What happens to the minds of young cooks? We hear about chef suicides, we hear about addiction, we hear about the terrible working conditions and low pay - now, let's talk about how the restaurant industry manipulates a group into finding pleasure in being abused.
[listen]
[read, with an open mind]
“The most important thing to remember is that the chef is always right. When you receive an order, be prepared to do it with a “Yes, chef!” no matter what it is.”
Sound familiar? To the initiated, nothing screams solidarity more than meeting a fellow cook outside of work, exchanging horror stories as a poor excuse for pleasantries, and occasionally interjecting a “Oui, Chef!” into the conversation. Oui, Chef - which means nothing more than “yes, boss” when directly translated - is the kitchen calling card. Any cook who’s done time in fine dining will tell you that this is the be-all, end-all of kitchen lingo. It is our unofficial mantra; a phrase that bonds us together worldwide and signifies the utmost respect for the chef.
Or is it?
For centuries, well-intentioned leaders have spawned disastrous cults. It’s time to have a long, hard conversation with ourselves.
Ever wonder how someone becomes a cult member? I’ve been fascinated with this my entire life. Cult members represent all walks of life, and are impossible to categorize by age, geographic location, or even personality type. If research has shown anything, it’s that every single human on earth can be susceptible to mind control at some point in our lives. One common thread among most recruits is that most people who ended up joining a cult were recruited during a period of heightened stress - people undergoing significant stress, whether it’s financial, relationship, health, or existential, are often more susceptible to suggestion when a person or group claims to have the answers to all of their problems. Cults identify a need, and present a solution.
I was 17 when the kitchen found me. I flirted with serving, bussing, and eventually bartending at a chain restaurant in my local midwestern shopping mall as a part time gig, then got thrown on garde manger during a particularly busy night at my first fine dining restaurant at 19. As the misfit artsy kid who didn’t relate very well to most people I grew up with, the restaurant industry welcomed me with open arms. I felt a sense of belonging for the first time as an adolescent, and I was hooked. Less than a year into the industry, I gave up my academic dreams and scholarships to join the world as a productive member of the working class. I dropped out of college, packed my belongings, and moved across the country to attend culinary school.
At this point in my life, I was in the throes of a physically and emotionally abusive relationship with a man who had nearly killed me just a few months prior to my first fine dining job. I was waist-deep in disillusionment and deeply depressed from my recent trauma. My self esteem was shattered and nothing made sense in my world - and I had a deep need for structure and stability in my life. The kitchen became my refuge. Everyone else was just as fucked up as I was, and we bonded quickly over long hours and late night shift drinks. I took every shift I could get in an attempt to spend as little time at home as I possibly could. In a world where nothing made sense, the highly structured French Brigade system mapped out my job duties in a militaristic way that allowed me to fully submit to the culture of fine dining. I didn’t have to think - I just had to follow directions and cook.
The great irony in my story is truly that during the first few years of my career, the professional kitchen saved my life. Home was terrifying - and working as a cook ensured that my time at home was kept to a bare minimum. If I had been home more, I honestly believe that relationship would have killed me. This, coupled with a deep need to find my own identity, allowed me to romanticize the industry. I felt like a failure in every other part of my life, but not in the kitchen. In the kitchen, I was part of the elite tattooed badass rockstar chef squad. We were cool and interesting and sexy - all the things that were sorely lacking from my personal life, which mainly consisted of crying in the shower and then drinking a bottle of wine to fall asleep, only to toss and turn and wake up every few hours from violent PTSD induced nightmares.
Cooking became my religion.
If I had treated restaurants like a stepping stone, a source of income while I worked on my academic goals, my experience might have been different. That wasn’t the case, though. The industry sunk its talons in me fully and before I knew it I was swept away into a decade-long descent into madness, all in the name of food.
According to research done by Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer and Robert Jay Lifton, several criteria need to be present in an organization to qualify as having the basis for thought control.
Keep the person unaware of what is going on and how she or he is being changed a step at a time. Potential new members are led, step by step, through a behavioral-change program without being aware of the final agenda or full content of the group. The goal in most fine dining kitchens is complete submission of the staff to the chef’s every whim, with no pushback or input from anyone. The convert is next fully subjected to the unrealistically high expectations of the group. The recruit's "potential" is "lovingly" affirmed, while members testify to the great heights they and "heroic" models have scaled. The group's all-important mission justifies its all-consuming expectations.
Control the person's social and/or physical environment; especially control the person's time. Through various methods, newer members are kept busy and led to think about the group and its content during as much of their waking time as possible. Kitchens are notorious for having absolutely zero work-life balance - having free time makes you seem lazy in the cult of fine dining, and inhuman schedules of 80+ hrs/week are glorified and revered as a sign of “passion” and “commitment.” As a cook, you can forget about seeing your friends or family - you’ll never get holidays or weekends off. You will never have a normal life. You will defend this selfish choice profusely to everyone who is close to you, and more often than not, this will push away everyone who cared about you, leaving you no one else but your coworkers - which have quickly become a new "family."
Systematically create a sense of powerlessness in the person. This is accomplished by getting members away from the normal social support group for a period of time and into an environment where the majority of people are already group members. The members serve as models of the attitudes and behaviors of the group and speak an in-group language. The group interprets or uses words and phrases in new ways so that often the outside world does not understand. This jargon consists of thought-terminating clichés ("12 hour days, that's nothing man") which serve to alter members' thought processes to conform to the group's way of thinking. Ever hear of FIFO? In kitchen jargon, it stands for “First in, First out” - an effective way of rotating product to ensure that the oldest items are always used first, which prevents spoilage. It’s also a controversial human resources philosophy which promotes a workplace culture of “Fit in or Fuck off,” where employees are expected to conform to the prevailing organizational norms or be fired. Restaurants thrive on creating a culture of fear, bullying, and petty tyranny that inevitably ends up manifesting as a super toxic workplace.
Sacred Science. The group's doctrine or ideology is considered to be the ultimate Truth, beyond all questioning or dispute. Truth is not to be found outside the group. Member's personal experiences are subordinated to the sacred science and any contrary experiences must be denied or reinterpreted to fit the ideology of the group. The leader is likewise above criticism. Oui, chef. No questions asked. If something goes wrong, that proves that they were not applying the principles correctly. You obviously can’t hack it in the kitchen.
Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences in order to promote learning the group's ideology or belief system and group-approved behaviors. Good behavior, demonstrating an understanding and acceptance of the group's beliefs, and compliance are rewarded while questioning, expressing doubts or criticizing are met with disapproval, redress and possible rejection. If one expresses a question, he or she is made to feel that there is something inherently wrong with them to be questioning. Keep your head down and work, chef. Don’t ask questions, just do what I say. Truth is, most executive chefs don’t want a highly innovative team. They want a bunch of fucked-up, uneducated, desperate, easily controlled worker bees that execute their vision without a second thought. They want ultra-loyal pit bulls that attack when they say ATTACK.
Put forth a closed system of logic and an authoritarian structure that permits no feedback and refuses to be modified except by leadership approval or executive order. The group has a top-down, pyramid structure. The leaders must have verbal ways of never losing. This IS the very definition of the brigade system.
I would venture to guess that at least 85% of kitchens have a history of multiple unreported incidences of sexual harassment, hazing, substance abuse, exploitation, and verbal - possibly even physical - abuse.
These behaviors become normalized when we are faced with them daily. Maybe seeing a co-worker sniffing a line of coke off a sizzle platter stashed in his lowboy halfway through the Wednesday night rush and then chasing it with a deli cup of boxed wine seems shocking the first time, but you pretty quickly find yourself kind of numb to it all. It is what it is. It’s the perfect environment to tune out everyone else’s crazy bullshit and fully wallow in your own self deprecation.
Entering the professional kitchen is like stepping through the wardrobe in Narnia - only instead of finding a white witch and a talking half-goat, you find a haven for desperation. It will welcome you with open arms like a long-lost sibling, and for the first time in your life, you’ll feel like you truly belong. You’ll find people in similar situations to commiserate with. You’ll find that one person who always makes you feel better because talking to them makes you realize that someone else actually has it worse than you. You will become fully hypnotized by the trance of self-obsession, and you will be completely unaware of it gradually sinking its claws in deeper and deeper until you are so wrapped up in your own ego that you don’t even recognize yourself when you look in the mirror.
The months turn to years, and the shift drinks turn to shift bottles. You numb yourself to your own routine. Get up, go to work, unleash all of your pent up fury on the people you work with, go home, fall into a chemical-induced coma for 4 hours, and repeat. Work, sleep, work, sleep. Your life has officially become void of anything that makes you truly feel alive. You are a robot on auto pilot, and when this awareness eventually creeps in, you have no idea how you let your life slip so far out of control. You have lost the ability to truly connect with anything that isn’t food, booze, drugs, or casual sex - the cheapest, easiest, emptiest sources of connection we have as humans.
More important than anything, you lose connection with yourself.
So what do we do? How do we get out of this world of fuckery that we’ve spiraled into?
We must begin with awareness. We must fully and honestly admit to ourselves the damage that we have inflicted on not only our own lives, but the lives of the people closest to us - and after nearly a decade and a half in BOH, I have yet to meet a single cook whose career lifestyle HASN’T negatively affected an important relationship in their lives.
We need to actively focus inward - not from a place of self-obsession, but from a place of true introspection. We must get a meditative hobby immediately - whether it’s running, knitting, writing, hiking, weightlifting, yoga, art, or meditation itself - we must find something else to focus on when we are not at work.
We must begin the quest to find the key that unlocks our intuition - our voice of reason and clarity, our impulse SWAT team that stops destructive thoughts and negative self-talk before they ever have time to manifest and ruin our lives.
We need an entirely new perspective on life. But most importantly, we need to allow ourselves to see and accept our current situation for what it is : a complete mess. We cannot proceed until we allow ourselves to come to terms with this truth. And then - we need to buy a shovel and start digging.
Deep.
Getting out isn’t exactly easy when the world of the kitchen has become the only world you know. Thoughts of leaving are met with feelings of severe anxiety, shame, and extreme unworthiness. A decision to leave the front lines of the kitchen feels like failure - and more often than not, any attempts at self-improvement are met with ridicule and negativity by coworkers, whether it’s a better paying job at a hotel with benefits and a reasonable schedule that allows for a few hours of quality time with loved ones per week or a completely new career altogether (how many of you just muttered "sell-outs"?). Most of us don’t mean to do it, but most of us do.
We get subconsciously jealous when a coworker snaps out of it.
We think we could never give up the life.
We romanticize it further.
We continue to drink the kool-aid.
We continue to belong.
People who leave cults or other high-stress cultures often suffer from depression, anxiety, paranoia, guilt, rage, and constant fear. They exist in a psychological state of floating - which is essentially when former members of a group go back and forth between cult and non-cult ways of viewing the world. You know it’s wrong, but you can’t pull away. It’s a foggy, in-between state of consciousness marked by difficulty thinking clearly, making decisions, analyzing situations, and performing everyday activities such as dressing oneself, cleaning, or grocery shopping. This is so common that there is currently an entire Facebook support group dedicated to chefs who have cleaning issues at home.
Once the awareness creeps in, our world is turned upside down and many end up existing in this existential limbo for what feels like eternity. Deprogramming is always a bit messy, and most relapse a few times and end up back in toxic kitchens before they are able to get out of the lifestyle trap once and for all. It's another form of addiction - addiction to the identity. Addiction to the fantasy. It’s comfortable. We know how to navigate this world.
As an industry, we need to learn to set boundaries. We need to learn that it is not only okay to have a life outside of work - it is essential to our happiness and health. Demanding a quality of life comparable to mainstream societal norms should not fill us with dread. We work hard - harder than most - to become masters of our craft, and it isn’t a crime to want our compensation to reflect that. It isn't greedy to want enough money to survive without constantly stressing.
I am not saying that every head chef is a bona-fide cult leader -
but I do want to point out the similarities between the rules of the kitchen and the conditions that define mind control and lead to brainwashing.
I genuinely believe that most people have good intentions, but lack the foresight and awareness to see the long-term damage that maintaining this sort of authoritarian power system creates in the lives of cooks everywhere. I am, however, saying that we need to all collectively put a stop to these antiquated cultural norms.
The system is no longer working - our industry is riddled with mental health issues, substance abuse and suicide. It isn’t a coincidence - we are quite literally causing the epidemic by creating and perpetuating the perfect incubation conditions. The good news is, we have nowhere to go but up.
We must actively seek ways to stimulate critical thinking and analytical thought - two things that are actively discouraged in the kitchen culture of mindless obedience.
Conceptually, Oui Chef! needs to be replaced with Why, Chef?
Teach each other. Empower each other. Share knowledge. Find your curiosity. Question everything you don’t understand. Fall in love with learning again the way you did when you were super green and had no idea what fresh marjoram even looked like. Be vulnerable and get to know your coworkers as people if you're going to call each other "family."
We must focus on improving and inspiring each other, on pushing our coworkers to be the best version of themselves that they can possibly be - even if it means leaving the kitchen permanently.
Especially if it means leaving.
If everything that you currently are is made up of all of the residual outcomes of your past thoughts and actions, then humans are really just an ever-evolving recipe. Sometimes we need to balance ourselves, adding a bit more sugar and spice to tame the bitterness and sourness that has crept in.
There’s no shame in improving your own signature dish.
[think]
[absorb]
Did this trigger you? That means something resonated.
It might be uncomfortable, but I urge you to explore this feeling.
Ask yourself why this has made you so angry.
What realizations has it brought up?
What do you fear?
Go inward. You'll surprise yourself.
© 2019