“Commercial food”

I have started my project as simple documentation of daily kitchen routine in one of London's restaurants. Project name is “Commercial food”. It is about environment where food gets prepared and served. Project was started on October 2016. My inspiration derives from E.Smith’s “Country doctor” photo-essay. I investigate how process of cooking and environment in commercial kitchen looks like for ordinary people. The restaurant shown in this project is very trendy and busy. Chefs are not doing everything from scratch like in fine dining restaurants by reason of hight covers, approximately 600-1000 cover a day at summer . Shifts usually last for eight to ten hours. Chefs work up to fifty hours per week. Busiest days are Saturday and Sunday. Working process can often get out of control what results in bad food and service standard. Kitchen brigade counts 45 people not including kitchen porters and a head chef. Main chef’s duties are to set up all necessary ingredients in advance, finish and serve food when it is ordered as quick as possible according to all standards and guest’s special requirements. I started to work in Catering and Hospitality industry when I came to the UK from Latvia five years ago. I did not speak English and did not have any valuable experience to start my professional path. That is why I found a job as a kitchen porter and then moved to kitchen assistant position and chef position later. After working in various places with more than a hundred of people I have found out that most chefs would like to change their lives, or work in other fields . They speak limited English and prefer to communicate in their own languages with co-workers from the same country of origin. Another disadvantage of being a chef is anti social working hours that make life unbalanced. Nobody in this particular kitchen has decided to be a chef by choice. Catering industry has low entry requirements and offers many immigrants jobs. They work on lowest positions for a national minimum wage to make money for living. Conclusion It is sad to see that many chefs or kitchen porters spend whole lives doing work they hate. The hospitality industry is the UK’s fourth biggest industry in employment terms in the UK. Hospitality industry stood at 2.9 million jobs, equivalent to 9 per cent of total UK employment. Meanwhile, workers get low income and no social protection. Nobody cares of what does it take one to make you full.