Food is a gift
/by Mac Worley
Mac Worley is a chef with nearly a decade in hospitality and a deep passion for storytelling. His writing is shaped by kitchen culture – its pressure, creativity, human connection and the small, often overlooked moments that together make up a working life.
Listen: My Jacket - Mac Worley
Food is a gift: a weird and special and unique present that vanishes moments after being presented to whoever‘s lucky enough to be at the table. Imagine spending hours painting a portrait of someone just for them to admire it once and never see it again.
Which is why it’s fascinating to me that food is almost never considered a waste, neither of time nor money. If something looks and tastes good and someone’s happy to eat it then it’s not a waste by any means. Society may have many shortcomings but food is something we’ve got pretty bang on.
I can go to any city in my country, any town for that matter, and sit down, order a meal and allow a complete stranger to keep me from starving to death. I don’t need any information and if I do it’s right there, either on the menu or in the minds of the front of house staff. I don’t need to know and honestly couldn’t care less where the chef is from, what they speak or who they are! As long as they can cook and I can pay it’s perfect.
A chef can and will spend their whole day making sure their mise is done, along with prep, backups etc.
Hours of work every day of every week, all leading up to the moment the food can be put on a plate and finally be taken out to the customer, who will consume it moments later. At surface level all this could be seen as waste, a fugazi, but it’s actually the polar opposite of wastage.
One of the many responsibilities head chefs have to fulfil in order to get and maintain a job is sharing with those around them any and all information they might have that could help create a better, more well-rounded chef. You spend years of your life and career learning things, getting thrown in the deep end and learning even more.
Trial and error is fantastic and showing people how we do things is important but not quite as important as showing WHY we do things. You need to teach your cooks that there’s love and respect in any good and respectable food business, whether it’s a butcher shop, fine dining restaurant, café or whatever else.
If you as the head chef want your chefs to love what they do and for that to be represented on their plates, it starts with you. You need to let them fall in love with the process of cooking as well as the finished meal itself.
You might teach someone how to sharpen a knife but what you're really teaching them is patience. You might teach them how to butcher a whole chicken but you're also teaching them not to waste what has been given to them. You might teach someone how to make a sauce, but somewhere underneath all of that you're teaching them to give a shit about the person who’s going to eat it.
Eventually the people you’ve educated and taught will leave that job, perhaps go to another state or country, and hopefully they’ll pass on that knowledge to another person eager to learn cook and so the cycle continues.
Maybe that's the real gift. Not the food itself but the fact that someone cared enough to make it. Or cared enough to teach you how to make it, so eventually you’ll care enough to do the same for someone else.
Mac has written a ebook for chefs on how to survive in hospitality. It is available to download here
You can check out his other recently published articles on The Burnt Chef Project.
