Sociologist Ellen Meiser publishes book on Making It: Success in the Commercial Kitchen
In her new book, Assistant Professor Meiser takes a close and personal look at how knowledge, power, and interpersonal skills determine who succeeds in commercial kitchens.
A sociologist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, whose area of expertise is in food studies and the restaurant business, has just published a book exploring commercial kitchens, one of the few places in America where workers from lower-class backgrounds can rise to positions of power and prestige.
Based on her doctoral dissertation, Assistant Professor of Sociology Ellen Meiserʻs first book, Making It: Success in the Commercial Kitchen (Rutgers Press, Oct. 2024), debunks talk about culinary school being a waste of time and money. Meiser says many graduates from these institutions feel their experience was worth it.
“I write about workers’ education, emotions, their bodies, and their ability to command social power in the kitchen as all big elements that determine success,” she says. “And I’ve written the book for a broad audience — not just sociology nerds, like me — with the goal of it appealing to anyone interested in cooking and how the culinary industry works.”
The book is based off research she completed in graduate school. Meiser received her master of arts in Asian studies (2016) and doctor of philosophy in sociology (2021) from UH Mānoa.
“My goal, when I first designed this study, was to make better sense of how we, humans, conceive of success, averageness, and failure in creative industries that also have commercial pressures,” she says in a recent interview with the UH Alumni Association. “How do we judge what success actually looks like? I was particularly interested in averageness — or what I like to call, mediocrity — as many of us, myself very much included, inhabit this space of ordinariness, yet we hate to admit it!”
The book, she says, looks at how chefs and cooks judge and perceive the success-failure spectrum within their profession, and the various elements that impact it.
Making the case in Making It
Starting with the premise that the restaurant industry is one of the few places in America where workers from lower-class backgrounds can rise to positions of power and prestige, Meiser notes in Making It that with over 4,000,000 cooks and food-preparation workers employed in America’s restaurants, not everyone makes it to the high-status position of chef. The book investigates the factors that determine who rises in the ranks in this fiercely competitive environment.
Meiser posits that the career path of restaurant workers depends on their accumulation of “kitchen capital,” a cultural asset based not only on their ability to cook but also on how well they can fit into the workplace culture and negotiate its hierarchical structures.
She came to this discovery by immersing herself in the topic, spending 120 hours working in a restaurant kitchen and interviewing 50 chefs and cooks from fine-dining establishments and greasy-spoon diners across the country. In her investigation she discovers that for some workers their clout comes from education and the resulting expertise, but for others it’s all about climbing the ranks, controlling their emotions, or exerting control over coworkers.
The book takes a look at the interplay of knowledge, power, and interpersonal skills that determine who succeeds and who fails in the industry.
Finding freedom at UH Hilo
Meiser arrived at UH Hilo in August of 2022 where she’s found a “huge amount of freedom that faculty have both inside and outside of the classroom that is just unheard of in most jobs.”
“We’re allowed to create classes on relevant topics we are interested in, we can devise lectures and activities in ways that we find exciting, we can assign readings we have found meaning in, and so on,” she says. “I’ve been able to create courses on the sociology of food as well as music, because of this flexibility. So, one of the rewarding parts about teaching at UH Hilo is experiencing that intellectual freedom and seeing students get a kick out of it, too.”
Meiser also enjoys UH Hilo’s support of place-based learning outside of the classroom.
“I’d never experienced this sort of teaching style in the past, so it’s been very cool to bring students to various parts of the Big Island in a big 15-passenger van to connect our reading and lectures to actual spaces,” she says.
Podcast: The Social Breakdown
Meiser also runs a podcast, The Social Breakdown (with tagline, “The sociology podcast nobody wants, but everybody needs”), co-created in 2017 and still going strong with UH Mānoa sociology colleagues Penn Pantumsinchai and Omar Bird. The podcast has an average monthly listenership of about 8,000 fans.
“We’ve been lucky to have a positive response from the podcast,” says Meiser. “Many professors around the states have picked it up and use it in their classrooms, which is cool!”
Meiser’s duties are to create, write copy, record, and edit the educational podcast that covers a variety of field-related topics. She also organizes the guest interviews, and promotes and markets the show to expand the audience base.
Learn more
- Ellen Meiser’s website
- Profile story at UH Hilo’s research website Keaohou
- Column by Ellen Meiser: $50K per year for a degree in a low-wage industry − is culinary school worth it?
- Column by Ellen Meiser: How did abuse get baked into the restaurant industry?
- Story: UH Hilo sociology class holds Food Studies Teach-In
Story by Susan Enright, a public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.