On October 19^th 2014, a Wednesday morning, I arrived at Ross Dining Hall for an abbreviated introduction to the Middlebury food system. I was greeted warmly by Chef Laframboise and I quickly realized that all the other workers had arrived well before me, before six AM, and learned that most would stay until about two PM while Chef Laframboise wouldn’t leave until about eight in the evening. Initially these long hours didn’t seem too daunting. After all, I do have long days of class and homework – or so I thought.

After a quick tour of the facility I gained a sense of how well planned each meal is. Beginning with a general plan at the beginning of the semester followed by meticulous ordering and recording of quantities and prices, this place was a functional facility more akin to a finely-tuned, and efficient, machine than any “creative” kitchen I had known previously. I do not say this to minimize Chef Laframboise’s enthusiasm and dedication to the food his kitchen produces, but to emphasize that he is far more than just a creative guide for the food that he and his staff produce. Complete with menu plans for the next three food “cycles” and work schedules that evenly balance the time of each staff person from cook to dishwasher, Chef Laframboise’s work encompasses negotiating the individual needs of his staff and coordinating his kitchen with the budget given by the college administration. In this way; his management position makes him the connection between two different scales of labor.

After my tour of the facility, I was set to work cracking eggs for the weekend breakfast. Although I knew logically that the dining halls must go through many eggs I hadn’t imagined anyone cracking each egg individually. I soon fell into a mechanical rhythm for cracking each egg and lost myself in reflection. I remembered that just a couple days before, I was eating scrambled eggs and encountered a very unpleasant crunch with my second bite which led me to reject the rest of my eggs. I recounted this unsavory texture to my friend who asserted that the eggs “must be powdered.” As I moved onto my second case of eggs, I had already cracked a hundred eggs, I was indignant and frustrated with my previous selfish actions. How could I have wasted the rest of my eggs? Did I really expect hundreds of eggs to be cracked without a single piece of shell ending up in the batter?

John, my kitchen mentor, received my questions with good grace. He explained that we source our eggs locally at a smaller farm that does not have the capacity to combine the eggs and pasteurize them in their facility. The dining halls make an effort to source products locally, he told me, but in this case pooling eggs manually without pasteurization can sometimes be hazardous to health. If one egg has salmonella, then the whole batch of eggs can be contaminated. I could see how easily this could happen: I was also instructed to remove any “bloody eggs” from the batch. At home this is easy because the bowl I use is so small. In the dining hall, however, I cracked literally hundreds of eggs into one enormous pot and fishing a bad egg out became a much more difficult task. I was very conscious of how easily I could have ruined an entire batch of eggs – and how much that would cost the dining hall.

Finally I considered my work in comparison to those around me. John was cracking eggs three times faster than I could and he was managing to carry on a lively conversation with the other cooks while accomplishing his work. I, on the other hand, couldn’t successfully split my attention and found my mind wandering after only half an hour of cracking eggs. I woke up early as a one-time event, but the cooks surrounding me wake up earlier and have a longer commute every single day. I felt even more of an outsider to the kitchen that makes the food I consume every day after working there than before becoming better acquainted with the workers and their rhythms in my brief visit.

 

I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this assignment.

 

C. Maeve Grady

Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton is a selective autobiography of her journey through the food industry. Hamilton examines her growth beginning in her childhood home kitchen and through the many roles she inhabited including the dishwasher, the waitress, the prep cook, the boss, the guest, the mother, the wife, the celebrity and a multitude of other positions. Hamilton structures her narrative around the same type of functional space, the kitchen, but it is the uniqueness of each kitchen she occupies that separates each phase of her life. Hamilton’s emphasis on space and place correlates with Doreen Massey’s conceptualization of space and place expressed in her book Space, Place, and Gender. Hamilton also self reflects on what it means to be “One of the best female chefs” in comparison to and in conjunction with her role as a mother. Through the lens of Mintz’s understanding of inside versus outside meaning, Hamilton’s role as a woman in a professional kitchen often conflicts with her role in the domestic kitchen. Below is an analysis of how the many kitchens of Hamilton’s career agree with Doreen Massey’s concept of space and the meaning that these different spaces hold on a personal scale and in the context of structural power.

In her book Space Place and Gender (1994), geographer Doreen Massey defines space as “constituted out of social relations” (2). In her autobiography, Hamilton conveys to her readers and understanding of the different environments she grew up in by focusing in on the “boss” of each kitchen and how that person defined the space. In Hamilton’s childhood kitchen, her mother dominated and established the kitchen as central to the home. Hamilton describes how her mother kept an impeccable pantry, used every part of any animal that entered the kitchen, and how her mother imbued a love for food in all of her children (Hamilton 7-8). In preparing for the family lamb roast, Hamilton’s mother taught her children to work “quickly, efficiently, and cleanly,” and, less explicitly, together (19). Her mother defined the kitchen as a space of hard work but also collaboration.

In a later phase of her life, Hamilton worked long hours for a variety of catering companies in New York City. Hamilton describes the windowless, fluorescent and expansive kitchens led by “a Rich, the guy who used to walk quickly and purposefully from one room to another…when in fact that was just his strategy for earning his $17.50 an hour while accomplishing little” (Hamilton 75). In these factory-like kitchens, an apathetic leader combined with the demanded quantity of food precluded quality. The work was short lived and executed by “a crew of mixed talent” and no acquaintance which resulted in surface-level social interactions (Hamilton 74). Such shallow social interactions result in limited investment in the product, resulting in poor quality food. The catering kitchens of New York City differ greatly in scale and setting from Hamilton’s home kitchen but are representative of two extremes of how social interactions constitute space.

In drawing from other contemporaries and in challenging Laclau, Doreen Massey also asserts that because social interactions are always evolving, so must be the space or spaces that they inhabit (Massey 249-269). In this way, space is inherently tied with the progression of time. Blood, Bones, and Butter perfectly exhibits this relation; each space Hamilton trudges through is characteristic of a specific time in her life. The same space could not exist at a different point in her life because it is as much defined by her interactions as she is by the interactions facilitated by each space.

After her parents’ divorce, college, and the gruesome catering kitchens of New York City, Hamilton moved to Michigan to study fiction writing and she began to work as a caterer for a woman named Misty in downtown Ann Arbor. In a moment of reflection, Hamilton confides that she felt “trapped…in this middle state, in the middle of my crossing now totally convinced that the route I have chosen is wrong” (Hamilton 105). This witty articulation of feeling “in the middle” not only epitomizes Hamilton’s style as both a clever and honest author, but also encapsulates the importance of her own journey in characterizing the space she inhabits. Hamilton goes on to declare an affection for simplicity: what some would call mundane but what she considers “satisfying and meaningful enough.” She continues, “I liked these people and their lives, But more to the point, I came to understand that I liked People and Life.”  (Hamilton 108). Misty’s “home style of cooking, her bumpy, misshapen tomatoes,…her cabbages shredded and broken down with salt and vinegar, her hunks of pork swimming in smoky, deep, earthy juices” are not likely to be easily found in Hamilton’s current restaurant, Prune, but their place and Misty’s place in the narrative Hamilton has constructed came at, if not the right time, an opportune time.

Gabrielle’s evolving role in her mother-in-law’s, Alda’s, kitchen is a distinct example of how the constantly changing nature of social interactions is linked to, and often the cause of, changes in a space. In Hamilton’s first visit to the Italian villa she and her stepmother connected through the kitchen. Although much different from any industrial kitchen but also distinct from Hamilton’s childhood kitchen, Alda’s kitchen is rustic, haphazard, and seemingly unchanging. A thick language barrier leaves cooking as the medium through which Gabrielle comes to know her mother-in-law (Hamilton 233). Over time, Hamilton observes the slow decay of the villa, Alda’s arthritis prohibits her from spending much time in the kitchen, and Hamilton’s marriage becomes more and more acrimonious. As the interactions that traditionally constitute the space are less and less common, the space itself decays. Hamilton specifically describes the moth-infested polenta and the disintegrating stove top as both a literal reality and a symbolic manifestation of inevitable change in time-old space (Hamilton 282). After seven years, Hamilton rearranges the kitchen table and throws away the infested grains in the decaying kitchen. She physically changes the structure of the space, separating the eating area from the cooking area, and in doing so she changes the nature of social interaction in Alda’s kitchen. Hamilton assumes, in part, the role her mother held in her childhood and the role Misty held in the small Ann Arbor catering company; she redefined the parameters for social interaction and thus changed the space. Such a change could not have occurred if Alda were younger or if Hamilton were happier in her marriage and able to accept the decaying nature of the kitchen. Again, Hamilton demonstrates the inextricable relationships between time, space, and social interaction first characterized by Doreen Massey.

Finally, in drawing from feminist geography theory to defend her conceptualization of space and time, Massey asserts that space is political (Massey 260). With this foundation, and recognizing that throughout her life, Gabrielle Hamilton has occupied both professional and domestic kitchens, it is important to question the meaning held by work in domestic versus private kitchens, a comparison that Hamilton re-assesses throughout her autobiography.

When Hamilton takes over the villa kitchen, she says “I feel potent and capable and maternal. I am taking care of and providing for my family” (Hamilton 280). This is Hamilton’s inside meaning, a concept defined by Mintz as the personal significance behind an individual action that is constrained by structural and societal power (Mintz 20). Hamilton also often incorporates a reflection on the outside meaning of a woman in the home kitchen. The outside meaning of a woman “taking care of her family” has roots in misogyny and oppression of women. Hamilton, however, challenges this assumption in her work as a professional chef. Hamilton brings just as much of her professional self into the domestic kitchen as she brings her “mother” self into her professional kitchen. Upon encountering “a half mountain of soft, crusted-over, dark brown crap” outside the back door of her restaurant, she responded with the motherly impulse to not “ask someone else to do something that I myself am not willing to do” (Hamilton 139). Even more appropriate than the preceding humorous example, Hamilton calls her restaurant a family in her dedication. By adopting a family-inspired style of interaction in her business and business-inspired type of interaction in a domestic kitchen, Hamilton blurs the lines for what is expected of a woman in a domestic kitchen versus a woman in a professional kitchen and challenges assumptions made about both.

Blood, Bones, and Butter not only offers an honest and sometimes gruelingly accurate tale of kitchen work but is also decidedly geographical. Hamilton’s narrative is characterized by the many spaces in which she lived and worked. In her descriptions of each space, she exemplifies Doreen Massey’s concept of space and in her broader narrative, each space is connected to a time, further agreeing with Massey’s conflation of space and time. Finally, Hamilton reflects on what it means to be a woman in both coded male and coded female spaces. Her experiences of space and time are communicated to the reader with wit and honesty.

 

I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this assignment

C. Maeve Grady

 Works Cited

Hamilton, Gabrielle. Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef.             Paperback Edition. New York: Random House. 2011. Print.

Massey. Doreen. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.

Mintz, S. (1996) “Food and its relationship to concepts of power” Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Power and the Past. Beacon: Boston.