Who would be a chef?

I can think of two good reasons to become a chef. Constant work and travel.

There is always demand for a chef and no matter how hard times are, or how poorly the economy is doing a chef will always be able to find employment. What's more if a chef should seek the chance for travel and adventure cooking is an easily transferable skill that can be taken to any country. Cooking can open many doors and offer many varied experiences.

But cooking really is a young person's job, it offers no real security or reward for hard graft and devotion. The upward slog to becoming a head chef is brutal and the pay never reflects the heart, pain and graft that a chef will deliver for the sake of his job. Quite frankly, cooking is a dead end job with a very limited chance for honest success. For the few celebrity chefs and glamorous head chefs in prime positions there are hundreds of thousands of white uniformed culinary soldiers left to toil in terrible working conditions.

Chefs often enter the industry out of love. Food is a passion, a mistress to be honoured and adored, but she asks a heavy price. Seventy hour weeks, long double shifts that sneak up back to back. A hard, unforgiving environment in which to work, where stress tears at the guts and the demands of a hot kitchen will burn, blister and cut at the flesh. The work is unsociable and for those chefs unfortunate to be working those seventy hour shifts are often shocked to realise that their generous sounding pay packet when broken down to the hourly figure is often less than minimum wage.

Even more lamentable in this day and age where a good chef will know a staggering amount of knowledge and own a prodigious level of skill and also be willing to work all hours under the sun is that there are simpler jobs offering the world. Take tube drivers earning £31,000 plus for a thirty-five hour week or manual workers earning £15.25 per hour for local council and borough related work.
Such figures really have to hurt the heart of an honest chef.

So if you don't thirst for overseas adventure or need a job straight away I'd strongly recommend choosing a different career option and save the joys of cooking for your domestic kitchen.