Uncommon Sense: Scars, with Ellen T. Meiser

From TV's "The Bear" to the simmering restaurant thriller "Boiling Point" we seem drawn to angry-but-vulnerable chefs in pop culture.But how do such stereotypes shape who works in kitchens and how they treat their colleagues?Is "kitchen culture", with its macho rough and tumble norms, always so different from the work culture so many of us face -including in academia?Sociologist Ellen T. Meiser joins us from Hawaii to discuss this and more, reflecting on her new book Making It: Success in the Commercial Kitchen.She tells us about her lifelong fascination with kitchens -from teenage shift work in Anchorage, Alaska, to studying baking and pastry at the Culinary Institute of America and entering the field of Food Studies.We ask: how do scars serve as a kind of currency in commercial kitchens amid values of stoicism, perseverance and pain?How does the transience of worker populations make kitchens sites of risk and low accountability?And how does "scarring" take place beyond the kitchen, in a traumatogenic society where individuals, but also our planet, face significant harm?With celebration of the late chef and author Anthony Bourdain.