Chefs have low starting salaries and slow promotions. Is getting a certificate more important than culinary skill?
Low starting salaries, long hours, slow promotions and a fixation on certificates mean the food and beverage industry faces multiple long-term difficulties. Compared with how other countries value a chef's individual ability, along with rigorous promotion systems and salaries that simply cannot be matched, many culinary-program graduates are unwilling to enter the job market. In fact, statistics from the Taipei City Department of Education in June this year showed that of 289 vocational high school students in food and beverage programs, only 21% entered the job market.
Chen Chi-wen, a "Golden Hat Award" head chef who now teaches at Ta Hwa University of Science and Technology, admits that food safety problems have emerged endlessly in recent years and have dealt many blows to the culinary world. Therefore, in his teaching he lets students "recognize early" the realities of the industry, and uses local ingredients to ensure culinary safety, so that young people who have been painstakingly trained for 4 years have a chance to stay and strive in the culinary world.
Cao Rui-peng, a professional technical teacher who is responsible for teaching the ingredient-recognition course and has worked at several hotels, says that in class he teaches students to recognize different agricultural product labels such as slaughtered meat products and production and sales traceability. "These labels mean the country has already screened them first, so there is at least a first layer of protection. Then students try to judge the freshness of ingredients by sight, smell and touch."
"In fact, combining with local ingredients can also be a way out." Chen Chi-wen says that at the end of last month, in cooperation with the Hsinchu County Government, the local specialty wild ginger flower was used as a competition theme, and more than 200 teams of culinary students from Hong Kong, Macao and Southeast Asia made dishes such as wild ginger flower preserved mustard greens with braised pork and wild ginger flower macarons, all of which were refined, creative and full of local character.