Feeding people is still an act of care
/Ask almost any chef why they started cooking and the answer is rarely about ambition.
It’s about a grandmother’s kitchen, a Sunday roast, the first time they made something from scratch and watched someone eat it. For many it was also a decision made around year nine or ten that the classroom wasn’t for them. Instead they found a kitchen and felt at home in that.
What nobody told them then, and what the industry still doesn’t say loudly enough today, is that choosing to cook is a creative decision. Chefs create not just with their hands but with their hearts and minds – they develop ideas through taste and instinct, solve problems in real time under pressure and bring into being something that didn’t exist before.
“We are importing the skills we should be growing and keeping”
The sad fact is that chefs are on the national skills shortage list, with critical gaps reported across every level from commis to head chef. In the nine months to March 2025, temporary skilled visa applications from the foodservice sector increased by 206 per cent, with chefs accounting for nearly 4,000 of those visas. We are importing the skills we should be growing and keeping.*
The ACF sees this up close. The chefs who leave aren’t walking away because they can’t cook, but because somewhere between the apprenticeship and the fifth year of service the thing that brought them to the kitchen was buried under cover counts, compliance checklists and margin pressure. The care was squeezed out.
The kitchens that retain people – the ones worth working in – haven’t solved a staffing problem as much as they have protected a culture.
Feeding people is still an act of care. The question is whether we’re building an industry that remembers that.
* Reference: ChefHire Accommodationaustralia
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