Here's My Resume....

wow! Looks good...you've been cooking for 4 solid years and you were a Sous Chef?! Impressive!...so in other words, you never really learned how to do shit? Ahh..the glories of hiring from the new Food Network driven work force. Sold on the "glamorous " life of the celebrity chef and whatever the latest buzz terms..."farm to plate"..."nose to tail eating".."hand-crafted" .."insert indusry/societal catch phrase here"...without even the vaguest reality check of what cooking is. It's grueling, thankless hard work. I've heard it all, but when any of us interview prospective cooks, do we ever hear.."I do the best on principle. I push myself to be better, faster, tougher than the next guy because I like to see them crumble"? I want a cook to say.. "I LOVE working the line..I love the drama, the on the fly problem solving..the chaos." One in 11 are like that. They get it. The rest are lazy pussies. You've been in my kitchen a week and you don't know where the immersion blender is? Or what or where the masa is. You should have seen that when you walked through the kitchen. Not much on details eh? And just where the fuck are your knives "chef"? Cooking is your life, but you can't invest in the tools of the trade? Buying knives is one of the best parts of cooking!
I fear for the future of cooking. As I've mentioned before I'm sure, I like old school. Hard ass, bad ass, foul mouthed cooks who work like clockwork and take more pride in their actual skills, speed and techniques than they do on the whole Gestault of cooking. Cooks who see what's going on all around them and learn from that. Meat fab/charcuterie/pastry/pasta making/ stock making/sauce making...all these things go on around them every day and yet they still say..."I'm not learning anything"..well jump the fuck in and stop waiting for an invite! The desire and ability to cook isn't formed by waiting for someone to take you by your thin skinned hand and passively waiting for someone to slow down for you...it's formed by YOU saying fuck it! I can do that shit..seeing what your actually looking at and just doing it! Stepping yourself up to the speed with which things are being done!
I guess this "no child left behind" bullshit isn't relegated solely to cooking, it is in fact a sad reality of ALL professions. No...some children should left behind...some should have been thrown at the base of Mt. Olympus a birth.....but I guess all we can do is wish for the perfect world, where ambitionless, non-self starters are burned for kindling for the doers.