The programmers site was originally dubbed "Not Programming Related" and was intended to hold the questions which didn't fit on Stack Overflow - in other words, questions about programmers, not programming, all of the soft topics like workflows, career advice, language speculation, etc.
And indeed, looking at the front page of programmers.SE, there's not a single question that is actually about programming. People aren't asking questions there that they could otherwise ask on Stack Overflow; virtually every question there would be closed on SO.
You appear to be proposing a superset of this site because, as Sam points out, several of those questions would be just fine here. That, to me, serves no real purpose other than to splinter the demographic between the "inclusionists" and "deletionists", with one going to the site where subjective questions are allowed and the other staying here. That was not the point of programers.SE, and considering how young cooking.SE still is, a broader proposal could only end up hurting both sites if it actually made it to beta.
I'm sure that wasn't your intent and don't wish to downplay your effort, but it seems to me that you've partly misunderstood either the scope of this site, or the purpose of programmers.SE, or both, and as a result, you've created a proposal that claims to be a sister site but is in fact just a duplicate with a slightly expanded scope.
The most common off-topic questions we get here, bar none, are recipe requests, and there's already a proposal for that. In the meantime, we're doing our best to sharpen up the blurry borders and politely nudge newbies who ask these questions in the right direction.
The second-most-common kind of off-topic question are the low-level "food" questions, and it's unfortunate that our name is still "food and cooking" because it was never our intent to support questions like "What are some good snacks for the car?" or Sam's example, "What's your favourite pizza topping?" That subject doesn't have it's own proposal, and if you created one, it would have little if any overlap with this site.
- However, that subject also has an inherent problem, which is that there's no expert audience; programmers.SE is essentially a subset of the SO demographic, but everybody eats and therefore a "food enthusiasts" site, if it survives the Area 51 process at all, would be doomed to become yet another crummy yakkity-yak site occupying yet another dark and dusty corner of the web. I believe, as Sam says, that it would be better to try to fit those into the recipes proposal, as they are basically the same sort of question (food polls).
Aside from those subjects, question closings are really quite rare. I think we've had one question about career advice in the entire 65 days; we've had a very small number of brewing/winemaking questions (which also has its own proposal), and in the early days we got a handful of health questions, which we thankfully don't get much of anymore, and if you want to talk about that, check out and support the nutrition proposal.
The site that you're proposing, if it were truly defined analogously to the programmers.SE, would cover an area that we don't actually have yet. That's when we reach critical mass and have hundreds of actual chefs (or at least really hardcore home cooks) actively participating and wanting to talk about other aspects of the profession than cooking itself; career advice, shopping and brand recommendations, war stories, quotes and jokes, "best music to cook to" recommendations and so on. We might get there some day - hell, I hope we do - but right now, I don't think we're even close.
If you want to go ahead and define that proposal anyway then be my guest, but please do it properly so that it doesn't overlap so much with this site (unless those questions were intended as off-topic examples). Good "Chefs" questions, in addition to the few examples I gave above, might be:
- What hobbies tend to attract chefs?
- How do you organize your kitchen?
- What's the [weirdest/hardest] dish you've ever prepared?
- What made you choose to be a professional cook?
- Which culinary schools are the best for [...]?"
- Describe the worst kitchen you ever worked in?
- What was the first thing you ever learned to cook?
And so on and so forth. These are the kinds of questions that are (sort of) targeted at culinary experts but don't actually have anything directly to do with cooking. I don't see people asking these questions left and right - quite possibly because we set the standard early on that these weren't appropriate - but if you have a burning desire to talk about that stuff, you should adapt your Chefs proposal accordingly.