Chefs and Cooks on the Internet

Back when I was cooking professionally (actually, even before then, when I was studying cooking) my husband gave me his old computer and we shortly thereafter got connected to a local ISP. While poking around on the very young Internet, I discovered a newly formed listserve for food professionals. It was very early days for the list. I lurked and just read for some while, fascinated just to follow the discussions.

It was a fascinating place for a newbie to the industry to be, and some of the discussion was rather heady: great discussions on kitchen and personnel management, resolving problems (like the cracking cheesecakes that was making me crazy), sharing tips and sources for equipment, pointers to articles and news stories that affected food producers and purveyors, or bone-chilling stories about a newer set of yet lower standards for foods to served in schools to our children. There was a lot about behaviour in kitchen (was the arrogant chefs who abused all around him becoming more of a cliché than a reality?), food safety, pricing, tipping, salaries.

One list member runs a placement agency for food professionals, and her insights were wonderful and helpful, and her semi-regular posts of resumes (names deleted to protect) from new CIA or some other culinary institute graduates with grandiose expectations, appalling grammar and more 'what not to say if you want a job' items in their resumes than any of us could possibly imagine. (And the covering letters were even worse.)

I eventually graduated to contributing to the discussions. At times people would get shirty. In the early days of the list, we had some real knock-down-drag-out flame wars over some highly volatile topics like food irradiation, transgenic food plants and milk. The list owner eventually had to set up 'rules of conduct' and a rota of volunteer 'moderators' was established. The list required authorization to join once the housewives wanting a new recipe for jello-mould salads with carrots had finally found us.

During the busy seasons (harvest time for the farmers, Christmas for almost everybody), postings were few and far between. In the slower seasons, there were often more than I had time to read. Shortly after my business was well in hand I was asked to be one of the chocolate experts in an 'ask the expert' section of a San Francisco newspaper's bulletin board. I made some friends on the list, and lost some too (rest well, Pastorio).

I am still a member of the list, although I no longer cook professionally (MS and the attendant stamina issues made continuing in that line of work impossible). I don't read everything that comes through the list, but I read a lot of it, and I find out about things I did not even know existed, get annoyed at the latest thing some government or the WTO is doing to our food, or discover an approach to handling something that I had never considered. Unless they kick me off, I will stick around. I get a lot of really cool stuff from that list.


See The fall and rise of good bread featuring 2 articles by a favourite writer of mine from my chef's list, David Auerbach (the man who saved my beans cooking). He has other articles there too. Check the archives.