It Starts With the Product: Historical and Contemporary Investigations of How Chefs Navigate Quality, Economic Relationships, and Ethics

Abstract

How do we explain the fact that ethical concerns are ubiquitous in the world of food, but apart from TV and celebrity chefs, most prominent figures in the culinary landscape are hesitant about making claims to be ethical? This thesis is concerned with the experiences of a handful of high-end British chefs as they ambivalently contend with various pressures relating to broad ethical discourses, professional and economic precarity, and shifting conceptions of value therein. As I progressed through the research, I was struck by how each chef measured the value of an ethical discourse in relation to the material qualities it contributed towards an ingredient. What was “local” or “sustainable” was only good insofar that it represented something materially superior to other ingredients. The question of why high-end chefs are cautious to make claims of what is – or what is not – ethical, then, came down to a more fundamental question about how various qualities are valued.

Approaching this topic through a story of quality reveals a complex history of how particular ethical discourses have always interfered with evaluations of what makes an ingredient ‘good’. The ethnographic accounts, combined with the social and cultural histories presented here, chart the rising social category of chefs in Europe and the development of certain normative ideals, values, and practices that inform the subjectivities of contemporary chefs. Moreover, they reveal the various mechanisms that make evaluations of material quality more contested and imprecise over time. I go on to examine the histories of locality, seasonality, and sustainability which contextualise my contemporary ethnographic accounts. In doing so, I analyse the fraught and complex histories therein and how each enable and constrain evaluations of material quality in context-specific ways. This historically and culturally constituted understanding of quality anchors my argument as to why these chefs rebuff the notion of being ethical leaders. To resolve this, I explore how they reconcile the uncertain terrain they find themselves in by making the abstract concrete. That is, how they balance amorphous ethical discourses with what contextually and situationally works. Rather than food ethics being simple, I explore how its inherent complexity is tamed at the intersection of normative ideals, economic relationships, professional creativity, and contested evaluations of material quality.