Doing Gender

Though my experience in the food industry is not extremely extensive, I have had some experience in different areas and in different contexts. I guess the first experience I have had would be in my own home which is a bed and breakfast where obviously breakfast is served. In addition I have worked on the dietary staff at a Senior Care Center and in the kitchen at a summer camp, all very different yet similar experiences. At home my mother is the main chef who prepares breakfast for guests and my brother and I help out when we are home and able whereas my father does what he wants and tends to enter the kitchen at the most inopportune times. Working in a retirement home was really my first job outside of my home that involved food preparation, serving, and cleaning up. At this job I soon realized that most of the head chefs were men and the servers were women. Though there are currently a couple men working at serving meals, for the longest time any men who worked in the department rarely saw the outside of the dish room let alone the main dining room, when they got out of the dish room it was to serve meals to the residents who were ailing the most and often unaware of their surroundings. When I started working at summer camp I had the position of the kitchen floater which meant that I was lucky enough to prepare food in the kitchen before meals, keep an eye on the salad bar in the dining hall during meals, and wash the dishes after meals. For the most part the girls worked in the kitchen and the dining hall and the boys worked in the dish room. I was the only girl to work with the dirty dishes which most considered to be the man’s work.
All of these jobs haven’t really shown me a distinction of class within the food industry but they have definitely shown me the difference between genders. The women who are in the food industry are the faces, they get the recognition of being servers but when something goes wrong it is usually their fault for whatever reason. The men then tend to cover the extremes of head chef or dish boy. The men are assigned their roles and run with them while the women are often directed from many different people. The food industry is not necessarily corrupt in its ways but definitely biased in its job opportunities.