The James Beard Foundation has been a serious mess for a long time. Arguably it’s always been a mess, perhaps not unlike its founder. During the pandemic, the foundation tried to fully ‘clean house’ and leave behind not only the financial scandals of the early 2000s but also its reputation for ignoring women and people of color in giving out its awards to restaurants.
In pursuing that reform, the James Beard Foundation created an ethics committee and a tip line and hired investigators to look into tips they received about nominees. The criteria for the award changed as well. I think this has been badly summarized as adding elements in addition to culinary excellence when it is more that the Beard Foundation decided to define culinary excellence as including “equity, leadership, sustainability, diversity and other values”. The first application of the new criteria led to the disqualification of Timothy Hontzas, the chef-owner of the Alabama restaurant Johnny’s, due to anonymous accusations of yelling at workers and guests, which the ethics committee suggested had been verified from their review. Another nominee in today’s New York Times story recounted being called by investigators about her social media posts that someone had claimed were “targeted harassment”. (Her posts are in fact just vague subtweets about domestic abuse and sexual misconduct—any woman who ever posted a #MeToo message would have to be investigated if this were the standard.)
So I think you can at least say that this is a pretty clumsy implementation of an arguably laudable goal. Some of the judges resigned because they weren’t told during the judging process that there were ethical issues being investigated, so that alone seems like a bad design—if you value the work of a judging panel, you make them privy to all of the issues at play and you let them decide how to proportionately apply all the criteria. Though some people are complaining about “cancel culture”, it’s not that unusual for a competition of any kind to include some form of ethical or moral criteria, some evaluation of the “whole person” being considered for an honor. But the whole point of having judges is putting them in charge of comparing and contrasting candidates while holding in mind all of the awarding institution’s mission and perspectives.
The problem goes deeper, though. The real issue here is that these awards really matter financially to the restaurants that receive the awards. Which is turn is what makes the full ethical remapping of the awards so difficult: they are intrinsically scarce, highly valuable, and in each regional category, only one restaurant can win and only a few can be nominated. It is one of many “tournament economies” littered through our culture: annual promotions and bonuses that can only go to one worker in a firm out of many eligible workers, jobs at the pinnacle of organizations that confer vastly higher compensation on the single ‘winner’ with that title, a limited supply of highly specialized positions sought by many qualified candidates, or literal prizes in competitions that are worth a tremendous amount directly and indirectly (say, in the form of opportunities to be an advertising spokesperson or to get high fees on a speaker circuit).
As soon as something really matters in these terms, is worth more than the respect and recognition that comes from a purely honorary award given out by a local fraternal charitable organization to an older and well-established community member, then the judging process is vulnerable to being compromised in a variety of ways and the competition always risks becoming ugly—or promoting forms of manipulation and deception. It’s why some economists and organizational sociologists have questioned the supposed incentive value of limited pools of merit pay and tournament promotions in terms of encouraging overall productivity within an organization. People who don’t think they’re in the running might end up working just enough to not attract negative attention, and people who are in the running are pushed into selfish attention to “gaming” the award criteria (including sucking up to the people giving the awards) and to sabotaging potential competitors.
As some people have already pointed out with regard to the Beard awards, that’s a reason not to have an anonymous tip line. It’s also a reason to think twice about being public about disqualifying someone for a specified reason like “yelling at guests and employees”, because from here on in, the foundation will have to strike any nominee who has been credibly reported to yell at employees or guests. (That’s very likely the majority of chef-owners making high-quality food, even if things have changed in the last decade or so.) At a minimum, the people staging a tournament economy are wise to keep their deliberations secret and to only announce nominees who have cleared any form of vetting process they want to maintain. If there’s got to be investigations, best do that around the outcomes—have all nominees sign a statement attesting they meet the criteria and follow the rules and then revoke if it comes to light that they haven’t. (Say, in sticking weights inside of bass caught in a fishing contest.) The Macarthur Fellowship “genius grants” are worth a ton to the recipients, but the organization handles that wisely by being very secretive about how it hears about candidates, about what it is looking for, and about what its deliberations are like.
Given the new values the Beard Foundation wants to embrace, however, it’s worth thinking about whether a stringent tournament economy can ever match their new ethical commitments. Maybe the way to go is to establish a high baseline criteria of commitment to equity, cultural leadership, community responsibility, ethical treatment of food, sustainability, fair compensation of labor and the maintenance and invention of foodways and give a “Beard Seal of Approval” to any restaurant which applies and meets the criteria. Stick a fee on that process and means-test it against the revenues or assets of a restaurant ownership so that you can staff the evaluation process adequately.
There are cases where you can’t really avoid a tournament economy, but a lot of what we do along these lines isn’t strictly necessary even for—perhaps especially for—the sake of encouraging particular kinds of behavior or practices. Everybody likes to cite that moment where The Incredibles riffs off of Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” and laments that when everyone gets an award and all people are made equal, no one is truly special or individual. As usual, there’s a vast excluded middle between “McDonald’s and The French Laundry are the same” and “we have to pick the one and only regional restaurant deserving of the top prize each year”.
Anybody who has ever been on the inside of selecting winners for a highly competitive tournament prize where the distinction between 1st and 2nd place is “the whole reward” and “nothing” knows that there is frequently no meaningful difference between the top candidates—or that the difference that matters isn’t known to the judges at the time they are making their choice. (In tenure-track academic jobs, for example, the job offer is made on calculation of the estimated lifetime work of the person being hired—and nobody ever really checks the math on whether those estimations pan out accurately or not.) But there often is a widely-agreed upon difference between the top candidates and the middle-ranking and low-ranking ones. Every competition I’ve judged has sorted itself with remarkable ease into those three groups: there is usually quick consensus about which candidates are not competitive, which are the top candidates, and who is in the middle. If you have a tournament where there are multiple equal prizes for all of the top-ranked candidates (say, a fellowship that can be given to the upper 25% of the group), the only discussion is about a handful of boundary cases at the lower edge of the top group and the higher edge of the middle group.
You don’t even really need a pyramidal distribution (as in the case of Michelin stars, where there are very few of the top ranking to go around, and more as you go down) based on the propositional belief that there can only be very few who are supremely excellent. If your idea of excellence is not about mediating access to artificially scarce rewards but instead is just a set of challenging criteria that you would like to see many people meet or exceed, then you can and should remain agnostic about the numbers that make it across that line. In fact, if those criteria are driven by a sense of mission, by a change you’d like to see in the world, your hope should lie in that number being as big as possible. If I knew that a Beard Award meant not that a restaurant had won a tournament but instead met high standards for ethics, fairness, sustainability and culinary quality, I’d be very inclined to prefer any restaurant that had achieved that standard. In that case, there’s still a financial reward, but it’s spread around—in this case, in an industry that is otherwise notoriously punishing in multiple ways.
Image credit: "James Beard Foundation Award for Excellence medallion" by Cullen328 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
The truly challenging situation is when all these points apply, but there are necessarily scarce rewards. I think this happens most often with jobs, perhaps because jobs are less divisible than restaurant patronage or grant funding. But there are many more people who would be good history professors or WNBA players or oboeists than there are places for them and thus the tournament with its unfairness and psychic damage is likely to remain.