You would think that fat cooks (chefs) could survive in the cooking industry.
I mean, they know what’s good, right?
The old joke here is that you should’t trust skinny people about food – because they have clearly never found anything worth eating.
But apparently weight can be an issue in the kitchen.
It makes sense if I think about it and remember back to my first job so many years ago.
Working in a kitchen is serious work – and few people engaged in serious, daily, physical work are overweight.
Am I too fat to be a chef? Another question you should probably ask yourself. This is something they don’t tell you at admissions to culinary school, either—and they should. They’re happy to take your money if you’re five foot seven inches and two hundred fifty pounds, but what they don’t mention is that you will be at a terrible, terrible disadvantage when applying for a job in a busy kitchen. As chefs know (literally) in their bones (and joints), half the job for the first few years—if not the entirety of your career—involves running up and down stairs (quickly), carrying bus pans loaded with food, and making hundreds of deep-knee bends a night into low-boy refrigerators. In conditions of excruciatingly high heat and humidity of a kind that can cause young and superbly fit cooks to falter. There are the purely practical considerations as well: kitchen work areas—particularly behind the line—being necessarily tight and confined… Bluntly put, can the other cooks move easily around your fat ass? I’m only saying it. But any chef considering hiring you is thinking it. And you will have to live it. If you think you might be too fat to hack it in a hot kitchen? You probably are too fat. You can get fat in a kitchen—over time, during a long and glorious career. But arriving fat from the get-go? That’s a hard—and narrow—row to hoe.
-Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw