Back in high school, I thought I was going to become a chef. I started to watch cooking shows, I starterd to cook for my friends at school every Wednesday, and I started taking cooking classes at community college. At one point, I took an afternoon class at my community college, where I got to wear a chef’s suit and create dishes every week.
The Food Network convinced me that the chef’s life is glamorous and I could be famous or something, but I’d have to work hard. How hard? Perhaps 50+ hours a week, on your feet, and low pay for 10 years.
I recall being dead set on being a chef, which I could have done if I went to community college. Perhaps it was my bad experience with the culinary class I took that made me think of a different option. Either way, after a few hours of googling, I read up on food science, didn’t understand what it meant, and started to just put that as my default major, because all other majors seemed boring to me. For the schools that didn’t have food science, I chose business like most people who have no idea what they’re doing with their life.
I’m not sure what convinced me to go to college, I remember not being too excited on choosing a place, and only applied to like, 5 schools in California. I think it was because I had the grades so it was worth a shot.
Either way, I got into food science and have been in the food industry creating products for a few years. It’s been a wild ride.
After talking to many chefs with an extensive work history, I’ve gathered enough information to share with you on the difference between being a food scientist and being a chef. The pros and cons of each, and the potential future of each profession.
Food Science
A food scientist can get their degree in 4 years and go off and running. The 5-figure degree is considered a good investment if you didn’t waste your life in college.
Within food science, the factors that are most important to drill through your head are Food Safety, Food Processing, and Food Statistics. These are the intermingled factors that make you a specialized expert in Food Science.
The food industry’s main goal is to provide safe and affordable food for everyone. In the past, one can argue this is the only thing that matters. When you learn what water activity is, or the reason why retort is so efficient, or the purpose of a difference test versus a description test, these are tools the average person doesn’t know, therefore you become an expert with the knowledge that is uncommon to the general public.
Product Development is considered a capstone of all of these lessons as you have to consider making a good product with cost, equipment, and safety constraints, with an amazing amount of confidence that your 10 tons of products won’t be ruined after 3 months in storage.
This is something a chef does not have to deal with.
The pros of having a degree in Food Science is that it’s a pretty niche degree and you can get a job with less competition than your peers. However, product development is kind of put on a pedestal when it comes to really comfy jobs so you might need to work a bit on that. However, there are plenty of other jobs in the food industry where you can go to and be happy.
Culinary Arts
If you’ve ever talked to a successful chef, perhaps you notice an aura of confidence that they know what they’re doing. Of course, they do, they’ve spent most likely a decade working on their craft, working insane hours creating and perfecting the same set of dishes over and over again.
A huge debate I dealt with when deciding to potentially pursue the culinary path was to choose culinary school versus staging, or apprentice. I almost had an in with a chef at Lafayette, but it fell through.
There are many articles that doubt the validity of going to culinary school, and most schools are either bankrupt or are under financial stress. The return of investment of being a chef in culinary school is tough.
Yet one can argue that even a college education is a bad investment. Colleges don’t go bankrupt because, well, college is expensive and that money goes somewhere.
As we’ve discussed time and time again on My Food Job Rocks, education is what you make of it.
Whether or not you decide to get educated, that is not even half the effort it takes to be moderately successful. You have to work hard to even achieve significance in this field.
Why? Well, to quote a great Pixar film, “anyone can cook”.
Because there is a low skill gap to becoming a chef and also holistically, less impact, it is a job that can be exploited to being “stuck”. Making it as a chef is hard, and can be categorized as being as difficult as having someone buy your music, or auditioning for a role on TV.
Musicians and actors are exploited in the same way as chefs. They have to work really hard at their craft to get noticed, and the small funnel of people who are noticed will fight to the death to get to stardom. Some even make shows out of it.
Yet you can still fall in love with music as an audio engineer and you can still enjoy being in the movie industry by working on sets, or even costumes.
When it comes to career paths, becoming a chef is hard to get to a livable wage. But there’s another way.
How They Are Both Slowly Merging Together
Similar to the most popular article on My Food Job Rocks, culinary is merging with food science.
The main reason is that food as a cultural icon is much more important than it was in the past. In the past 50 years, average citizens can now be exposed to is not only safe and affordable, but also can be shipped from Japan, make you lose weight, and taste things you’ve never tasted before.
Therefore the food industry is looking into the culinary arts to unlock potential flavors.
For the chef, this means you can get a stable, corporate job doing what you love. If a degree is required, then a food science degree only takes 4 years for a BS (2 for associates) and as long as you connect the dots and apply the complex science with your culinary skills, you will do well. And if you do get a degree in a food science related field, you have a high possibility to become a Research Chef and join the RCA.
For the food scientist, there are still people out there who think we are these weirdoes with white lab coats. But now the food industry cares about taste. And because taste is an art, you can work to get better with taste. You have a chance to become an artist. Read cooking books, watch youtube channels on techniques, or even stage at a restaurant or go to culinary school. The creative lessons alone will improve how you think of product development tremendously and will make you irreplaceable.
What’s probably the best incentive for both the chef and the food scientist is that your art becomes scalable. You have the potential to impact more than any restaurant can ever impact. The joy you should receive for someone trying your product should be enough to wake you up in the morning.
The most famous mantra in the industry is that “taste is king”.
You are needed.
Really helpful explanation on the differences between the two and why skills from both are important to food development – thanks!