Cooking competitions have a vital role to play in drawing young talent into the industry, according to experts in the field.
Speaking at the Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) Black Box Culinary Challenge last month, Alan Palmer — MLA’s global competition coordinator — explained: “Competitions allow young chefs the chance to work as a team, and to be creative outside their normal place of work.
“Something like this really encourages junior chefs to build a career in the industry: they can compete, they can travel, they can take part in something established, creative and exciting.”
Lachlan Bowtell, regional manager for Meat and Livestock Australia — Middle East and North Africa, added that competitions were essential in attracting youngsters to view the industry as a serious career.
“I think globally, there’s a bit of an idea that people who work in the kitchen are service staff, just ‘servers of other people’,” he claimed.
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“If you consider a young person who starts out in IT, compared to someone working in the kitchen industry, they could earn three or four times as much. A junior chef would have to work like crazy for 10 years to get anywhere near that salary.
“Because of that, we’re losing people; we’re not capturing them and drawing them into the industry,” continued Bowtell. “What we need to do is promote the field as a real skill, one that is respected — it’s a culinary craft, not servitude.”
MLA’s Palmer added that there were plans in the pipeline to take the MLA competition to other areas of the Middle East.
“So far, we’ve done two in Kuwait, two in Egypt and two in Jordan,” he noted. “We hope to go to Oman and we haven’t been to Qatar yet either.
“Sometimes it’s difficult because there’s not a chefs’ association in some places,” he admitted.
“You really need someone following up to make sure these things happen.”
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