of the concepts that both sort of scholars and food writers have like to play with is this idea of food porn. And so part of that theory is the idea that the food is so aspirational, right, it is so out of reach, it is so beautiful, that it's actually quite disincentivizing, disempowering for the everyday person to feel like they could acquire those ingredients, use those techniques, make that beautiful, beautiful food at home themselves. So it has both, right, that I think it encourages some folks to get excited and to want to learn those skills and to try them for themselves. But for others, I think it makes it seem so far out of reach that they don't really dive in. Tom, have you found Instagram like as a, personally, have you, do you find it a pressure? Do you find it a great way to communicate? Or do you just keep, do you just note the whole business? Yeah, listen, I love social media. Like, I'm over two platforms of it. I mean, Facebook is kind of controlled by a team. But Instagram and Twitter, Twitter for me, I'm all over from news, newsfeed. I really enjoyed to find out what's going on. It's been, it's been brilliant this year, and particularly for understanding like political standpoints of what's happening in the industry. And Twitter, it's very fast acting has been amazing. But Instagram, I absolutely love. And I have to be honest, that social media, I'm quite lucky I take with a complete pinch of salt, right? So it's something that just exists. And it's a great way of talking about things and throw business out there and whatever else that happens, if it disappears. But you've seen from somebody like Marcus Rashford this year, who is promoted and used social media for such a force of good of creating change that is around food and is amazing and incredible. And then Instagram, for me, is brilliant. It's a great way for chefs within the industry to be able to showcase what they do around the world. It creates a world food audience. We might be looking here about what somebody's cooking in Singapore that's incredible or looking over at what someone, Thomas Keller's overdoing over in the States. And from a young chef's point of view, it helps drive interest about where they want to go when I was a young chef. All I wanted to do was leave the West country and move and work in London. But there were many young chefs that were working in London that wanted to go to France because that was the space. Now the young chefs are going, I want to go to Scandinavia. I want to go to, I want to go to the States. I want to go to Singapore. I want to go anywhere. There's so many incredible restaurants that are out there and seeing. The one problem that we do create within industry-wise through Instagram is that when you are a young chef, and it's one thing that we always pick up on when we have chefs coming through for trials and for positions and jobs in our restaurants, particularly at the Hand of Flowers, which is the two-star space. The young chef comes in for the day and they're doing stuff and at lunchtime the dishes are going up on the pass and they're being sent out. And they're there taking pictures of it because they're really interested in the finished picture. I mean, that's fine. That's great. But all you've done is taken a picture of something that's a picture. You don't know what it tastes like. It's the chefs that are there, the young chefs that are looking at the produce coming in in this raw state. The ones that are excited about the new season asparagus, the morels, the beautiful chickens, the amazing beef that's coming in, the fantastic daily-day-bought fish that we demand is 10 out of 10 from the harbour side. All of this sort of stuff. They're excited about the ingredient and they're taking pictures of that. Then you know that this is somebody who's going to be a fantastic cook. This is someone who's got a real interest in food from the grassroot level for the purpose of creating food. If your only interest is in the finished product of what that finished picture looks like, then you're not going to go that far because when you create a dish and you send it out to the customer, it only looks like that dish wants it. It will only look that pretty once. If you've created something and it tastes rubbish but it looks beautiful, it goes out to the guests. They see it. They go, wow, this is beautiful. They cut it. They move it. Straight away, the picture is destroyed. The pretty picture is gone. Now they eat it. So it now looks rubbish and it tastes rubbish. What you want, you want product that tastes amazing. It doesn't matter really what it looks like at the end. As long as it tastes amazing. And that's the most important thing ever of everything. Do you ever worry that Instagram has a democratising, maybe an effect that's too democratising? So you get somebody like Joe Wicks who becomes super famous for food that really looks quite mediocre. I mean, no offence to him. No, absolutely not. Now listen, social media is incredible for getting messages out there. Instagram isn't just there for a foodie audience. There's a foodie audience listening and watching this but it's there for everybody. And what Joe Wicks said, we all eat and hopefully we should all eat three meals a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. And I had a bowl of yoghurt this morning with some grapes. That's not Instagramable but it's some yoghurt with some grapes. We're not all eating pretty pictures all the time. Instagram is a force for good. Joe Wicks is a hero. He's an absolute superstar for what he does is create, showing people how quick and simple and easy it is to cook, to put recipes together that taste nice, that are healthy, that are just trying. It's an amazing, you have to view it in the right space. It's an incredible tool for creating all sorts as well as showing top three-star restaurants around the world. It's also showing people how to just do very, very simple cookery or gnarly old carrots, but what you can do with them to make them all taste nice. I think for me social media is constantly a force for good. It's for good but that's because I've got thick skin and I pay no attention to anybody who's telling me it's rubbish. Emily, the reason I mentioned Joe Wicks is because he struck me as the absolute polar opposite as your dude. He's like this incredibly hardworking. He takes things very seriously. He takes his fitness very seriously. He takes everybody else's fitness very seriously. Like a really conscientious young man or to the opposite of the dude, but I'd love for you to describe for a British audience some of the examples of dude culture that you talk about in your book. Yes, so some of the examples that I look at, we talked about some of the dude food examples. There were other advertising campaigns that some of them for like convenience foods. So things like, you know, Velveeta, shells and cheese, right? That it's microwaveable. And so because these marketers feel this anxiety, right? Of like, oh, it's cooking masculine enough, right? The microwave, right? Is this masculine space, right? You're just heating something up like it doesn't impinge upon any of that. And so their ad campaign, right, was, you know, cook like that guy you know, right? That he's just cool. They celebrate, you know, folks who, you know, work at a mall selling remote control helicopters, right? That's his job, right? That he gets to, he gets paid to play. That that's the sort of career that we're celebrating. But I resonate with these ideas about sort of hard work and the shift within, you know, the public's perception of chefs within the sort of celebrity frame that it has wholly transitioned from a sort of blue collar back of the house. No one ever wants to meet you sort of a career to this sort of celebrity profession, right? The chefs are rock stars. Chefs are these members of the creative industries, right? Who people do want to know. I love that, like, on the website, right? It's like, yes, if I'm here, you can come say hello, right? People would want to come not just to eat your food, Tom, but to meet you, right? To brush up the brilliance of, you know, this great chef they've read about, they've seen on Instagram, who they've seen on television. And so this idea of the hard work in the manual labor that used to construct, right? A sort of constrained blue collar idea of the cook and the chef. Those ideas of working class masculinity, like also feed into particular ideas, right, about real men. And so it was so fascinating when I looked at cookbooks from the early 20th century that were being marketed to men. Sometimes they would have a guy on the cover, like with a tool belt full of kitchen tools, right? Or in the language to men, you know, telling how to outfit your home kitchen, right? If you've never cooked before, your guy, you want to start cooking, they show little images, right? Like a red toolbox, like you would have in the garage, right? To translate this language of like, you know, this is the hammer, so this is the meat grinder, right? Like having this metaphor of working class masculinity is blue collar kind of brawny idea of being able to bring the construction worker in to the language of a cookbook to be able to masculinize cooking, even for a male audience that might define themselves as foodies that are interested to buy a cookbook. And so I think that might not necessarily be how actual men felt, right? When they were buying a cookbook or wanting to cook at home or wanting to try out a recipe. But I've been fascinated in how these industries only felt like they could speak to men through those constrained terms in those really limited ways. Yeah, I want to drill in more about the class, the class dimension to the images of masculinity in cooking. First, I just want to remind the audience, you know, you can ask a question. And if you're burning to make me change direction, you could do that, you have that power. So just smash it into the chat box underneath. Tom, when you started, I'm guessing like this is kind of late 90s. It wasn't, you didn't get many posh men in the kitchen and it was a kind of working class route into something creative. Do you think that's still true? Has it changed? And has it changed in a in a good way or about? You're very kind by saying the late 90s, you're very kind in fact, but it was very early 90s. So in 1991, I walked into a kitchen and it was bad. But yeah, at that point, it was pretty, was it working class? Yes and no, what it does what kitchens have got is that they've always attracted, I don't know, people with a slightly left field way of life, waves and strays of societies, people that have found themselves in a kitchen space. Some have been career driven, they've always wanted to do it since they've left school, but some most kind of fall into it. They kind of, they end up going there because it's just something that they did. They started as a barman and then they filled in as a kitchen one night and like myself, I started washing up and fell in love with that space, that energy. So there's always been an eclectic mix of people within the kitchen. Yes, I suppose a lot of the hard grafted jobs always felt like it was guys or kids that were from a not necessarily an academic background. But it has always had people that have been very, the food knowledge, the understanding of how to create, if you look at someone like Hugh Ferney Wittenstall who and Jamie Oliver, both of which were working at the River Cafe, a mission-starred space, Jamie Oliver, young lad from Essex, whose parents owned a pub, gone on and done something incredible and amazing, Hugh Ferney Wittenstall, an eating educated chap who ended up working in a kitchen that is now, you know, gone campaigning and has his own kind of restaurants set up as well. So there's one kitchen with two very, very different kind of background of people who have then gone on to create television and media personas that they've driven into a fantastic space. But now, yeah, there's a huge amount of, I mean, our kitchens, for example, are full of many, many different people. It's the beautiful thing about the professional world of hospitality is that it is the most embracing. It doesn't matter on religion, colour, race, sexuality, education, financial background, none of it matters. As long as you're having fun creating and cooking food and you're all driven to this one goal. But I have a head chef in one restaurant that has a degree in forensic science who decided to not do that. He's decided to become a cook and he's now a head chef at the Mission-Star Oliver's own. And then there's myself, who has very little in the way of any qualifications, but a number of businesses, you know, so we do, you know, I couldn't sit down and tell him how to solve a crime. So, you know, it does create two very different kinds of people. Yeah. Emily, I'd love to drill in a bit on class with the work you've done, because the way you describe it, it sounds like it's very much the kind of the playfulness of the dude in food. It was sort of masked an attempt to maintain very traditional gender splits. But do you think the same is true of maintaining class divisions? Do you think there's something sort of a little bit conservative underneath the message? Yes, I think both come from, you know, a sense of sort of gender anxiety, right, of holding on to that idea of manhood at a moment when maybe you can achieve some of the signs or symbols or, you know, typical life accolades, right, like being able to own a home or having a career that you feel established in, for example, looking at the dude during the Great Recession years in the United States, right, that was a very difficult situation. And so in thinking about the anxiety around social class as well, of being able to establish oneself, that because these these ideals about masculinity are often tied up with being the breadwinner in your family, right, of being successful in your career, that these understandings of being a quote unquote real man have a lot to do with social class. And so I find dude food so interesting in that it purposefully right has this sort of unpretentious approach, you know, simple plating, simple plates, even sort of simple descriptions, right, the menus, we see dude food sort of put down that it would be described in a very different way, that it pushes back against some of the rules of fine dining. That dude food is about, you know, not just the playfulness of an idea of gender, but also sort of a playfulness of what counts as a cuisine, what counts as good food, what's something that should be, you know, affordable and accessible in an interesting way. So it has a lot of ambivalence as we think about both gender and class through dude food, the dude himself and how he operates in sort of a food media space. I've got an audience question while we're on this from Dai Bass, who says, she's still confused about what a dude actually is, who is the ultimate dude and what does he eat? Yeah, so the dude, I mean, I can give you an example if we think better through bodies. So I write about the dad bod as the embodiment of the dude, right? So this is not infinity, right, going after six pack abs and working out really hard in the gym and not eating everything you want, right, to really have that lean body, a lot of work. The dad bod, right, still drinks a full six pack of beer, eats eight slices of pizza at a time, but still has a body, right, that's considered desirable, right, that it's, you know, all the articles that were written about it, right, that like women preferred dad bods because it was sort of this real authentic sort of genuine man body. But the dad bod, for example, like doesn't do anything to dismantle the messages of diet culture or the diet culture messages, right, that are still around us, or, you know, to proper a position for the mom bod, right, for bodies that actually gain weight for real reasons when they make babies and make life. And so the dad bod, like the dude, like has a degree of privilege, right, and this ability to sort of slack off, to push back against expectations, but doesn't really have a collective politics to sort of move forward in wanting to bring about a sort of revolutionary change. So the dad bod in the United States, right, it was stars like Seth Rogen, or if you know, Chris Pratt, right, so the transformation of Chris Pratt from, you know, a sort of overweight, goofy guy on Parks and Rec, a really popular sort of funny show, to then being a member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this guy next door transforming right into yet another man of steel. So seeing the configuration of the dude sort of losing his footing as there are these expectations for men as well, right, to look a certain way, act a certain way. So I hope that example helps, right, so the dude, you know, he's not going to focus on healthy eating, right, he's going to push back against some of those ideas. But the big Lebowski, right, was a dude, if you've seen the movie Clerks, right, you've seen dudes just trying to make it through the workday. If you've seen Dude, Where's My Car, right, seen two really silly guys, right. So those films give you examples, right, of sort of how the dude operates. And so, I mean, he was a figure, he was a way of talking about masculinity that food brands could use when they were trying to market what were perceived as feminized products. So with Diet Coke, for example, right, that had been perceived as wholly feminine. So Coca-Cola goes back to the lab, back to the drawing board to come up with Coke Zero, right, to put it in a black can, right, to have it code, you know, as this masculine diet soda. And then, you know, the ad campaigns that went with it had messages like it's not your fault, right, that you would rather stay home and watch basketball than like, you know, do the laundry. It's not your fault, right, for a younger dude that you're not studying and doing your homework. Like, of course, you should be playing video games. You're a guy. So you see this sort of forgiving, celebrating messaging that went along with the dude as a way to say it's not your fault. And it's totally okay, right, Coke Zero's for you. It's a manly diet soda. So I looked at how those messages were used to sell things like diet sodas and yogurts to get men to watch Guy Fieri on television, right. How do you make food network? Not about sort of dump and stir cooking, but about something that men would watch during prime time. So looking across those media spaces. So I hope that clarifies a bit what the dude's about. Yeah, I absolutely love that whole culture. It's not your fault culture. I could get on board with that. Tell us the idea. You extended it to everyone. It could be a revolutionary thing. But it still was sort of constrained just for men in this moment. That's what these dynamics of power sort of remain unchecked. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So interesting. Tom, you were talking about, I've been thinking about young people since you said that about Instagram. And there is this kind of rise of project cooking in the young, you know, they're very into cooking over flame. They're very into long time projects where you brine something for a fort for a two months. They're very into, you know, they're comfy duck. They've just gone to a new place that in the 90s would have seemed obsessive and weird. And do you slightly blame yourself for that? Yeah, I mean, yes, no, I mean, it's not a bad thing. It's great. Do you know what? I think so much of it comes to this much more culturally, particularly in this country, I don't really know from the States. I did spend about five or six weeks there a year ago, filming all over the States and trying to get underneath the skin a little bit more about the food cultures there. But the understanding in this country that we've moved massively to this kind of almost like post World War Two world of growing vegetables. Bake Off is a prime example of going from a show that really shouldn't have been hugely successful. It's the people baking cakes in a tent, except it's only turned into something massive. It's amazing. The understanding that people can get on and have a bit of time to make a bit of them time, a bit of understanding of going back, that world of convenience and everything is right in your doorstep. Yes, we love it. The fact that it's there exists is great for our lives. But that hobbies being quite a big thing. So going to baking or going to, if you look at TV shows now like the pottery throwdown or the whatever, you know, things where people are taking time to create something, growing your own vegetables, gardening, all of these sort of things are beginning to come back a little bit. And then food massively, the understanding we're very, very good in this country. We have to remind ourselves that we are a northern European country. It is cold for nine months of the year, and maybe even more. You know, we do have to wear jumpers most of the time. We're very good at smoking things, preserving things, salt and curing, all of those sort of processes around food that suddenly becomes really quite interesting. It takes time, the understanding of it. And most ingredients that you need to use, where you preserve, cure, make jams, whatever, they're not necessarily expensive. So the things that people can play around with, they have a bit more time to do. So that does appeal to, I suppose, a younger generation having a go at doing something. And then the rise of street food has been massive over the last five, 10 years, the way that burgers have suddenly gone from being something the golden arches, and that's the only place you get. Tonight being somewhere that's really taken care of, burgers are really well sourced, the process of it, the way that some butchers will use aged meat to give this wonderful flavour and a percentage of fat content. And then the idea of that street food culture coming through, Reuben sandwiches, all that kind of the salt beef, the understanding, the process, all of these things become very exciting. And it's not necessarily just about food. I think it's our culture at the minute. It's much more about interesting hobbies that are creative growth and perhaps a little more in tune with a heart and soul of what we feel. But perhaps the earth, what's having, you know, making a pot is something that's there for long term. It's not disposable, you know, growing plants and fruit and vegetables is something that takes time for you to then be able to reap the rewards from it. And the same with cooking, you know, putting an interest into it, putting something there is a great way of kind of creating something, putting your energy and efforts into something and then you get rewards. I mean, I've got a great question about process food. The dude seems very much to, you know, it's all very processed. It's all very chemical. It's kind of diet coke. It's pot noodles. It's things that they're very little that are quite far away from the ingredients that went into creating them. Is there any space in kind of the masculine ideal, whether it's the Superman or the dude for actual real food? Yes, I think that's part of what I'm sort of revealing in the book, right, of the very limited way food media and food advertising have sort of thought about gender and food, that they've limited this world for both men and women, right, that we want men to be able to cook at home from the best ingredients and to have that knowledge to cook for their children every day, right, and not have that sort of be, you know, denigrated, sort of feminine, you know, feminine drudgery. But that's just what we do, right, that all of us should have that relationship with food, with ingredients and with the process. But what we still have is an inequitable sort of distribution and cultural understanding of the work of food in the home, right, that shopping and cleaning up, picking recipes everyone likes, making sure picky eaters will eat things, right, we see these still sort of inequitably fall as, you know, jobs for women to perform in the home. And so part of what the book is about is asking for more justice and more joy in how we think about food for both men and women, right, that we don't want to have just a diet culture of sort of restraint and lack sort of laid over women. This idea of sort of lady drink says, you know, not having much to them the sort of pursuit of lack versus man food as this sort of assumed, right, hearty filling food that men should be allowed to drink Diet Coke and women should be able to order a steak with anyone, you know, not presuming that it's for, you know, her date of her the man at the table. I think Heineken just won, you know, one of the most influential commercials of the year for one that they did, you know, men order cocktails too, right, that when we often have someone bring a cocktail and a beer to the table, there are these expectations, right, of who ordered what when we bring the salad and the steak or the burger, right, these expectations that are based on gender who ordered what. And so I'm just asking for a world where we push back against that, right, and that cooking at home and this access to that way of eating is available to everyone that gender doesn't have to constrain us. It can be opened up and flexible and inclusive so that it's a part of our lives that's deeply meaningful, but not something that puts us into a box. And so we need food media and food advertising to still keep pushing. Some of the examples in my book are from 20 years ago. So we can say, ah, right, it was another time, like forgive them. Some of them, though, are from 2019. They're from 2020, right, to keep talking to men in particular ways, as if they can't be a part of food and engage with it those ways. So that's what we're looking for, right, a world where we can all engage with food that way. Tom, we talked very briefly at the start about your forthcoming project with Marcus Rashford and you mentioned that it was the first time he'd ever appealed a carrot. Is there something about that? Is there something about cooking from scratch? I feel like it's a very heavily loaded concept. It's a way that a kind of predominantly middle-class media looks down on working-class life that you don't cook from scratch. And it's also a way that, you know, people are kind of demonized for their lifestyle choices and therefore can be marginalized in lifestyle solutions. So actually cooking from scratch and making that a norm is quite a revolutionary act, but it also feels kind of quite condescending if you go on and on and on about it. How do you square that circle? So the project with Marcus is very much trying to push something in line. We launch it next week and it's very much about trying to engage budget-friendly, pocket-friendly dishes that destigmatizes the fact that people may come from disadvantaged backgrounds in areas and the fact that they are worried about food. And we talk about you can buy a chicken burger in a high seat for a pound. Why would you cook? If you are one of those areas and you come from one of those backgrounds where money really, really is that desperately tight, like many, many people find themselves in. There's two and over two and a half million children in this country that every year suffer from food insecurity. And the reality of it is how do we engage food? How do we engage cooking? How do we engage that process? And yeah, straight from scratch, healthier eating food always is much more in a way of middle class in terms of cost, in terms of many. So a lot of the recipes we're using are using tin product, tin potatoes, frozen vegetables, frozen pre-chopped onions. There is nothing wrong with this. It tries to engage people in the cookery process. What you need is people like Marcus to be able, with his reach, to be able to show everybody that a Premier League footballer, someone who's reached out over the last year and touched the hearts of many throughout this nation have recognised that he's somebody that is not just a footballer, but he represents so much more. He represents youth. He represents an area in a background that is very similar to myself, which is why we're working together. And trying to press that message forward, that when Marcus then takes part in it, is involved in it and the recipes that he cooks and is engaged in it, all the embarrassment is gone. It disappears. You're just having a go at cooking something. So if you think of all the cookbooks that I normally write, or the television shows that we normally watch, that are all around food, it is very based on a foodie audience that is normally lifestyle-esque. It is very middle class, middle England kind of base. And that's where a foodie audience normally is. But to get that across, just because you come from a slightly disadvantaged background doesn't mean to say that you can't be able to cook. And that's where someone like Marcus can get that message, help get that message of food across. And that's where working together is so, so important to try and encapsulate and embrace it with everybody. Emily, I've got this great question from Siobhan in the audience. She describes how pre-made cake mix used to be just add water and then bake it. But then they had to start adding an egg so that men would feel like their wife was cooking, otherwise she wouldn't have done anything. I mean, how much of the gender stereotypes based around kind of domination and control and food kind of mediates that for that domination and control? And how does it intersect with race as well? Yeah, it's a good answer, Siobhan, quoting these studies from Ernest Dichter in the 1950s, that they did. They were looking at trying to convince women to use more convenience food. At this moment, after World War II and in the United States, after the Depression, when people genuinely wanted to be using whole ingredients. And so the food industry was trying to encourage these sort of products of wartime, right, to have domestic application. And so this idea of having instant coffee, orange juice from concentrate, it's a sea change in a food culture. And so cake mix with just add water. I haven't read his evidence saying that it's men saying you're not really cooking. What Dichter found in their focus groups with women was what they felt like they weren't cooking, that this didn't count. And if cooking was the way that you sort of demonstrated your love, right, for a husband, for your children, it was the role you performed in your family. What they found is this underlying anxiety was this idea that a woman felt like she wasn't performing her food based food role in the family. It's how Dichter reported the results, right? So he was reporting them in a particular way to help cake mixes sell more product. So I'm not sure that he's reporting results that actually tell us something about how women actually felt about cooking. But that's the story that they tell, right? That then if you add an egg and you add milk, like you're doing enough cooking that this counts. It fulfills that social expectation that's so much a part of that sort of feminine role and how it's still sort of constructed in society and culture. And of course, this idea of the white woman homemaker, right, that it's tied up in ideas of whiteness as well. And so this question of race is an important one, as we think about how ideals around food come to be. And so the dude as well, right, his privilege is also, right, it's much easier to be a dude, right, to slack off and say, no, thank you, I'm not going to do that if you're white, right, if you're already circulating with the racial privilege of, you know, the dominant group in a particular, you know, historical moment that in the United States, right, it's still a white supremacist culture as we think about the power structures at play, not to say that everyone holds those beliefs. But as we think about how race operates, that it's also a big shaper of our food lives, these ideas about how we perform our ideas about gender and about race, that's a really good question. Talking of questions, there are five more minutes, everybody. So if you have something burning, you want to ask, you still have time. Tom, Jane Savage in the audience draws this interesting distinction between the kind of intensification of sensory pleasure, you know, what things taste like, perfect ingredients, perfect smells, perfect ripeness, and creativity. So this kind of Marco Pierre White style firebrand who can make anything out of anything. Are those kind of two warring versions of masculinity? I mean, can you still be a man and go and wax lyrical about the smell of lilac or a fine wine or is there still a very much a male way of talking about what things taste like in a female way? No, I think the whole thing gets confused when you have to add the key factor that ties it all together is passion. So the moment you talk about passion about something, you add, this smells incredible because of this and what you can create and what you can do or why it smells amazing. You look at artistry, if you look at somebody Damien Hurst, for example, I mean, the most famous artist in the world, a fantastic artist who creates beautiful things that his latest set of paintings, these beautiful blossom kind of like dot pictures, I mean, they're amazing, they're beautiful. And this is again, somebody from the 90s lad culture creating something that's so incredibly beautiful. And essentially their blossom pictures, which you could say sits there in that kind of feminist, feminine side of an artistry thinking. However, it's the passion about it. It's the fact that when Damien Hurst is painting, he's covered in really dirty ovals covered in paint, he's got a pair of cool trainers on and all of a sudden that mixture of the two together, it's irrelevant what he's painted, what he's created is passion. And that's where I think that male kind of, that's where we as bloke can go, I get it, I get the excitement about it now, I can understand why food is exciting, why art is exciting, why floristry is exciting, it can be something amazing when you talk to people like who are passionate about what they do. And there's a kind of like an inner fire that creates this sort of stuff. Then it's irrelevant of what you're creating or making, it's the passion that can combine everything together. And finally, Siobhan has mentioned the name Homer Simpson, just as a kind of floating signifier, which I think is extremely interesting because he is, he's sort of a dude, but he's also, but really what he is, is a very greedy man. And what role does greed play both in the kind of developing of food culture, which also expresses so much about your class and gender structures? Oh, I think the dude, right, he holds on to his privilege, even as he's able to sort of slack off and have things be a little bit easier for himself. And I love the question about sort of food and sensory experience too, right, and sort of diving into it. And then what we see in the literature is that, you know, cookbooks written for the, you know, gourmands, right, men in the late 19th century, the early 20th century, they would say, right, men had these sort of enlightened palates, right, that their embrace of food was sort of rooted in this idea of like huge passion that was masculine while women, right, had to follow recipes, right, they had to sort of follow home economics, right, as it sort of developed. That is to say, right, that that is an individual experience for everyday men and women, or that it has to be any of ours. But what I've always looked at is how the texts, the media, the cultural bits of our lives, how they've tried to give us those messages, that we can recognize, right, that we can push back against to be able to have this understanding of who we are, how we move through the world, and how food is a big wonderful part of that. And Tom, this is the last word, and I forgot to ask either of you about COVID, because it's already gone as far as I'm concerned. But do you feel like, is the restaurant world going to make an amazing recovery? Are you already Thunderbirds are go? Yeah, listen, hospitality will be incredible, hospitality will always be there. That's the thing, and I think that's kind of why everyone has, there hasn't been a huge amount of support for it. There's been support from staff, but hospitality, as human beings, we love social interaction. So it doesn't matter if every hospitality business went bankrupt right now in a year, it would be back, everybody else would be there, because we all want to mix, we all want to hang out with each other, we all want to go for drinks, we want to go to football matches, we want to go to events, we want to go to theater, we want to go to cinemas, we want to, all of it will come back. So yeah, the hospitality industry will hugely come back, but sadly there may well be a lot of casualties along the way, but hospitality will exist and always will exist, because human beings love being with each other. On that happy note, mainly happy note, I'm going to say thank you both, and thank you for the audience for doing so much heavy lifting, and it was a wonderful discussion, thank you all. And thank you Zoe for steering us through so brilliantly. Tom and Emily, that was just so completely fascinating and interesting, and so many different angles and perspectives, kind of nails that, it was completely brilliant. It's Friday evening here in London, this feels like a very fascinating way to start at the weekend. And thank you also to KitchenAid, who support the work of the British Library food season, in which there is plenty more to come. We have events right through and until the end of May. Next up is Wednesday 21st of April, we have two events, kicking off with Kate Young talking about food and crime fiction, event called Cyanide and Marmalade, brilliant title, and that's followed later on by Bill Beefood and Jonathan Meads, two really great writers in conversation about their passion for French cuisine. Find out all about those, get tickets, find out the rest of season, all there on the British Library website. If you would like to support the work of the British Library then the donate button on your screen. But for now, thank you hugely again to Tom, Emily and Zoe. Thank you for watching and goodbye from the British Library food season.