I ran into this piece, which notes that celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay was in a “huff” because a restaurant where he was dining with a celebrity companion refused to serve her salad dressing “on the side.”
Anybody who follows the LA Times Food Blog knows about the brouhaha that went down yesterday when celeb chef Gordon Ramsay and his dining companion Victoria Beckham (aka Posh Spice) left trendy Westside restaurant Gjelina in a bit of a huff after the waiter denied the 8-month pregnant Lady Victoria’s request to have her salad dressing on the side.
Having said that I would be in a huff too if an expensive restaurant displayed such arrogance and poor service to me, the whole episode underlines to me a bubble psychology. The self-importance of the restaurant – and Mr Ramsay – to me are amazing considering that chefs are simple craftsmen – artisans running a workshop – which indeed is recognized by at least one chef who calls his restaurant L’Atelier.
I have a pet hypothesis that the celebrity chef is a symptom of bubble psychology. The existence of celebrity chefs is an example of what I call hyper-specialization, of which more later.
Doing a little back-testing of the hypothesis, it appears that there was, indeed, a wave of celebrity for chefs in the 1920s run up to the Great Depression. For example the famous Auguste Escoffier was exalted by the French government as a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur in 1920 and as an Officer in 1928. Fernand Point, known as the “Father of Nouvelle Cuisine,” opened his restaurant “La Pyramide” in 1926. Willy Rahmig on the current U.S. Culinary Team is the third generation descendant of an eponymous celebrity chef on the Riviera who moved to the U.S. in the 1920s. In 1925 the Chicago Chefs of Cuisine was founded as chefs became highly visible. In 1929 the National American Culinary Federation was founded. (Needless to say, the early depression years were almost financially disastrous for the association due to the many jobless chef members.)
Moving on to hyper-specialization, a.k.a. the “services economy.” When we talk about and measure “the economy,” we are talking about and measuring exchanges for monetary value. But there are many unmeasured exchanges which contribute great value to us, but are not measured as part of the economy because there is no money exchange. A prime example is the unmeasured contribution of people, mostly women, who stay at home and contribute to their families by raising children, cooking meals and generally providing domestic bliss. But the fact is that an agrarian society may have little need for money exchanges and have an extremely low “GDP,” but still provide a high standard of living through self-sufficiency and barter.
In 1978 only 16 percent of meals were eaten outside the home. Now almost 40 percent are eaten in restaurants. Not only do we have celebrity chefs, we have professional dog-walkers (and doggie day care). The unmeasured domestic chores have in some sense remained exactly the same, but they have moved from unmeasured to measured because they now involve an exchange. Have the chores moved into the economy because both parents are working, or are both parents working because the chores have moved into the economy? Is the second parent’s labor simply offsetting the labor that goes into providing the newly “outsourced” domestic services? The answer is not obvious to me.
This outsourcing of domestic services is an example of hyper-specialization, which I think of as the growth of exchanges without any actual growth in social benefit. This means that the economy appears to grow, both in terms of employment and GDP, but basically the growth is just an accounting change because the same number of meals are cooked and the same number of dogs are walked whether or not there is a money exchange for the service.
Why is this interesting? Because as we see GDP and employment fall, I suspect that a large part of the fall will be the result of a reduction in hyper-specialization. I eagerly await the disappearance of the celebrity chef, to say nothing of that of that Marin County archetype – the Birkenstock-wearing vegan professional dog-walker. Speaking of vegans, I think that food faddists – organic vegan locavores and the like – are very much a part of this symptomatology.
Financial Reality 