PUBLISHER’S Post
I turned 50 this year. For the first two-thirds of my life, I remember almost always being the youngest person in the room. I graduated early, married young, had children young, (by today’s standard) and was always a high achiever—whatever that used to mean.
As a woman whose formative years were in the 1980s and 90s, I was taught that I could do or be anything I wanted. And that I could give my children everything they could possibly need while achieving those dreams. And that I could keep the house shiny and clean and cook wonderful meals every day. After all, our mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers had marched and fought and earned equal rights for women. And yet…
Though in 2024, Caucasian women probably had the most gender equality in US history, all things have never been equal. While women can now manage their own finances and have their own credit—only since the 1970s(!)—and now have the freedom to choose to hyphenate or keep their surname in marriage (or to never marry at all), we still bear the physical weight of childbirth and all that comes with it. According to research expressed in Gemma Hartley’s Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women and the Way Forward (2018), the majority of women also still bear the mental load of their households, married or not.
And at work, women still make between 84–92% of what men make for the same job, according to the Pew Research Center (2022) and the US Census (2021). In the food industry however, the word from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2023 is that women chefs and food preps who work full-time make only 81 cents to every dollar that men make in the same jobs.
Perhaps because this disparity still exists, women have to work harder, produce more, manage more, all while balancing firmness with kindness, structure with levity and by-the-way-let’s-not-forget-about-self-care. Women are tired, y’all! But women are also resilient, innovative, courageous, adaptive, intuitive and inspiring.
March is Women’s History Month. In this time set aside to celebrate the achievements of women in past and modern society, it felt like a perfect moment to focus an entire season on women in food. In Ventura County, we have many inspirational women who have made food their careers. While we couldn’t begin to scratch the surface on this subject in one issue of the magazine, still, we made an effort. On pages 8 and 10, we highlight six creative businesswomen; our spring table on page 22 is made up of mostly women-owned businesses; on page 41 we meet herbalist Emilee Dziuk-Barnett, who helps us identify native medicinal plants to grow this year; Lorenzo Nicola of Ojai Rotie talks about how his grandmother still influences his career (page 33); and on page 28 we have a story about a female farmer’s journey from conventional citrus to organic herbs.
I may no longer be the youngest person in the room, but as they say, age brings experience and understanding. What I know now is that my house will never be perfect; my meals will almost always be on the fly; I still have to make decisions to balance work and motherhood even with adult children. And, women deserve to be celebrated.
Cheers to women,
Tami Chu
