I don’t think I agree. Who watches Hells Kitchen and thinks, “man, doing extremely complex and fast paced cooking in a stressful environment with a chef who’s verbally assaulting me at every moment seems very appealing, I should change my occupation!” Aside from people with a superiority complex and a ‘Can’t lose’ mentality.
I honestly think it’s more likely to drive people away from jobs in the food industry, especially if they’re not already interested in cooking. That being said the dramatization factor is definitely there, and I would hope that most people at this stage would recognize that “reality” tv and competitions like this don’t actually represent reality at all, at least in most circumstances.
The same type of people who watched Top Gun and joined the Navy, I guess.
The same type of people who watched Jarhead and joined The Marines.
Then again if you watched Jarhead and that motivated you to join The Marines, you probably were a perfect fit for The Marines because you already had a favorite flavor crayon.
Paper. Some prefer to only eat the wrappers.
Or Apolcaypse Now or Fullmetal Jacket. Sometimes antiwar movies can end up being great military recruitment films to certain people.
I’m gonna have to disagree. Hell’s kitchen has been on for nearly 20 years now, Master Chef for over ten, etc. They’re on multiple networks and are popular in multiple countries and continents. To say they’re “designed” as a recruitment tool is just ridiculous. They’re “designed” as entertainment, and they are entertaining. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by networks producing these kinds of shows in the past 20 years, they’re not going to spend money like that to advance some agenda of “getting people to work as cooks,” they’re gonna spend that money to advance the agenda of “I and my fellow entertainment executives want more money in our pockets.”
Interesting way to look at it. I saw it as more reality TV bloat content.
Yep, and it sucks, even if you’re passionate about cooking.
Sincerely,
Somebody who flushed that career down the toilet 9 years ago and literally got a pay raise to clean toilets and now makes about 5x what I was making as a chef. And I work less.I’m still having fun as a chef at 30. What did you move into? eventually I’ll have to find a better paying career
Like I said, I got a pay raise to scrub toilets lol. That was in a power plant. Because that got my foot in the door there, I got an opportunity to get into traveling for refueling outages as a radiological decontamination technician at nuclear plants. That was mostly Swiffer sweeping floors, wiping stuff down, and taking out the trash, but one of the projects was hanging heavy lead blankets in high rad areas while wearing uncomfortable, hot suits with a PAPR to breathe through. From there I got into water chemistry as a service rep to treat the circulating water system at a nuclear plant and also visited a few other plants. This was about double my toilet scrubbing pay. One of the other plants was hiring a few years in when I was looking for greener pastures, so I got in as an outside operator. After almost two years of that, earlier this year I was promoted to operate the water treatment plant onsite. That’s at double my water chemistry service rep pay.
It took time, hard work, and a ton of luck, but I’d probably be dead by now if I hadn’t made that change. I’m glad you’re still enjoying being a chef and I’m not gonna shit on anybody’s dreams, but I found it to be a thankless job. Maybe you have more freedom and better help. I was doing 60-70 busy hours every week and I don’t think I ever got more than $12/hour, maybe only $11.50? Plus no benefits. Now I’m at $50/hour (and scheduled overtime) plus good (not great) benefits. The drawback is that it’s rotating 12 hour shift work, so I’ll do a set of day shift 0500-1700 and then have time off and flip to night shift 1700-0500 back and forth. But every 4 weeks I get 7 days off in a row. It requires pretty good knowledge and application of physics and chemistry, but only requires a high school diploma for some reason. Also, I’m in the US, so I’m sure the numbers and everything look very different elsewhere.
My wife loves that show, I was never able to fathom why it is so interesting to watch people being frustrated in you free time. Cooking should be so about fun and love, don’t shout with my food, please.
Watching people be frustrated is literally half of why streaming is so popular
The other half is, of course, boobs
What’s that make The Bear?
