Alright, so you did your job of pan handling like a street urchin (or failing to solicit your nudes to your old high school alumni), and after hours of going through Instagram and tiktoks about foodporn, you found that you love food. What with the starving and whatnot, you realize food is something that does one of two things (besides makes you fat).

1. Food tastes delicious
2. Food Brings joy

And somehow you wanted to be a noble profession of a chef. You know, because making food and bringing joy sounds like a simple way to make the world a better place.

Oh my sweet summer child, it a-least certainly seems morally good, just don’t talk to any Vegans, Dieticians, or Jain cultists and you’ll be/do fine. In fact, you should probably not read this article if you want to be naive. . .

Anyways, so you decide to go down the route of culinary school.

Then you realized you couldn’t afford it, so you either dropped out, or quit before you started. Nice.

Then you found some trashy third-rate Duck-Duck-Bingle article online saying how you can apply to an apprenticeship to work and eventually become a chef. It’s like internship but you get paid, so it’s kind of better than slavery but-not-really.

So you knock on the back of some dingy restaurant that might as well serve as a town home, and you get greeted by a dirty apron, grease-stained, grisly look of a man who definitely taste tests every meal.

Well, for quality assurance purposes. Of course.

You talk about your optimistic dreams to one day be a chef and willingness to work for little pay to help make it come true or something.

Then Chef-boi here, he interviews you and all you had to do was say ‘yes chef’, ‘no chef’, and end everything with ‘chef’ because he’s the big boss and Chef is ‘Chief’ without the ‘I’. His name is ‘Cheff’ too, because that’s how cultish he wanted to do things, but he spelled it weird to be ‘edgy’ or whatever. So it’s ‘Cheff’ Chef to you, you plebe.

So you work out this routine of being a bitch boy and go in early in the morning to buy supplies for the kitchen, then you also got stinted on some bad fish. All of it is your fault, of course, and it comes out of your paycheck.

“It’s alright though”, you reason while staring in the mirror as you wipe the piss off your apron and do the quick jiffy-nano-second ‘I touched the water’ wash-of-your-hands as you leave the restroom before picking your nose. It’s alright because you get lucky with some left over food, it’s decent, ain’t bad, and it’s free.

So you get to take home some half eaten steak or mash potatoes, or snack in between meals. By in-between meals, I mean in-between you prepping this meal and the next. Sure this apprenticeship stuff sure has a lot of ups.

After working in the kitchen as bitch boy, and moving on up as a pre-prep-re-cook. Now your morale starts wavering, it seems like an uphill battle and you move but it’s not by very much. Also, the bartender that’s banged everyone but-you, is about to leave town. And you’re thinking ‘man, this sucks’.

Well, guess what,

you’re right.

But don’t worry, you’ve now established yourself among the veterans of the staff. It’s a shit sandwich and everyone gets to realizing that someone held back the tomatoes and cheese. Some realize it after they eat the whole thing and die, others luckily, like you, take a few years.

Point is, you’re no longer the newbie fresh meat, you’re spoiled milk like the rest of them. And by veteran staff member, I mean you take shots between making meals and do lines of cocaine. Yes, between finding the courage to quit and the resolve to put on a fake smile, those lines of coke in the bathroom push you to working faster with a fake smile so you think you’re leaving work early (which is like quitting, but for the day).

So, the best of both worlds!

Don’t worry, the federal employees that eat at the restaurant get to pop positive for residual coke on their drug tests. They’re not even druggies, It’s a great thing. Cocaine, a spice for ’25 to life’ served for free, on-the-house.

Somehow Cheff Chef read a book or saw it on TV in Iron-Maiden-Heavenly-Hell’s-London-Fire-Backdoor-Kitchen-Girls-5 about doing some wipe-shit for a go/no-go coke test on the bathroom counters and this guy finds out it’s a positive result for coke.

He’s looking for the druggie that did lines in the bathroom, but you know you’re safe. Because he tested the sink counter, and you obviously do em’ on the Toilet Tank, for privacy reasons of course.

Rando: “Hey are you crying in there?”

You: “Uh, yea, It’s just been rough these past few days. I’ll be fine.” Sniff Sniff *Snoooort*

“alright, well cheer up” *door squeaks -the same squeak since you first got here- as it closes*

*Door slams open* and you’re thinking ‘fuck’

Cheff Chef: “you done in there? Lunch is coming up and YOU need to get back on onions!”

You: “Yes Chef, in a minute Chef” as you ride that high.

While you,

sit back down slouched on the toilet lid, trying to handle the hit of the new shit (because your old druggie dealer moved towns or got jailed or something) all while Cheff-boi-R-tard is looking for blood. . . on people’s noses, you get to thinking.

You start thinking about how you’re working for this Cheff Chef, while noticing he’s in some uncertain age range of early 40s and late 50s. All while his 30s look like they fucked him up harder than a three-way gang war in the back streets of a Straight guys’ Drag Club.

You gotta admit, he’s an insufferable dick, completely loves to yell, and says something about ‘Great chefs yell and swear’ because it’s passion and some other bullshit about kitchen-talk because he read it in a book and Idolizes a certain Chef (that also is a bit of a prick). So he berates you with a verbal barrage like an emotionally abused-battered wife, all while paying you spare change, and making you work longer hours. Because fuck-you, remember?

Oh yea, in case you forget some more. Your routine is waking up before dawn to do your runner shit. And when you’re done hashing out chicken tendies and slapping a piece of lemon to say it’s Gourmet, you get home after the sun goes down. So enjoy working longer hours than the sun for less than minimum wage (because, Taxes).

In your coke-infused worker-drone-zombie state, something clicks and you realize that this man is a ‘struggle-chef’ with a failed-or-failing business, probably outwardly projecting his frustration to the little bit of control he has in ‘his kitchen’ yelling at barely-adult teenagers. This dude probably spent all his life like a better version of you, and slowly rot away trying to get a quarter of a Michelin Star. What with the business struggling to stay afloat and all, all while you’re riding this sinking ship. So you think about your options and you really think about whether or not you want to be a chef with a chance of meat balling into being like a failure like Cheff Chef.

Also, you remembered that you’re high as fuck on cocaine. So this thought train was probably brought to you by drugs. And you’re grateful to Cheff Chef for making your life so difficult that you resorted to doing drugs and making life way way better.

But you’re retarded, so you keep following the prize like a cultist. Because that’s what they do in the food industry, customer is number one, and food is primo.

Something,

like a ghost dick, probably got in you, because now you’ve seen failure. Hell, you’ve probably even tasted it, especially after the customer returned ‘failure‘ half eaten and complaining about ‘gluten’ or some-shit.

Whatever, a rejected meal for thee, is a free meal for me.

So you decide to get on a binge of TED talks and read some books about Cooking to ‘rediscover yourself’ or something. It started innocent enough, going through youtube channels of crock-pot chefs and barbeque masters in Cooking Mama Video Games. After a while of going down this huge rabbit hole, you get to the near food-like-soul-feeding conspiracy of flavor crystals and using LSD to make everything better like Famous Chef, Helmut Spargel.

Also, salt and other spices are technically crystals. So Flavor Crystals.

Whatever,

Your soul-searching conclusion leads you to realize that being a Michelin rated 11-star intergalactic celestial championship Chef requires recipe adherence and very ritualistic mechanical motions. You see, after you reinvent yourself to be the best, you have to maintain being the best, which means doing the same dried-out boring motions and hitting the right temperature and other boring things that you’ve done billions of times.

That’s probably why most chefs quit,

or at least slap their name on a restaurant and over see it, while giving customers the illusion that they’re cooking for you. Ha, fat chance.

It’s alright,

You decide that this amount of work is dumb and you join the rest of the great chefs and

Kwit, or as they say in A-mer-eh-khan, ‘quit’.

You always fantasized about telling your boss off and saying ‘fuck you’ to Cheff Chef. But you just kindly let him know that you’re leaving; and he’s pretty sad to have lost you.

Between your lines of cocaine and shots in the backroom, Cheff-boi matured a bit. Back then, he probably would’ve yelled at you to go, but he’s changed too. All you see is some sadness leave his eyes rolling down his cheek as he wishes for you ‘the-best’ while you leave and put up your rags-for-an-apron. All to get hired on as a fast-food attendant.

You’re doing considerably less blow than before, and there’s not much of the perks, but you also work less.

So it’s a bit of a give and take, different lifestyle. It’s comfortable and easy, really. Almost too comfortable, like a dream.

It’s alright though, as you flip patties on a flat grill and hear that Sizzle sound.

You think, ‘at least I’m delivering happiness on a bun’.

In Closing

This was an entirely fictitious shit post, made with rumors and other full-assed lies from industry professionals.

I was actually inspired by A great Chef to write this. He has nothing to do with anything here other than saying how much of a drag being a Michelin rated Chef is. Very corporate and robotic, where the soul is taken out of the food, and the kitchen becomes a factory assembly line. All while you slave away to feed great tastes and flavor to some rich snobs that you’ll probably never see again because the wait list is longer than all-of-recorded-YouTube-videos.

So being the best chef is definitely not for everyone. I mean, to be the best, it definitely can’t be everyone. Linguistically speaking. . .

But being a chef ain’t half bad.

I wouldn’t know, because I don’t (and never) work in that industry. (not even with a ten foot spatula)

Always invest in a micro-wave-oven, it’s like a safer bet than being a chef.

But also, there’s no safe bets really. Can’t hedge it out unless the hedge is zero.

*Not Valid Financial, Legal, Life, or Any Advice