 Hi, I'm Kat. I'm a mentally ill and that's not how we usually go around introducing myself to people. But it's a big part of who I am and I'm not ashamed of it. I'm not ashamed that you know that and I also want to tell you that God, I love you guys. I love chefs and I love the people who choose to make their living in food and you know your people, you feed people and you take care of them and it's the thing that consumes you and and the people you choose to spend all your time with and you wake up thinking about the food you're gonna serve to people and how you're gonna make it even better and and make it perfect and how you can make your guests feel happier and feel taken care of. But we're not taking care of you. You're not taking care of you. And you're not taking care of each other either and you're too afraid to ask anybody to do that for you. And it's killing you and it's killing this profession that we all love and it's killing people and there's not gonna be a kitchen of tomorrow if there's nobody left and you, all the people who took the time and the effort and the money to get to this place today, you're the people who are gonna have to solve this and I want to talk to you about a friend of mine and some of you know her by name or by her incredible reputation and some of you know her very personally. Her name is Jessica Largy and the night I met her she won the James Beard Award for Rising Star Chef in 2015 and I met her just a few minutes after she won the award and she had been identified as one of the best and brightest hopes for the future of food and I stopped her in the press room where I was working and I was taking pictures of the winners and I congratulated her. God, she looked amazing and I'd never met her before but there was there's something about her and she really seemed like this blissful, happy and balanced human being with this gorgeous like really serene smile and I still love the picture of her that that I took that night. There was there was just something about her that was so compelling and I wanted to know more. So a week or two later I was putting together a panel of female chefs in California and I was moderating it and I've reached out to her and I couldn't I couldn't find her. She was she was nowhere to be found and I started hearing through the grapevine that she'd left her position at Manresa where she had been for years where she'd she'd worked up through the ranks to become chef de cuisine, but nobody could tell me where she was going next and or even where she was right then and they really couldn't tell me how it got to that place where she decided to leave one of the greatest kitchens in America working for one of the most extraordinary chefs of our time who she loved and she admired and she was stepping away not just from her job, which is one of the most coveted positions in one of the best kitchens in the world but also from the people and the profession that had defined her every waking moment and consumed her soul and and been her life for such a long time and no one could tell me where she'd gone or why she'd gone away and then she did. She showed up back in my life a few months ago and she wants people to know what happened and she gave me permission to talk to all of you about it because she thinks it's gonna help. She wants to save this industry that she loves so much and she wants to save your life. She lost herself. That's what she told me. She said she loved and she lost everything she loved and she valued about herself apart from her skills in the kitchen. I lost Jessica is what she told me. I didn't know who I was when I wasn't at work and even there I'd become a different person. She loved what she was doing and you make no mistake about that. She loved what she was doing and she loved David Kinch who was mentoring her and supporting her. But the kind as you all know that the kind of toll it takes on your life and on your personhood and your soul to the kind of work she was doing calls for the exclusion of everything else in the world. The exact same things that make you the good kind of beast in the kitchen, the drive and the focus and the obsession and the demanding exactness, the directness and the utter intolerance for imperfection can make you a mess of a human being outside of the kitchen. And so maybe maybe there are some of you who can just check it at the door. Go home. See your friends and family in the daylight hours. Sit down, eat a meal with a knife and a fork. Drink something that's not just out of a court container. Be there to kiss somebody you love good night. Make it out to celebrate your loved one's major life achievements and successfully resist the urge to bark at somebody when they screw up a small task. I haven't met a whole lot of you who can do that though. And it got really really low for Jessica and while she was rising up at work she was going through a heartbreak at home and she found herself becoming angry and mean and a dark shadow of the self who she knew. Her partner told her she needed to get therapy and get help and she didn't want to hear it and like so so many chefs she just thought she toughen up work through what she thought was weakness and the relationship ended and the only thing that got her out of bed was work. 12 hours, 14 hours, 16 hour days longer. She worked seven days a week at a restaurant that was open five because she couldn't function otherwise. She didn't know how to be a person. Just a machine who made flawless food. And she was she was just angry at anyone or anything that thwarted that purpose and she yelled and she raged and she went home and she hated herself and she felt sick and exhausted and then she peeled herself out of bed and did it again and again and again and again and does this sound familiar to anyone? Is this and we're gonna get back to Jessica's story but if you're here this story or something like it it doesn't faze you at all. Just this is just restaurant life how it is how it's always been and how it's always gonna be, right? Can we stop for a second and ask ourselves if it has to be? Can we allow ourselves the luxury? Okay, just for a minute and imagine and envision what it would be like if the people around you weren't killing themselves to put food on plates and provide pleasure to people who have absolutely no idea what's going on behind the kitchen door. We have to we have to we have to or more people are going to die and this is not an exaggeration in February alone in the shortest month. I know of three different chef owners who took their own lives and those are just the ones I know about. That's not counting like a line cook who overdosed or a chef to party who drank him or herself to death in a slow suicide just shift drink by shift drink and shot by shot or server who accidentally stepped in front of a train or a car late at night alone and collateral damage we might tell ourselves there are three in February. That's probably not above average, but who knows because we don't talk about this. It's three in a month which would be 36 in a year which would be 360 in a decade chefs gone and this is a self-inflicted wound on the industry and it's violence that's being done right in front of our eyes and people are too afraid to speak up and I know this because they tell me. And at this point last year, I wouldn't have believed that the issue was this big. I mean I knew there was a problem. I would be interviewing a chef for my job where I worked at CNN or a tasting table and I write pretty openly about my own mental illness my anxiety and depression and there would inevitably become a pause in the conversation where we stop filming where we stop talking and They would say hey, can we go off the record for a second? Can we talk about something and they would tell me hey, I've been suffering or somebody in my kitchen is suffering And I don't know what to do about it. Okay, it happens once twice maybe and And then it started happening the majority of the time and I knew I had to do something about it So on January 1st of this year I launched a website called chefs with issues with the notion That I could set up a safe place for conversation about mental health and the industry and provide links to resources that people could use mental health and money and and hotlines and all that and I also put up a survey about mental health Because including a section where people could share more about their particular experiences because I just I wanted to get a sense of what people Needed to talk about and I expected maybe a few dozen responses. Maybe a hundred if word got out As of last week I had 1600 responses from people in the industry Mostly people in the kitchen. I'm gonna read to you what one chef sent to me At times my anxiety reaches such a level that I feel no human can withstand I checked off all of the Accomplishments on my bucket list in this industry, but I don't feel a sense of satisfaction I make a lot of money, but I don't feel valued. I've missed so many life events lost so many relationships I didn't know this is what I was signing up for when I was young now mid-career I don't know what else I could do with my life Many of my role models have fallen apart some have taken their own lives. I feel like we're disposable less than human Celebrated for a season then discarded as if we never existed We identify ourselves so closely with the profession that I don't know what we are when we're not wearing the coat When I get home, I don't know how to be a husband and father My team consists of counterculture individuals who are so passionate about their craft so wonderful and vibrant But I see the path they're on and it hurts gets harder and harder to sell this business to young people Knowing that we're selling them a choice that many of us are great having made Retiring from this business comfortably. I don't know what that looks like. I haven't seen it yet But we chefs persist we survive Every night that we fall asleep sober or intoxicated is a victory and some of us don't make it and We mourn but we don't judge because we understand But not been what vote reality. I can never pronounce his name. I'm so sorry It doesn't have to worry about Michelin stars anymore What's the worst case scenario hell where it's gonna be hot and I'm gonna be judged that sounds like a Wednesday Best case scenario, there's only stillness Nothingness like closing your eyes in a swimming pool. Maybe no printer. No yelling. No financial statements. No expectations No Yelp reviews. No critics. No exhaustion. No sense of disappointment. That's from a chef who's made it This is the tip of the iceberg and I get letters all the time and strangers coming up to me I have 26,000 words of stories that I have collected from chefs and their loved ones and their Families and the people they have left behind after suicide and they're in pain They feel alone and they're afraid to speak up and I know this also because they tell me So with this survey of the 1600 people who responded who are mostly kitchen staff 84.2 suffer 84.2% suffer from depression 73.2 suffer from anxiety 49.9 deal with substance abuse issues 75.5% use alcohol to cope with the fallout from this while other terms drugs compulsive eating sex are overspending 57% of people said they couldn't say anything at all to the people they work with The people who they work next to every day Stay by side by side day in and day out Why can't they tell anybody? Because 68.6% don't want to be thought of as weak 51 54.1 don't want to be thought of as crazy and only 3.9% of people said their issues had nothing to do with the profession Now I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a statistician and I don't work in a kitchen But I don't think it takes much of a leap to realize that those numbers add up to a giant crisis in this industry that we all love so much and That is one hell of a lot of people who are suffering and not speaking up because they're afraid of what the person next to them might think and As a person who suffers from mental illness I can take I can tell you firsthand how much courage it takes to get out of bed every day Put on your game face Leave your house and muscle through a work day with this massive weight strapped to your chest Not knowing how you're gonna take another step and somehow manage to get through But you do what you need to do and you turn around and you do it again, and that is real strength and You're dealing with all of that and you're gonna have to worry that the person next to you on the line Will know this about you and think less of you when you're standing there invisibly bleeding That's ludicrous, and we can do better by each other And what we can do is talk and it has to start from the top By which I mean you business owners managers executive chefs celebrity chefs chefs to cuisine major D's line cooks whoever here have people who report to you or who idolize you You can drive the change and I've seen it work I've seen chefs like Ashley Christiansen Kelly field Seamus Mullen George Mendez Angie Marr I can go on these are all tough strong talented chefs who run their own kitchens, and they command support From every quarter. I don't see them losing a damn thing By checking in on the emotional welfare of the people who work for them and being being vulnerable in front of them In fact, I see their staffs and the people around them look up to them as heroes as Mentors as role models, and they stick around and they work their asses off for them Let your staff or your peers this isn't just her bosses We can do this for each other let them know that there is nothing to be ashamed of That you're not gonna think less of them for being a human that their job isn't in jeopardy That there are less Destructive ways to deal with stress, and I'm not saying it's not gonna be super awkward when your line cook is sobbing in front of you But you'll both live through it. I promise and Back to Jessica She realized that it couldn't stay that way. She wasn't gonna survive not as the person she wanted to be She burned it all down She walked away from the job. She loved she sold almost everything but her cookbooks And she's told me she rented a room like a college student And she hiked and she walked and she talked and she just was a person and After her James Beard award, she was one of the hottest properties in the country and She turned all the offers down, which is one of the scariest things a person could do You strike while the iron is hot because when's that ever gonna happen again? She started talking to a new business partner about a restaurant And she told this person that she needed six months to learn to be a person again Luckily they agreed She traveled and she ate all over the world and she wandered all over and she rebalanced her life the best she could and now She's ready again And in the spring she is opening Simone restaurant in Los Angeles And her number one goal is the health and wellness of the people who work there including herself and For herself and for a partner in the business. This means that there's going to be a mandatory Six weeks off paid and the people around here will get varying amounts of that too I can't stress this enough mandatory paid time off She's not hiring anybody. She's worked with before because she doesn't want herself falling into old patterns And she's gonna try try to close the holidays So people can be with their friends and their families She's offering yoga classes and to enter her staff and subsidizing massages. She's eliminating tipping So her staff knows that they have a solid base and they don't have to worry about the whims of customers She's gonna do her absolute Damnedest to make sure that the people who work for her feel stable and balanced and valued and she's scared Who wouldn't be? It's a gamble she has to take because we can't afford anything less. Thank you for listening