I said in the last post that there's a longer conversation coming about the masochistic nature of this industry. I'm not going to have it all today. I'm thirty minutes from the kitchen and it deserves more than thirty minutes.
But I want to put the question on the table so I can't walk away from it.
We only create abusive environments by accepting them. Every chef who got screamed at and then screamed at the next one. Every cook who wore a seventy-hour week like a medal. Every one of us who knew a kitchen was poisonous and stayed, and told the new kid that's just how it is.
So why do we accept it?
Is it pride? Is it the fact that most of us came up with no money and no leverage, and the job was the only thing we had? Is it that suffering together feels like family, and family is the thing a lot of us were missing? Is it because the people who made it out alive are the ones who get to write the rules, and survivors have a way of mistaking the thing that nearly killed them for the thing that made them?
I don't have clean answers yet. I have thirty years of evidence and some guilt of my own. That's where the next one will start.
For now, just sit with the question. If you've got an answer, I want to hear it.