A Few Things Cooking Professionally Taught Me
about work in the cultural sector
Introduction and Recap
It’s an unpleasant trait of publishing a newsletter that every time – every single time - you press ‘publish’ at least one person decides that’s the final straw and presses ‘unsubscribe’. This happens even when the general response to a post is positive, a post gets shared, people get in touch and talk about it, and you gain new subscribers. I’ve learnt not to worry about it.
If you’re that person about to unsubscribe, I’m sorry for whatever I’ve said that triggered it, but go well and use your attention wisely and creatively.
But if you’re one of those who recently signed up, welcome. I’ve had a big uptick of new subscribers recently, thanks partly to Francois Matarasso for recommending me to his readers recently. I’ll try not to be inhibited by the opportunity to disappoint you.
New readers might like to be reminded that the title of this newsletter comes from my book Tactics for the Tightrope, published by Future Arts Centre. This book is best described as a manifesto-cum-toolkit for an inclusive and fair cultural sector, with trace elements of my own story as a writer and cultural worker. It also brings together and updates some of the research and provocations written via Thinking Practice since 2010. This includes work on strategies for creative livelihoods, creative resilience, leadership and community engagement. The Thinking Practice website has a fullish list of publications.
Unfathomably, Future Arts Centres still have a few copies of the paperback of Tactics for the Tightrope left. You can buy them via their website and at no good bookshops. Alternatively, you can download a digital copy, or individual chapters, for free at tacticsforthetightrope.com. (So long as you don’t train your AI with it.)
What I write here continues those arguments with the world and myself. All my old Thinking Practice blogs are archived here too. If you’re a real historian, visit the Arts Counselling blog I wrote between 2008 and 2010 when I worked at Arts Council England, which aimed to demonstrate, to myself if nobody else, that arts bureaucrats are not robots.
A Few Things Cooking Professionally Taught Me
Last week I took part in a ‘speed networking’ session with students in Leeds University’s School of Performance & Cultural Industries, where I am a member of their Industry Advisory Group. The intention was for students to talk to us about their hopes and ambitions and us to share something of our own experiences of entering and staying in the cultural workforce. It was a really stimulating session for me anyway, and I’ll write in the next newsletter in response to a couple of brilliant questions I was asked.
I found myself talking about the early years of my working life as a vegetarian head chef. (I was 28 when I got my first job in the arts, and as I always point out, my pay went up, because the arts don’t have a monopoly on exploiting passion.) This was a period where I was beginning to be published as a writer, founded a poetry magazine and press and started promoting events, but where I was also learning business and leadership skills alongside culinary ones in the heat of the kitchen. It was, in hindsight, how I slowly dug a tunnel out of a slightly stuck position, having a lot of creative intent and stubbornness, but absolutely no contacts or entry points to the spaces I wanted to operate in. Fortunately, I found the counterculture of small presses rather than banging my head against big publishing’s locked doors.
This chimed off something I read on Substack by Wil Reidie, author of a fascinating newsletter called The Recovering Line Cook who wrote a Note about “A Few Things Cooking Professionally Taught Me”. These are both specific to cooking, but also useful life lessons: Work Clean, Create Parallel Versions of Yourself, Everything is Impossible Until It’s Done. (If you like reading about cooking and food, as I do, Wil’s newsletter, which is also about living in Finland, is entertaining and insightful.)
What follows are a few things cooking professionally taught me that have informed how I work in the cultural sector.
Freedom is built on plan and prep
I remember being struck in my first cheffing job, in a Wardour Street basement, how little of the time is spent on service (the hours a restaurant is open) and how much is preparation, based on planning. Often repetitive prep which some people would find tedious. (Not me, if you have a sack of onions that need dicing, holler.)
To have the freedom to make things, or to improvise, you need to know what you have to hand has been prepared. There’s a lot of lists and stock-taking that don’t show up in the photos and the close ups of chefs on telly.
If you think you can prep the ingredients for a dish while cooking it, you are in for a stressful and chaotic time. You will not feel free. This is my experience of performance, of facilitation, of capital developments and of all sorts of cultural activity. Only when you have planned and prepped, can you ditch the plan and jump off into improvisation to respond to what’s happening in the room. Equally however, do not mistake prep and planning for the whole of the work.
No team without shared standards and values
I worked in relatively small kitchens – vegetarian catering was not in the late 80s/early 90s was a minority pursuit - so avoided the military-hierarchical system unfortunately still as play in many kitchens. (Not for nothing are chefs known as ‘brigades’.) In those what the Head Chef decides is right is right, whether you understand why or not. If you read anything I’ve written on cultural leadership you’ll know I don’t buy that.
What I do buy is that collaborative team performance still needs shared standards and values. It both depends on those and builds them. What are you trying to achieve? What does it look like – literally? How do you stop yourself serving something that’s not right, even if the customer has been waiting? If you can’t articulate those you are just people obeying orders.
Cultural organisations too need teams that have a shared sense of those things: how you treat people and each other, what you say no to, the way you deliver a performance or a show, the times when you step in on each other to protect your standards and values.
Never panic: just do the first thing first
It’s easy to panic in a kitchen. I remember having to fry 100s of sweet corn fritters for some vegetarian band’s 1987 Christmas party and it all going disastrously, while a manager stood over me panicking. It was a nightmare. Things go wrong in kitchens, as in life. Sometimes they don’t even need to go wrong: the prospect of all you have to do can be overwhelming.
But never panic. If you panic, you are lost.
Identify the order in which things need to be done and do the first thing first. Do it well. Then the next. Then keep going. The sense of achievement of doing the first thing first and doing it even adequately is an antidote to panic. Doing that repeatedly vaccinates you against panic in the future.
Constraint is king (waste nothing)
I could probably go on with this list all day. I could argue for really understanding your ingredients and your techniques in community work and why you should season like a professional cook, or why foraging might be the answer for fundraisers (I’m joking). But I will add just one more, possibly awkward, thing: constraint is king.
The truism ‘content is king’ is often used by people who can bear to use the word content, or who want to put your idea and art into some kind of mincer. But I learnt from cooking that if anything constraint is king. This started, I suppose, in my own example with the constraint that is vegetarian and vegan cooking, a perceived limitation that begins in ethical choice and leads to creative ways of finding flavour, texture and experience. You have ingredients, time, a budget – and also the constraints of your space and your customers. That leads you to how you can express yourself, but you must respect the limits and possibilities of your ingredients. (Hmm, how come I never became Vegan Heston Blumenthal?)
If you think there is never enough time, or money, or space, or people, or tech, or marketing for your cultural work: you might be right. If you think funding programmes can force you down narrow tracks, again you might be right. And yet, those things can also be stimuli for choices that express what matters to you.
Use what you have available, including the leftovers. What you can afford and forage. Waste nothing. Think harder. Find new ways to put things together rather than throwing more at a lack of ideas. Every constraint is a potential innovation or improvement. For me the idea of constraint as something to be used aligns well with asset-based approaches to development - it is the opposite of deficit thinking. None of this is to deny, though, that bad systems, power and inequality can force you into straight-forward lack, which is not healthy.
Final thought: maybe I should think through whether the funded cultural sector is actually a massive collaborative Oulipo-style work of art, a whole contradictory world expressed through arbitrary, occasionally painful constraints. And do it in words of one syllable. But not now.