Mother Jones
When Time Magazine couldn’t think of a single female chef to name to its now-infamous “13 Gods of Food” list, I shared the instant outrage that overtook the internet, but I wasn’t surprised at all.
That’s because the vexed gender politics of culinary prestige—the increasingly glaring fact that women are largely shut of the food world’s top honors—hit me like a sizzling chunk of foie gras to the face in mid-September.
That’s when I got the invitation to a prestigious food conference in Westchester County, New York, sponsored by a group called the Basque Culinary Institute. I have to admit my heart skipped a beat. The star-studded guest list—drawn up by the BCI, International Advisory Council, an influential (and all-male) group of chefs known as the G9—included Spanish legend Ferran Adrià, the surrealist godfather of the postmodern cooking style called molecular gastronomy; Michel Bras, whose eponymous restaurant in southern France has held the food world’s highest ranking, three Michelin stars, since 1999; and René Redzepi, an Adrià acolyte hailed by The New Yorker as “arguably the most famous Dane since Hamlet” for his radically woodsy “New Nordic” fare.
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