The Presentation of the Chef in Everyday Life: Productions of Inequality in Peruvian Culinary Schools

• In Event: Challenges of inclusion and quality in higher education, case studies from Mexico, Peru and Argentina.

Abstract

During the past two decades Peru has experienced dramatic economic gains that have propelled its citizens into a growing middle class. The government and media, seeing this growth as a repudiation of Peru’s longstanding racial inequalities, have lauded the new economy as providing opportunities for every Peruvian who can parlay hard work into cosmopolitan expertise. Yet critics have also suggested that this veneer of equal opportunity only serves to mask continued disparities. This paper, based on sixteen months of ethnographic research in Lima, examines these competing discourses of opportunity by analyzing vocational training in an industry that the media particularly celebrates as egalitarian: Peruvian haute cuisine. Drawing on participant observation in two working-class culinary schools, I show that success as a chef in Lima is linked not only to the food that students learn to prepare but also to the forms of sociability and self that they learn to project. I focus on one school’s mandatory acting class, employing practice theory to analyze how students learn to suppress mannerisms associated with lower-class urban migrants. At the same time, however, I show that students learn to prepare migrants’ cuisines in their cooking classes. Taken as a whole, I argue, this curriculum shapes workers who embody racial inequalities not through differences in phenotype or even culinary background but rather through their relative ability to perform the persona of a middle-class purveyor of ethnic foods – that is, through their ability to represent the optimistic discourse of Peru’s economic growth itself.

Author

• Amy Lasater-Wille, New York University