Why it is Evil

These people have made their lives revolve around food quality, making food that is good enough that people feel comfortable paying for it rather than cooking it themselves. Nutritious food is important, and nutritious food that is not unappetizing is good, but devoting your life to making ostentatious dishes is pretty much on the same level of importance as a hair-dresser, meaning below that of janitors and video-store clerks. But the cooks think they are important, don't they? In that they think that their skill at decorating plates with Sysco products is profound and world-changing they show that they don't know shit about life or what is really meaningful. Preening, egomaniacal self-delusion is an occupational hazard.

This makes people feel extra important, like they have joined some great fraternity and have a posse to back them up. You are donning a mantle worn by great men, men of renown. It's like joining the Crips or the San Francisco 49ers. Or becoming a cop. Like all uniforms it appeals to people with mental and emotional issues who seek become somebody else by donning a set of clothes, unaware that life does not work that way. Cheffing, like police work or being a soldier, is just a job and you are still you even though you are dressed like some other guys. There is no real glamor anywhere in human life. When people find that their lives don't change because they have put on this dream uniform, that's when all their issues come out. Cops get brutal, professional athletes drive drunk, soldiers kill civilians, and chefs throw hissy fits.

Remember, this used to be done over an open flame with freshly killed meat for the purposes of not dying from starvation. Cooking devolved, or evolved, depending on how you look at it, into the craft of providing a mouth-orgasm for people with money.  Anything in between charred mastodon flesh and Wagyu infused with Mongolian prune juice and stuffed with foie gras, qualifies as "cooking". The concept is broad. It's not some strict, perfect art that only people with decades of training and some kind of mystical super-power can do, but cooks want and need you to believe that only they can do it. Only they can save humanity from having to taste things that are not wonderful. 

There is a certain class of professional cookery that is identified solidly with the male gender, and this is because culturally speaking domestic cookery belongs to women. The men have to set themselves and their work apart from what your mom did in her kitchen. What the guy does when he puts on his whites and checkers is different from what many women do for their families and don't you ever forget that. Ever. Guys whose masculinity is easily threatened tend to be assholes. When they live in a state of insecurity due what they do for a living, that assholery tends to become ingrained, tends to take over their entire character. 

They are making a product that gets fed into a hopper then flushed into the sewer a few hours later. basically everything on the Food Network is about telling people how to make feces. Emeril Lagasse and Gordon Ramsay are just creating stuff for sanitation workers to deal with. There is no way you can take your work seriously on any deep level if it's existence is temporary and it's end result is disgusting to the very senses to which a chef is supposed to appeal. But to be a successful chef you must take cooking seriously. To take shit-creation seriously involves a certain amount of bullshit directed at oneself. You have to be pompous and demanding or you are nothing but a guy who generates smelly brown stuff. 

You can slave over something and have it sent back by some guy who is trying to impress a girl with how much he knows about good food. Or maybe they have an inferiority complex, are intimidated by the restaurant and want the chef to feel taken down a notch. Maybe the server gave them what they thought was the stinkeye and they wanted to give him some extra work. Whatever the reason, something that is the result of your taste and skill and all the knowledge you slaved over ranges for, while exhausted and kept awake only by anxiety attacks, is rejected by somebody who knows less about food than you did before you went to school for it. That makes you willing to kill people at any moment. You won't, because you would be raped endlessly in prison once they found out what you did for a living, but you could. You have the rage and antipathy to gut a motherfucker in front of his family.  

This makes you tired. Not tired like people who sit in front of a monitor for a few hours, or even people who do the lifting and carrying in manual labor, no, this is a different kind of exhaustion. It' the kind where you have to do a million mini-tasks over and over again, keep track of them, some of which involve precise timing and some of which do not, others involve great concentration, and keen senses, and others do not, and they are all mixed together. Nothing ever works the same way twice and something is always broken or not where it's supposed to be. It's impossible to get into a routine and so it's impossible to not be stressed and 18 hours into a day that won't end for another 10 you come to the conclusion that this is not what you are supposed to do with your life. 

Art used to be about skillfully depicting some literal, even that had importance to the audience, the viewer. Cave-painting, for instance. It used to have a message. Then one day, due to the need of people to show how much smarter they were than everybody else, it decayed into some guy throwing arbitrary shit together. The more arbitrary the shit, the more of an intellect you need to appreciate it so there are always tons of people ready to claim that they get it. An artist can make money with arbitrary, meaningless nonsense, and so can a chef. You throw together the right exotic and expensive-sounding ingredients and it doesn't matter if it smells like a street whore's crotch and costs $50.00 a plate, people will buy it. Artists, due to their knowledge of the human condition, namely insight into the fact that success has nothing to do with skill and that people are mostly morons, can only feel contempt for his fellow man. Immersing yourself in your work becomes an immersion into human foolishness and as the years go by it gets more and more difficult to hide your desire to see them perish in agony. You know why they use butter and duck fat so liberally? So that they can take pleasure in the idea of you having a stroke.

In a kitchen for 16 hours a day with sloppy, messy, smelly, delicate, always-on-the-verge-of-spoiling food will make some loathe it, especially if they were not all that fond of it to begin with. The thing about cooking is that the celebrity aspect of it from TV, the idea of multi-millionaire chefs who own popular restaurants, gives it prestige. Any job with prestige draws millions of assholes to their eventual destruction. By the time they know enough to be disillusioned it's too late. They will be bitter drunks and coke-fiends before the end of their their second marriage. After it stops being about food and creativity it starts being about ambition and power. All the petty politics of the office can sneak into a kitchen and rip it apart. For every talented chef there are 20 bitter, gossipy, burned out dipshits.