On Netflix, Chef Samin Nosrat Goes Global To Demystify ‘Salt Fat Acid Heat’
In her four-part show, James Beard award-winning food writer and chef Samin Nosrat travels the globe, talking to home chefs to learn more about the four essentials of great food.
On wanting to make her show about home cooks, not famous chefs:
“In terms of the power of a platform, and the power of media, there are so many other shows where you can see all of these fancy restaurant chefs, most of whom are men, most of whom are white men, and they’re getting featured. But this show is about home cooking. And often home cooks don’t get credit for their work, don’t get paid for their labor, and more often than not, for the last 10,000 years, they’ve been women.
So 200 years ago about is when restaurants started, and when restaurants started men entered the kitchen, and there was pay involved and glory and awards and titles, and then the professional kitchen became the men’s place and that’s been reflected in media. This was an opportunity for me to elevate and honor home cooks, most of whom are women and have been women for the great part of human history, and I don’t think that’s always acknowledged by the media.”
Empirical research shows that no domestic arrangement, not even one in which the mother works full time and the father is unemployed, results in child-care parity between heterosexual spouses. The story we tell ourselves, the one about great leaps toward the achievement of gender equality between parents, is a glass-half-full kind of interpretation. But the reality is a half-empty glass: While modern men and women espouse egalitarian ideals and report that their decisions are mutual, outcomes tend to favor fathers’ needs and goals much more than mothers’.
The result of this covert power imbalance is not a net zero. A growing body of research in family and clinical studies demonstrates that spousal equality promotes marital success and that inequality undermines it. And the disparity creates not only undue emotional, physical and financial strain on mothers, but also perpetuates attitudes about what is and should be acceptable — or even desirable — between a woman and a man, with children as their eager audience
“I’m ninety but I feel like I’m fifty. I don’t take any medicine. I never complain. I’m just happy to be alive. I tell people: ‘Start with what you have, not with what you want.’ Every day I dance for two hours. And I’m still really interesting too. I love politics and literature. I love the sciences. And I’ve got a boyfriend named Alexander. We exchange books. I don’t even know how old he is.”
(Moscow, Russia)