Popular Culture Review Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 2007 | Page 22

18 Popular Culture Review could be off filming episodes for the Food Network with confidence that all was in good hands at Babbo. Still, the power of the mythic fusion of line cook and chefde cuisine on television is so strong that cases of cognitive dissonance abound in the real world. Customers are regularly disappointed when their idols, “branded” chefs such as Flay, Lagasse, Puck, or even Thomas Keller, are not actually at their restaurants, much less in the kitchen attending to their plates. The uncomfortable friction of reality chafing against fantasy had apparently reached such a point in 2006 that Vegas mogul Steve Wynn reacted with what seems like a desperate— yet, on second thought, perfectly Vegas—attempt to rebuild a falling facade. He designed a new kind of contract with chefs at his latest venture, the Wynn Hotel and Casino, demanding that chefs live and work in Las Vegas and guarantee their regular presence at the restaurant for two-thirds of the year. So far, though, chefs with big names have roundly rejected this restriction. The question is: what is being placated by the magical elision of real and persistent contradictions in the chefs occupation? To be sure, the illusory condensations of workaholic-yet-homemaker and line cook-yet-executive haven’t been crafted for the chefs’ benefit, but to gratify the fans. So, the tensions symbolically resolved must be ones that their consumers would like to transcend in their own lives. It is not surprising, then, to find that those most smitten by chefs are especially susceptible to conflict between personal and professional priorities and pressures. In part, this is a factor of income. Many people with relatively high incomes have earned them because they have invested so much time building successful careers that they have compromised the time outside of them. But it is also true that most Americans with Jobs have been working more and more hours. Various studies, such as Juliet B. Schor’s Ovei^^orked American (1993) and Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), have shown that, although Americans since the 1970s have achieved unprecedented flexibility in their work places and schedules, and are aided more than ever by supposedly timesaving technology, their work hours have increased steadily. Building on a mountain of literature on the subject of the postmodern, “post-industrial” economy, Florida further points out that greater work flexibility has come with greater Job insecurity, a situation in turn prompting people to spend more time working to stay competitive in the more fickle marketplace. The nature of so many higher-income Americans’ work may contribute further to their lopsided equation of work and leisure. Based on his extensive research of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Florida shows that the elite 30 percent of Americans, those playing leading cultural and economic roles, tend to do work that is essentially conceptual. He defines the “core” of this “creative class” as constituting those who may be in far-flung disciplines, from music to marketing to engineering, but whose economic role is similar: “to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content.” Outside the