Where to go from here?
Or, why I'm not working as a cook right now and probably won't be for a long time to come
Food is relentless. It comes knocking whether I invite it in or not.
“You’re a compulsive cook,” someone said to me this week. It’s true, I am. Even if I’m not hungry, or I asked someone else to do the cooking, I will often drift into the kitchen and begin prepping. It’s a response to stress, to anxiety. I can always find something to do with my hands in the kitchen. A focal point where I can rest my attention for a while. And, at the very least, I know for certain we will have something good to eat.
But cooking can also be a crutch. I just listened to a Radio Cherry Bombe episode featuring Courtney Storer, culinary producer of the The Bear. In the episode, she talks a bit about the types of people who often end up cooking professionally. Lonely Hearts Club, I think is the term she uses to describe kitchen staffs. And it makes sense.
In a professional kitchen personal lives, personal pains, and emotions often have to take a back seat in service of the spectacle (that is, until they’re in the driver’s seat and everyone is either in tears or yelling). It’s a bit of a game.
I told myself I wouldn’t bring it up, but it really did hit the nail on the head. There’s a scene in The Bear, where Chef Carmy continues apathetically plating beautiful dishes as his Chef forces him to repeat demoralizing phrases about himself, closing out the scene with, “You are not tough. You are bullshit. You are talentless. You should be dead.” Still, Carmy plates the food, calls orders to his kitchen staff, and sends finished dishes across the pass, hardly blinking. What do you do when you’re being verbally and emotionally abused? In a kitchen, you just keep on cooking, come hell or high water. No one will fault you for it, in fact, this apathy can easily become a source of pride. I remember feeling like I’d really made it somewhere when I handled being screamed at by responding, “Yes, Chef.”
Cooking can become compulsive, it can be a lifeline, but any sort of tether can also be imagined as a leash. At first, what may pull you from the dregs of the ocean, can become the thing that holds you fast to the edge. It’s a limitation and it’s a contradiction. That which saves you from the hell of your personal universe will soon become the reason your personal universe is a hell. There is no time for reflection, no time to be hurt, no time to process in a quick-paced kitchen. There’s very little time to feel human. It’s one of the things I learned very quickly during my trial period as a line cook. There are millions of things to learn about the dish, the plating, the stove temperature, multitasking, but it can be a challenge to take a breath during a shift. In short, to learn about yourself and the people you work with. It’s like everyone is always at wit’s end, snapping and reacting. In the food, intention is everything, but between people it dribbles away in service of efficiency and perfection. The way you grow in certain types of kitchens is by overcoming adversity and thinking on your feet. Most of the time, there is no handholding. That’s an exhilarating way to learn because the stakes are high, but it leaves very little room for joy.
Now that I’m cooking at home, my frantic nature has started to ware off, and the food I’m making tastes better than it ever has. I think I’ve finally had time to process all of the important lessons that I learned cooking beside a talented chef. But ultimately, I left the line. It wasn’t because I wasn’t tough enough, or I couldn’t handle the heat, as I’m sure it seemed to some of those I worked with. Unfortunately, I think if the life and person I came home to after my shifts weren’t as wonderful as they are, I would’ve happily whittled myself to a nub at that station.
I took a look at the industry, my options, what cooking really means to me and I decided that I wouldn’t ask myself to do what needed to be done in this case. I didn’t feel like compromising who I was, in order to fit into a system that I see crumbling all around me. I didn’t feel like asking myself to shrink under the weight of what years of abuse and mismanagement in the industry has left behind in it’s wake. I didn’t want to be a hero. I just wanted to find my way.
And I think a lot of young cooks feel the same. I am glad that so many of them are taking charge and changing the way this system works – that they’re asking for better. It’s really easy to criticize the industry from the edges, but it’s so much harder (and more important) to do the hard work of changing it.
In my case, I’m not ready to step back into it. So for now, I’m trying to examine my relationship to the restaurant industry, to food media, to cooking and figure out how I can share it with others in a healthy way. A good start would potentially be to stop compulsively cooking. To leave the kitchen for when inspiration strikes, and turn elsewhere (perhaps inward?) when I’m overwhelmed and reaching for ingredients.
Right now I’m reading In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, an interesting book about addiction, and questioning how I relate to my passions. This is not to say that cooking is an addiction, and I don’t mean to belittle the very real struggles that so many face in relation to substances and harmful activities. It’s just to say, there are different ways to relate to the activities and objects in our life. Sometimes those relations skew toward addiction and away from harmless hobbies.
As Dr. Gabor Maté writes, “You may even devote your entire life to a passion, but if it’s truly a passion and not an addiction, you’ll do so with freedom, joy and a full assertion of your truest self and values. In addiction, there’s no joy, freedom or assertion.” Freedom. Back to that leash.
I’m not going to be able to sort out my own relationship to cooking in one (or even a few) essays, but I can at least open up the question for myself and others: how are you coming to your passions? Do you come of your own free will? Ready to encounter joy? Do they nourish you?
If the answer to any of these questions is no, not to worry. There is time to put some space between you and the water’s edge. I am not ready to abandon cooking simply because I think my relationship to it could use some adjustment. In fact, even recognizing moments where I find myself mindlessly cutting onions without having decided to do so, helps me to slow down. I can then ask myself, “WHO am I cooking for? WHAT am I cooking for?”
Sorting out our relationships to our worlds and our interests is a lifelong pursuit, and unlike on the line, there’s no rush here. Take your time. As an incredibly wise friend and mentor of mine often says: Go slow.
Good one, Clea! To slow food.