North Carolina's Women In Charge

The cooking industry has always been surprisingly male. Most of the great chefs have been men.It's been men who have run restaurants and alehouses throughout the centuries.Of course that changed with Fannie Farmer creating a cook book 150 years ago and a century later Julia Child as TV's first chef. Still  it's a man's world, well except in North Carolina.The whole farm to table movement is handled by and managed by women. Here they rule - and rule well.

It was the topic of an article written by New York Times Food regular , Kim Severson interviewed several women chefs s well as industry experts and farmers. The state  itself is an unusual one. Most of the population these days are Northern transplants, food savvy and used to more worldly fare.North Carolina is also a university state, drawing  student and staff populations from all over the world. They are  more open, maybe more sophisticated in their eating habits. These transplants want much more than just grits and fatback . Thanks to chefs such as Vivian Howard, who is the star of the PBs show"A Chef;s Life" , the restaurant fare is more hipster Brooklyn than the Old South.An el Bulli graduate Katie Button has opened up a tapas bar in the small Blue Ridge Mountain town of  Ashville.Another reason why is that there is not the amount of competition there as there is in New York, Los Angeles or even Boston or Chicago. A women chef has a better chance of opening up a successful restaurant there and maintaining its' success.

The same mentality  has extended to women farmers as well.They are the ones that supply the cuts of beef as well as grains. However there are some good old boys who have a problem with this. Jennifer Curtis who owns First hand Foods, a sustainable meat supplier, has encountered prejudice and misogynist attitudes..Men want to buy from men, especially if it's beef. There's sometimes a problem with other women too but it's not as bad. Mostly it's a sisterhood where they all rely on each other. After all these are the ones who are in charge of the pickle and bread companies, the orchards and pig farms. They need each  other to survive. In fact to help foster this attitude the state has the only female centric women's meat sellers conference.

A kitchen is a woman's place, but so is a restaurant and heading the farms.It is never more so seen than in North Carolina. women rule here as they till the land and nurture the state with good food.