I have always known the day would come when I wanted to be a chef. That day has now come, and not only do I want to be a chef — I am going to be a chef. Well, not so much a chef as a cook.
I’m going to do a Certificate III in Commercial Cookery at Regency Park TAFE next year, in 2026. I will always be a writer and an artist, and I’m going to continue with those studies online, but day to day, for one year, I’m going to get up in the morning and force myself to get to the kitchen at Regency Park and cook.
I feel I have been called to the profession. I started thinking about the famine in Gaza and food in general — and second to water, food is the most important single thing in the life of a human being. But the truth is, I literally know nothing about food. I don’t know how to cook, and I’ve had a bad relationship with food my whole life.
When I say I don’t know how to cook, I’m not lying. Literally, all I know how to do is put a can of baked beans in a bowl and into the microwave. I now live with my mother, and she doesn’t cook anymore, so we have a lot of Uber Eats — which costs a fortune. When I live by myself, I get by on takeaway and things like Lite n’ Easy frozen meals or frozen meals from the supermarket. I also have a lot of bread.
It’s so unsophisticated and, in so many ways, immature. I don’t have a refined palate, and the other thing is, I don’t know a lot about wine. I’m also a vegetarian — and I’m not a foodie. I don’t love going out to restaurants or people’s houses for dinner, and that’s not because I don’t like food; it’s mostly because I’m worried about the kind of food that might be served.
Whenever I say I’m a vegetarian, people say, “But do you eat chicken? Do you eat fish?” Intelligent people say this. If you eat those things, you are not a vegetarian.
I want to go to TAFE to learn how to cook. To learn everything about food — about nutrition, healthy eating, balanced meals, and all the techniques and methods for producing high-quality dishes for my mother, myself, and my future husband, who will be an older, God-fearing, conservative man from the Liberal Party.
I need this life skill. I need it for myself, but I also want to cook for other people. I want to make the plate out of pottery, glaze and fire it — and then I want to put a good quality meal on it.
At TAFE, I also want to learn about the psychology of food — and things like: were humans supposed to eat meat? I ask that because, apparently, those who eat meat get protein from it. But what does that actually mean? And how did we first discover a taste for meat?
I think about the early humans, and they wouldn’t have been able to kill big game themselves without any tools. But they probably saw other animals eating dead animals and decided to give it a go themselves. They would have congregated around the carcasses and gnawed away at the meat. And in the beginning, without the mastery of fire, they would have been eating raw, uncooked, absolutely disgusting meat.
It would have been just like out of a horror movie.
Then, making tools so they could cut the meat would have made things a little nicer, and with fire and the ability to actually cook it, eating meat would have become less risky, because I know there are so many different health issues that can come from eating raw meat.
So if I can come to some sort of conclusion about whether humans were meant to eat meat, it will make my time in the kitchen feel more or less authentic. Because if we are, I’ll feel like an early human or hominin sitting by the campfire, cooking up a feast for everyone in the tribe. But if we weren’t supposed to eat meat, I’ll feel like a serial killer’s assistant, chopping up the remains of an innocent for a bunch of voluntary carnivores.
Either way, I want to know. I hope they theorise about these sorts of things at TAFE.
It’s funny — I came face to face with the meat issue tonight, just after I decided to pursue my new but passionate dream of becoming a master chef. I ordered a vegetarian enchilada from El Mexicano at Hyde Park. It’s a stormy and very rainy night tonight, and I felt bad for the delivery driver having to bring it to the door in the rain.
Anyway, they did, and I was starving, so I opened the package — and it was, unfortunately, stone cold. I shoved it in the microwave for a minute, which is my only trick in the kitchen at the moment, and sat down in the living room with my mum, slowly eating away at the enchilada.
It tasted a little different than usual, but because I’d ordered vegetarian, there wasn’t a part of me that thought I was eating meat. That was until I bit into a large chunk of beef.
I instantly spat it out, ran to the bathroom, and violently threw up. I’m not allergic to meat, but just the thought of it — the feeling of meat in my mouth, in my stomach — absolutely disgusts me.
I settled down and talked to Mum about it, who seemed to find it slightly amusing. But it got me thinking: how can I possibly do a course in cookery when meat is going to be such a huge component of what I cook? So many dishes revolve around it.
But you know what? I’m up for this challenge.
I know you see chefs tasting their own food in the kitchen, but I’m simply not going to do that. I couldn’t. I can’t throw up in the kitchen. But there must be a way around it. There must be workarounds, and TAFE, being a government institution, is probably the best place to navigate imperfect study plans.
My relationship with food has been poor all my life. I love my parents, but I was never really taught about it. Growing up, I lived on Vegemite sandwiches and baked beans. Sometimes my mum would cook a corned beef with beautiful veggies and I loved that, but I don't eat that anymore and haven't done for years.
I’ve eaten too much, I’ve eaten too little — and it’s only in recent years that I’ve been able to get the balance right. I want to heal this relationship. I’ll never eat meat, but I want to be able to go to a restaurant, explain my special dietary requirements, and not have it feel like a battle.
Like I’ve said before, I put on a lot of weight and I haven’t been able to drop it. Next year, I’m going to take the year at TAFE to sit down, learn about food, and lose the weight.
But it’s not just about my relationship with food, or my desire to cook for my mother and my future husband. It’s also about hunger — and whether, as humans, we truly have the means to satisfy it.
I watch a lot of news on Gaza. A lot. I spend hours a day watching Al Jazeera and following posts from local journalists in Gaza, and to physically see those poor people starving — not just hungry, but literally bones sticking out of their bodies, emaciated, starving — it’s devastating.
It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that it doesn’t have to be this way. Their malnutrition and starvation are manufactured. Israel continues to use aid as a weapon of war — which is a war crime.
And it makes me think about the politics of hunger.
I watch the footage of some of the aid Israel does allow in — where countries donate supplies and they throw it from the sky in aeroplanes. You see the Palestinians running towards the aid, crushing each other in desperation. So desperate. So undignified.
How can this be allowed to happen?
I think they should stop those airdrops and get the aid in another way. It is dehumanising. I think there is a special place in hell for Netanyahu and those Israeli head honchos who have first of all engineered a famine and then go and throw aid at the Palestinians like they are animals begging for scraps.
This is why I want to understand our primal and physical need for food. I want to understand who controls it. What the rich eat. What the poor eat. Who provides it and who withholds it.
I want to understand anorexia and obesity. I want to understand why some people starve by force, while others starve themselves by choice, and why so many of us live in complicated relationships with food.
But most of all, I want to know how to make a nice, hot, home cooked meal for my mother and my future husband.
Before all other things, I must learn this foundational life skill — to understand food, and to understand myself.
