Laurie Woolever on 'Care and Feeding,' Culinary Culture, and Anthony Bourdain

Navigating Culinary Culture

• 🍽️ Woolever entered the culinary world in the late 90s and early 2000s, describing it as a high-pressure, high-stakes environment with easy access to alcohol and a culture of camaraderie.
• ⚠️ While acknowledging changes for the better, she notes that kitchens can still be high-pressure environments with a lot of goofing around and ways to blow off steam.
• ⚖️ In her memoir, Woolever discusses her journey with addiction and recognizing when she needed help, having since given up drinking and drugs.

Survival and Personal Growth

• 🚶‍♀️ At the time, survival meant getting along with people and diffusing uncomfortable situations quietly to avoid blowback.
• 💰 Today, survival still involves the hustle of working as a writer and living in New York City, but she is now a more confident and calmer person.
• ✨ Giving up drinking and drugs has made life quieter, calmer, and easier to navigate.

Career Trajectories with Culinary Icons

• 🌟 Working at Mario Batali's Babbo provided an electric sense of being at the center of something great, with colleagues at the top of their game.
• 🤝 Batali's influence helped Woolever gain bylines and establish herself in the New York scene, connecting her with helpful people.
• ✍️ As Anthony Bourdain's assistant for nearly a decade, Woolever gained more opportunities, collaborating on books like "Appetites" and finding intellectually gratifying work.

Reckoning with the Past and Industry Changes

• 🔄 Woolever experienced mixed feelings about the MeToo movement's impact on figures like Mario Batali, feeling it was jarring and slightly unfair to bear responsibility for actions she didn't directly participate in.
• 💡 She ultimately recognized her part in a culture where harassment was normalized and reflected on not pushing back more vocally, acknowledging the complex and sometimes toxic environment.
• 📈 While kitchens historically haven't been welcoming to women, Woolever believes meaningful changes have occurred, with more HR structures and communication, though progress is not always linear.

Lessons from Life and Loss

• 🧠 A key lesson from Anthony Bourdain was his openness to not knowing everything, his willingness to be proven wrong, and his enjoyment of deepening his understanding.
• 💔 Learning to manage grief after Bourdain's death was a significant part of life, reinforcing that there is always more to learn about a person.

The Meaning of "Care and Feeding"

• 👨‍🍳 The title "Care and Feeding" stems from a friend's observation that Woolever had a career in the "care and feeding of difficult men," managing challenging personalities.
• 🍲 The book also explores themes of cooking, feeding, self-nourishment, and self-neglect through life events like engagement, marriage, having a baby, and divorce.

Future Endeavors

• 📖 Woolever views her book as the final word on her jobs with Batali and Bourdain, eager to move on to new projects.
• 🤝 She looks forward to collaborating with others and helping them tell their stories, including a cookbook collaboration with Chef Ryan Bartllo.