PRIVATE CHEFFING/WET NURSING/SOCIAL THEORY OF HUMAN NECESSITY
+ the our warped but earnest attempts to configure care
For some months, I have been trying to figure out what it means to be a private chef. Mostly because I have ended up becoming one.
A decade ago, when I first heard of private chefs, I definitely pictured an Alfredo Linguini type figure. This is sort of the way that I imagined all chefs, but the signifier of privacy rendered the character somehow softer.
Within the last few years, the role has started to occupy a different space in my mind. I started hearing about cooks who left kitchens to chef privately, shifting modalities and lifestyles. I heard about worlds of privatized labor: glamorous clients, zoomed-in food, parties in different cities and countries. Was a private chef a portal out of the kitchen? This job —however opaque— seemed to acquire its own glimmer of capital.
How did my little brain go from picturing Linguini to this silhouette of something new? When did this shift in my mind??? What even was a private chef?
Even Wikipedia seemed a little perplexed about how to locate the job of a Private Chef within social context:
Not helpful!
In the imaginative space was the opportunity to romanticize. What happens when you take the same labor (that is often initiated by genuine passion) and lift it into the light of day? There was a lot that sounded optimal about being a private chef. After having produced mass quantities of food, the idea of curating a meal to suit specific needs sounded appealing. Slower, more zoomed-in, gentler, focused. The idea of learning about a person and then making something for them sounded pretty special to me; a salve after not getting to see where my food was going, but needing to have blind faith in it. And honestly if you’re tired and feeling like you’re not making enough money, there’s something to the idea of doing (maybe?) less and making (definitely) more. In our economic world, privatizing something implies its inherent value. It felt audacious to assert that one’s work was good enough.
And thus: it sounded fun to me!! I started clicking around, as it were, to see what was out there.
And Reader… what I saw blew my mind! It all went down on Craigslist’s Domestic Section. This is one corner of the internet that occupies maximal fascination for me.
I would see listings, more often than not, like these:
With requirements like:
These ads come in and contain multitudes. Six figure jobs posted on the internet’s largest message board! After awhile, I came to understand that many ‘Privates’ (the clients !!) often go through agencies that specialize in ‘society staffing’ (!!) in order to post these ads and find people. Clearly this job is very important!
And I understand why. Having someone in your life, around your kids, is no task to take lightly. Our homes, no matter what, are places that we need to be safe. It’s not the hoops one must jump through so much as the LANGUAGE employed that interests me most. Words like “discretion”! after all! Poised! Discrete about what? Poised for what?
While ads like this seemed dehumanizing, they also read to me as profoundly outdated. While advertised online, these felt like descriptions were stuck in the past. Which was made even more confusing as I continued to explore and realize that ‘Private Chef’ is also located somewhere in the future.
And the future that I mean here is TikTok
Isn’t that profound??? lol
Chef K
Is the Kardashians’ Private Chef. My bff Hannah sent along this NYT profile on her a couple weeks ago and I have been chewing on it ever since.
The piece largely features an interaction between Kim and Chef K’s food that aired on The Kardashians. Here, Kim gets upset that there are cookies out, rages that they taste too good, says that they made her gain 15 lbs in the past, and concludes that she plans on throwing the cookies – made painstakingly by Chef K – in the toilet.
Chef K, given a platform by the Times, is quick to reframe our understanding of what happened.
“At the end of the trip, she recalled that Ms. Kardashian walked up to her and said ‘Chef, I am so sorry, I didn’t mean to say that about your cookies – they’re great. They’re really good, I just have no self-control.’ All was forgiven.”
If the Kardashians, and the constellations around them, are good at anything it’s a Spin. If this is indeed a Spin, it works sooo nicely. Chef K shifts an alarming moment of her employer being unequivocally difficult to a seeming illumination of not just Kim’s humility – but even more, Chef’s own extraordinary cooking! Kim Kardashian, who kind of controls the universe, cannot control herself around Chef K’s cookies because they must be that GOOD. Chef K, then, must be extraordinary. Everyone emerges unscathed, and no one finds their cookies in the toilet.
This ends up giving Chef K the gift of visibility. The Times continues, “These kinds of disclosures have drawn fans more deeply into her world, making ‘private chef’ a paradoxically public role.”
So the camera shifts to Chef K, who is ready to rock.
Now, on TikTok, you can see Chef K make the cookies herself. And then YOU can make the cookies yourself. It’s almost as if Chef K and Kim have collaborated on this Cookie as if it were a Brand.
If you wanted to go realllly far with it, you might even note the inherent meta-aesthetic of Chef K making animal cookies with animal cookies. :o
Very quickly (and mercifully, tbh):
Zero percent of the people I have worked with, since I have started cooking privately and for events, have been anything less than lovely! While I do not really work in people’s homes, but I’ve still felt welcomed. The work has been really fun and stimulating and interesting. People are always strange around food, but now I have even more stories :) I feel I have taken care of people, and been cared for in return.
Which is why
I am fascinated by the inorganic nature of the hints around these repressed Craigslist narratives and over-expressive TikTok ones.
I wonder if there’s some sense of discomfort between the reality of the needs to care and be cared for.
It makes me think of a concept, coined by Ferdinand Tonnies, called Gemeinschaft vs. Gasellschaft. Gemeinschaft is society based on the communal, Gasellschaft is society based in rational association. Gemeinschaft is the way that societies operated pre-industrial revolution: smaller communities, inter-reliant, self-structured based on shared ideals and social code. Getting milk from your neighbor, and giving it in return. Gasellschaft (post-industrialization) operates on relationships via rational construction and social infrastructure. Popping to the store for milk.
If you’re like me, you might be like omg Gemeinschaft sounds so much better! Why did we even do Gesellschaft! To that, I would remind us all that these concepts (like most social theory) are ideal types – meaning that they are strongly applicable examples of dichotomies, but are in no way impervious to the complications of reality. Gemeinschaft births bad things in sinister ways like witch burnings, and Gasellschaft births bad things in sinister ways like ordering Doordash every night so that you don’t have to talk to people.
These two imperfections are perhaps a lens into all this clumsiness. In attempting to incorporate private chefs into the structure of our homes, we are trying to convert an inherently Gemeinschaft moment of care into a decidedly Gasellschaft world. We must exchange goods of feeding one another, and it may feel uncomfortable. In fervent attempt to synthesize it, we are prone to doing one of two very American things: making that work terribly invisible or terribly famous.
There’s almost too much a person could go into here
About kitchen work, domestic work, feeding. Now is not the moment to hyper-elaborate, but I’ll name a couple places my mind goes when I consider what one might call Care Work, and its fraught history. These contexts constellate around, hovering ghosts: separate spheres, domestic servitude, The Problem with No Name, cleaning, nannying, surrogacy, teaching, sex work…
But the one I keep coming back to is Wet Nursing.
Wet Nursing
Is something humans have been doing since antiquity. It is when a person who is not the mother of a baby nurses a baby at their own breast. For as long as it has existed, the cultural location of the work has oscillated between subordination and celebration; servant and noblewoman, servant and noblewoman, servant and noblewoman.
Eurycleia of Ithaca
Was Odysseus’ wet nurse. Her name means ‘broad fame’. Widely loved in Ithaca, she was Odysseus’ father Laertes’ great love— a sentiment never consummated out of respect to his royal wife Anticlea – whose own name, in turn, translates to ‘anti-fame’.
^Eurycleia vibes!^
When Odysseus arrives home from his travels, he is disguised as a beggar. Eurycleia, who raised Odysseus from her own breast, is given the job of washing the unknown stranger. While rinsing him, she notices a scar on his thigh. She remembers that Odysseus had the very same one. In this moment, she is the only one who recognizes Odysseus for who he really is. She sees something others do not. He sternly swears her to secrecy. She obliges, but she knows.
I’ve always loved how Eurycleia seems more embodied and observant than everyone else in Ithaca, her senses tuned in to what surrounds her. What is this fluid, liminal space Eurycleia occupies? She is perhaps loved by Laertes and Odysseus better and more purely than anyone else. Between care and discretion, where do we locate grace?
~~~~
As Chef K concludes at the end of the Times article, Kim genuinely did adore the cookies and was gracious in her apology. Effusive and respectful. “She was so kind”, Chef K says, “I wish they would have aired it.”
^shoutout to Chessy!