Thoughts on Capital, Taste, and Survival After Watching [Culinary Class Wars]
Everyone’s treating it like a meme, but surprisingly, this show made me revisit the question of “how taste, as a form of capital, survives in an age of endless competition.”
At first I thought it would just be another survival show, but as it moved into the middle stretch, a different kind of interest emerged. There were two main things that stood out to me.
1. The name value of being a “star chef” is capital that keeps accumulating. Contestants whose names were already attached to restaurants started off with favorable first impressions from the judges. In contrast, the unknown ones had to prove themselves on every single dish.
2. Beating the mainstream with fine dining alone is really hard. The popularity test mission showed just how strong familiar codes are among consumers (the judges). In the end, the ones who looked strongest were the contestants who respected others’ tastes but kept a clearly defined style of their own.
Watching the hidden masters episode and seeing the chefs tear up, I found myself empathizing with the burden of having to constantly prove your skills in society. Anyway, I think the white-shirt contestant is incredible. A school cafeteria chef pulling off that level of cooking?
5 answers
Agreed, especially the white shirt was on another level lol
Read the post well. I especially related to the first point. Every time I changed jobs, I was treated like a nobody in that world, and the period where I had to prove my abilities all over again at each company was exactly three months. It's true that having a "name" gives people trust even before actual skill, so watching the participants tear up in the hidden experts episode made me feel for them too.
On the flip side, "name value" is ultimately accumulated capital built from skill plus a long track record, so dismissing it as just "the disadvantage of being unknown" as if it were a social class feels like a bit of a stretch. And in the end, doesn't the final matchup come down to the taste of the food? The analysis itself is interesting, but it feels like it unnecessarily overreaches into sociology.
Oh, so taste is also capital. I hadn't thought of that.
If I'm going to nitpick, I think 'what's familiar to consumers is strongest' will actually end up working against fine dining in the long run. Everyone wants a fresh, memorable meal, but when it comes time to vote, they end up rewarding a safe collection of dishes. Still, here's another person who mourned with you when the Baek Jong-won zombie game came to an end. That white shirt really was something, though.