Culinary College as a Vegan: NWCAV Baking Program.

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and then this yen I had a memorable conversation today with the director and head chef of my college where I have been studying cuisine for all of one week as a vegan and it's apparently the last week I'm ever gonna spend in a college studying cuisine as a vegan I I talked to the head of the school for about an hour and a half in discussing the reasons why I was handing in my letter of resignation and getting my refund as a student and tuition is twelve thousand Canadian dollars so it's a lot of money out of their pocket and they sure would like to convince me to stay in the program because of course they're not gonna sell the same empty seat to some other student and of course you know a lot of the goodness of their hearts they sure would like to see me graduate and go on to a career getting paid twelve dollars an hour to work in the bag of kitchen somewhere there's no doubt there's no doubt they also have a humanitarian impulse trying to do the best they they can for me but sure the money is a big factor in this conversation all other considerations and intentions aside he said to me towards the end of this long conversation which i think is about an hour and a half he said to me you know can you tell me one thing I just like to ask you this question he said is it really so hard to be a vegan he didn't mean it in a cruel or Cadi way wasn't a backhanded insult but through this long conversation that was dealing with how difficult it was to be a vegan student in a non vegan cuisine College a non vegan cooking college non vegan baking program you know obviously this was us this question was smouldering away for him at the back of his mind you want to ask me is it really that hard I gave him a two-part answer that question both both parts were yeah the answer first half was yeah you know it really is that hard you really do and having a sense of being bullied and confronted and cross-examined on why you're vegan all the time I used the same comparison with him that I used when we talked to another professor about this because we had a whole running series of meetings these professors asking us to justify our V what why do you have to disrupt the program being vegan they knew all this we sign up for this College specifically because they said they were Pro vegan and positive what having vegan students than at before they said they were a hundred percent prepared and ready and positively motivated to this and we found out that they were 100% wrong so we've been we've been having these kinds of conversations a lot lately I said look I was born Jewish but ethnically I'm Jewish and not part of the Jewish religion if you're Jewish if you grow up Jewish you've answered the same questions a hundred times and the person asking you that question they may not think they're being mean or confrontational or even inappropriate but for you it's the 100th time you've heard the question and for them it's the first time they've asked it so to give an example if you're Jewish somebody might ask you you know can you tell me what is that why did youse wear this kind of miniature hat what why is that you know what is that really you only may be a totally good-natured question you may not man but of course it can come off as especially if you are Jewish and you fall oh you've answered this a hundred times or something you tell me something with Jewish origin how did you come up with this idea of cutting off the front half of your penis the circumcision go what where did that you know what what inspired this did someone sit under an apple tree one day and think sure sure and you know obviously those questions may be asked in in a warm spirited warm-hearted way or they may be asked in a more Kaddi way but if you grow up Jewish you may have been asked those questions a hundred times and you may not be so happy to hear it for the 101st time so I said first of all is a vegan you've been asked some of these questions a hundred times and you don't want to hear it 101 and the person asking you they're not going to be sensitive that they're they're not going to get that and I say yeah it's hard my daughter is in school in France and the French education system requires her to eat meat it is mandatory in the French education system for all the children you mean you got to fight like hell every French parent every vegan parent in France will talk about this with you if he actually knew that most of these professors have some connections to France and French cuisine so he actually right away he nodded he did or he knew this about France the yeah it was mandatory for the kids to eat meat this was seen as part of their cultural training introduction of French cuisine in school and this this kind of thing um even when my daughter was being born when we were at the hospital all the hospital food is meat and the hospital trying to force you to eat meat in the hospital staff being [ __ ] and really asking you if you're a member of a cult and they're not joking and them really regarding you as if you're a member of some weird cult like the Hari Krishna's or Scientology or something because you say you're vegan and sir I didn't mention it of course my experience with Melissa's family treating me and saying - calling me a cult leader really regarding veganism Singh as something very negative in those institutional context is that that kind of press you you know I also said to him I said all the time you deal with constant confrontations with people who just say that they were raised by hunters shooting elk and deer and that they think vegans are you know hypocrites and terrible people you do it all the time and I said in my life I've dealt with way more backlash of that kind of backlash is maybe a good word then I've ever dealt with backlash about being Jewish or you know Jewish as an ethnicity or Judaism as a religion not that many people have walked up to me like tell me son why did your ancestors have to kill Jesus would you just you know when you look back on good I mean if you have to kill Jesus I mean this whole religion would be so different today if we didn't have to wear this this cross this implement of excuse no I don't deal with this kind of this kind of backlash for Judaism and I do deal with the backlash from veganism all the time so that was one part of the answer and that was amiable enough and the second part of the answer was look we got a great example right here with what we've been discussing for the last hour or hour and 15 minutes whatever I did that here's my here's my cuisine school uniform they haven't figured out if they're gonna give me a refund for the uniform they promised me a refund for the tuition but maybe I may be stuck with the uniform they can't resell it the uniform has my name stitched into the back so looked real flattering on me too makes my shoulders look huge not that my shoulders aren't huge you understand look anyway it's supposed to be ah give you this kind of officious and imposing air um I said you know you realize that in the last five years seven years or more I've looked at every possible option for studying cuisine in Europe every possible option in the United States and I remember I specify this I said even Texas which is true there was one college in Austin Texas I really looked into it son life so not just obvious places like New York City and Seattle but even some obscure places like Texas I looked at so many colleges coast to coast in Canada and I said the reason why I settled on baking at all in this process was that I found it was really impossible to do cuisine you know the whole discipline of cuisine what everyone's say so the not just baking but all forms of cooking all forms of being a chef I thought it was impossible and I was phoning up these different colleges some of them by phone some of them by email some of us got but several Melissa and I visited in person also and in every case the question is can you accommodate a vegan student is it possible to go through this program as a vegan and most of them said no and look bless their hearts thank them for their honesty you're not gonna fight these okay thank you thank you for not wasting years of my life and thousands of my dollars by lying to me and telling me that I'll be just fine if I sign up here as a student as a vegan if if I really won't be if I really if I really can't be and I remember especially with the universities in Europe they were often very blunt in just setting me back an email saying look no I'm sorry but these are our guidelines and like 80% of what we do and what you're tested on really is specific to meat and dairy including health guidelines what temperature has to be kept at but all the skills all the projects they all have to be meat and dairy there's no way to go through this as as a vegan there's no accommodation whatsoever so now at this point I go back several steps in the conversation earlier in the conversation I had said to him what you guys are selling here as a product it's a tough sell tuition alone is over 12,000 Canadian dollars including the uniform including a very nice set of knives that you get but nevertheless twelve thousand dollar price tag up front rent in the City of Vancouver if you get a temporary furnished furnished apartment like we have you'd be lucky don't spend two thousand dollars a month on rent admittedly that's an apartment for the two of us not myself alone as a bachelor it was you are looking at more than a twenty thousand dollar investment here and there were a few really salient comparisons to make one is that this is a credential that qualifies you for a job that pays twelve dollars an hour so this costs me just in cash more than a PhD in Canada and it qualifies me for work in the back of a kitchen that's not paid any better than being a dishwasher who dropped out of high school and by the way showed up to James one of my patreon supporters he was he was agreeing with me on this I had just some posts on patreon I'm talking about low the wages are and out for the benefits are for all Baker's at all levels even if you have a specialized college diploma and so on and yeah it's horrifying you know oh great you'd be lucky to get $15 an hour well if you spent more than $20,000 on your education what's what's the justification is this this is one element and the other element is Canada is a country with tuition fees that's what I said I'm not joking my said I could get a I could get a PhD for less than this that wouldn't be true in the United States of America but it would be true in Canada or Germany or several other countries in in Western Europe where tuition is really low for advanced academic studies a community college teaching baking in Montreal or Toronto Ontario Quebec but BC normal community college programs and in cuisine maybe as low as two thousand dollars a year in tuition maybe five thousand but you know this is the ballpark and if you go to the government and cry poor or and say you want some special handouts and assistance because of poverty and job retraining or unemployment or you you signup for assistance of different kinds you can get social assistance and then that cost of tuition is going to come down from five thousand or two thousand to be closer and closer to zero and to be a debt that's amortized over many years and that's how people get qualified to work for $12 an hour not that credit skill incidentally by the way the federal government Canada lists baking as a trade that's in critical shortage that there are not enough because yeah I wonder why I wonder why there's critical shortage of Baker's because it's really low paid really hard long hours and the qualifications you need are not cheap or raised together so said to look on these two fronts the program you have here is a really hard sell so why do you think we chose your program we just up the street here in Nanaimo there's a program that's the normal Canadian price I think it was two thousand a semester maybe four thousand eight years something like that was the regular Canadian price you know being dramatically cheaper and by the way the education spread over more time and you know and totally professional program we went and visited met the professors and they have all this heavy equipment they've a lot equipment they don't have here they have every heavy factory-style equipment not just the artisanal stuff they have a huge kiln wood-burning ovens several different types of big ovens big stoves big process so you know they have a lot of advantages there they're cheaper and they have theirs of you why do you think we chose your college for $12,000 instead of another college for $2,000 it's because you were the college who said you had your act together to take on vegan students and some of these things I'm saying are quotations I mean I'm not paraphrasing too far here but they said things like repeatedly we've had vegan students every single year that the college has been open you're not the first vegan students every year we have at least one or two we have professors who themselves are vegan we met one professor is eating with in-concert current staff they only have one vegan and others who are really interested in plant-based cooking and teach special plant-based cooking modules and courses you know we support this we sympathize with this we want you to be all you can be we really empathize what you guys want to do and this is you know partly because they regard veganism as a kind of trendy you know genre of food services you know not really the ethical or ecological side of it but you know that they were really interested in they identify as a college that specializes in healthy cuisine and of course there's a lot of strange self contradiction and hypocrisy built into that yeah okay maybe that's a topic for another video but it's like they want to measure out how much salt they use really precisely to be good for your health but the rest of the dish is like eggs and cheese and steak and like you know what what oh it's a good thing you measured the salt out definitely ludicrously unhealthy anyway you know the other stuff that's the reality if you're making non vegan food generally and then even even in the baking Department I mean these are not social think is a healthy flan there's no such thing as a healthy you know creme said that you want filling in a pie ate like come on guys what there's no attempt but anyway this is uh this is a digression you know from from a digression but we chose this school we made this commitment because it was supposed to be possible and really positive for us to be vegans at this school and we had the crushing realization within the first three days that this was really not true at now they're the particulars of what the professor's said the particulars of what they did but but broadly speaking magista summarize it briefly I mean they assured us that we were not the first vegan students ever had they were expose this and one things I said to them we had a series of meetings the president said look you guys are really acting like we are the first vegan students yet you're freaked out and I said that's a Tony so Tony's the head of the whole school the top chef top director whatever top professor what I'm gonna say but you know um you know he agreed he really he became more honest and relaxed as the conversation progressed and he said yes he said it's true we were you know we were freaked out we were really freaked out you know we didn't handle it well he was honest enough to admit that that they did not cope well with the challenge of and what's what's the challenge instead of using butter using margarine this is the kind of substitution you're talking about in the in the baking department it's not that challenging of course if you're doing like if you're teaching in the the savory Department is they like to say if you're doing a steak dinner and you have to substitute for steak or you're doing how-to stuff a turkey sure doing a V that that's challenging but you're doing stuff we're fundamentally it's like okay replace butter with margarine replace eggs with a flaxseed concoction or we did chia-chia egg you know egg substitutes listen it's not that hard it really it really shouldn't be that hard it really shouldn't be that daunting you know so look I mean maybe that's enough you know for this video I don't know I mean I felt like it was worthwhile to go through in a little bit more detail what his misapprehensions about veganism were you know why you know why this was so daunting to him because I mean ultimately it's the same thing with authority figures in France like you know the hospital employees the nurses the doctors why are they so freaked out in hostile towards me when they find out I'm vegan why are the teachers and the principal at the school so free to know so why is this such a big deal even for someone who's you know devoted his or her life to to cuisine it shouldn't really be it shouldn't really be so shocking Melissa just mentioned off camera one of the comments made but one of the other professors so they they call them selfs of course they're both are a chef and a professor in this College uh one of them one of them said in a somewhat awkward stumbling manner well we've had other vegan students before but none of them are quite as I don't remember her finishing the sentence they're not they're not like you she didn't even say inflexible she didn't want to say something and something they're not as much as you and I suggested that where I said strident like you know you know the boy they don't work you know right you know but yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah in another case do they use inflexible like it could have been another context that's right that's right yeah yeah yeah well no the the first approach that both chef Stacey and shape chef Toni use with me was that they said well we respect your principles so you have to respect ours and it was just like homie I just made a pie made of dead animal parts you do not respect I by the way i did not say homie this is being polite at the time i'm just telling the story in a more more jocular way but that came up again with Toni today where I really said you know you're not in a position to tell me you respect my principles and I respect yours when I've been throwing my principles out the window to conform to your program because you didn't live up to your promises to give me a vegan a vegan option if even with you so just say both of them were sharp you were there Melissa's here off camera by the way I'm not talking to a coconut with a face drawn on it with a grace in case you were imagining I love coconut snow gave me more some of the great sense of humor better than Bonnie Rebecca most of the youtubers these days talk to a coconut than most of my fellow youtubers but look um you know I know I know I'm with only gonna try to dot no no no it's good so so babe what we're talking we're talking about the actual wording of them saying we've had other vegans but noticing is here right right okay okay it's hard so I'm young you know I'm stead of more down that's what's heard from you right I thought kiss her with both of the professors who confronted us on this I thought they really took a step back and were really shaken up when I just asked them simply have you had Muslim students before so did you notice that also and just suddenly they were like whoa and and I said yeah I said when you have Muslim students do you ask them to cook pork and they said no we use a substitute it substitutes something else or pork I said have you add Hindu students before and actually in both cases they seemed like a little like big maybe weren't sure if they had a Hindu student aren't that many Hindus studying here I think and I said if you had a Hindu student you wouldn't ask them to cook beef right it's like that's that's the situation we're in here you know and I think on chef Stacie I thought that did have an immediate impact I thought she was just very intimidated and very shocked and had never thought about it that way before like oh this is like asking a Muslim to butcher or hog you're not gonna eat the hog but you're still gonna cook it we're asking a Hindu to butcher a cow and prepare cow meat and it is I mean the Hindu comparison is better because there there's actually enough more of an ethical component so when we had our third meeting that day with an even at the end of the day we had another meeting with chef Stacie and at that time I took it a little further and said to her look the vast majority of Muslims are just born Muslim some people convert to Islam they didn't choose this and they themselves don't know why or maybe don't even question why why they don't heat a pig but are willing to eat a cow and other people as you know are not willing to eat a dog but they are really need a goat or a sheep and guess what the reason is magic it's not rational it's not ethical it's not ecological a pig suffers just as much as a dog or a goat it suffers as much as it possibly can when you slit its throat it's just magical thinking and I mentioned also with Stacey you were their baby I said you know why is it they can't eat one type of fish and can't eat another so you guys may not know this you know Jews who are kosher will refuse to eat lobster but they're going to eat all kinds of other ocean creatures it's just it's just magical it's just a magical line that says eat this don't eat that because the Bible says so or a commentary on the Bible says so some religion and said look you know we chose this it really matters to us it is rational it is ethical and it's the reason why we're here studying cuisine with you like we're not here studying cuisine despite the fact that we're vegan we're here studying cuisine because were vegan like that's the whole reason we enrolled in your college and paid $12,000 in tuition so do this this is the this is the situation so with both Stacie and Tony that had some kind of an impact but to be honest I don't think either one of them really comprehended what was going on they just got the sense like whoa there's there's a bunch of stuff here I hadn't thought about before like they think they just realized they weren't gonna bully their way through this by using [ __ ] you know thought terminating cliches like we respect your principles therefore you have to respect our principles you know that oh there's really something there to think about so and you know just curiously in terms of the sequence of this but for any of these conversations happened before any of the conversations have mentioned this video happened Stacey called us in for a meeting in which she basically said this is a summary but it is a fair summary she basically said look I don't want you to be disappointed I don't want you to feel we're wasting your time maybe you should just drop out of the program and she did say it in a nice way but that was the purpose of that meeting and that was the start of day three that was in the morning on day three of the course before any of these conversations that happened before and you hadn't he had not even occurred to me to drop out of the program it definitely hadn't occurred to me that they would ask me to drop part of like that was I didn't even think that was on the list of options and I I didn't think there'd be a refund I didn't think they'd give us a but they but that they were offering us a refund a 100% refund on tuition ahead of recognition that they were really not delivering what they were supposed to deliver so that's also interesting it's money out of their pocket and it's it's a failure for them on on many different levels first things last however the reason for my quitting when I did and how I did my reason for going up to the desk and saying okay yesterday you offered me a 100% refund if I quit now I'm here to take it I'm here to see that offer was none of these sophisticated reasons about vegan ethics and The Clash of Civilizations here it was because I had a burn I got a burn at the oven on the job and they did not have their act together at all in terms of a first aid kit in terms of the basic principles of get ice get burn gel get a bandage I don't want to go through the exact details would happen but I mean you know there were no bandages in the first-aid kit when I eventually did get the first-aid kit there were allegedly was a first-aid kit but you couldn't get to it it's it was total incompetence and a total sorry it's not just a lack of competence also a lack of concern or care it was really disrespectful and denigrating me the way the particular professor acted in this situation and the professors were doubled up for that lesser the the particular professor was talking about nothing else to do one professor was standing and doing a demonstration and she was standing there the other professor the second professor was standing and doing nothing I'm not folding her for that but the way she handled my burn you know he got to me on many different levels for me I'm not really cool with now having a permanent scar on my arm because of this momentary thing I'm not cool with thinking if you guys had a first-aid kit and burn cream maybe that would have reduced or averted my having a permanent scar mo if you guys that I served but cared you know this you know it would have reduced the amount of pain I was in for several hours because I wasn't a lot of pain for the first hour after this happened back in 1997 I worked at Starbucks as a shift supervisor and I had my act together to help the other employees when somebody got burned on the job you work with burning hot equipment at Starbucks people get burned and it's exactly that procedure get ice get the you know get the first aid kit the first aid kit it's gotta contain you know burn gel and bandages of different sizes big enough to cover a burn it's you're not having the adhesive directly on the burn or what have you it's a pretty simple pretty simple procedure I'm starting to Melissa about a - Melissa's mom's a nurse or whatever and you know I said look this burn was handled with total incompetence and total lack of consideration even apologize to me what there were nobody said I'm sorry we don't have a first-aid kit or the first-aid kit doesn't contain the dad the shell it doesn't contain the things that suppose again not one person apologized not one person cared and the professor was standing there doing nothing and finding things to pass time instead of helping me the actual case I presented to Tony wasn't to do with these more sophisticated questions of vegan ethics I said to him look if your school does not have it act together on a burn a burn in a bakery I said look I understand if somebody has some rare health condition if somebody has an allergic reaction or a concussion and something really unusual and the teachers don't know how to handle it I understand and it turns out somebody has is allergic to lentils and they they break out in hives and you don't do fine this is this is a baking class people are gonna get burned people are gonna get cut every year these are students in educational institution learning how to bake people are gonna get burned people are gonna get cut and you do not have your act together to deal with a be sick predictable emergency micromo two tiniest emergency imaginable this this you're not organized for that to me I've lost all respect for you as an institution I have lost all respect for that particular professor for her conduct in this situation and that's why I want to leave the University and he tried to do a lot of things that authority figures do in terms of misdirecting and de railing the conversation and apportioning blame to me and i honestly think he was doing that unintentionally he's just so used to being an authority figure and having conversations that he said a lot of things out there also that we're just kind of like very vaguely true in general for some other students some other circumstances bad don't look that doesn't apply to my situation at all like what do you talking about like it's some points you just digress into saying like oh well you know you need to have patience like I understand like doing the classes is really hard feels like what are you talking about I've finished every assignment like 15 minutes before the other students like no it's not hard the classes aren't difficult any imbecile can you know fold oh I mean the actual assignments no it's not challenging for me that's not what we're talking about we're talking about the fact that you didn't have a first-aid kit and you didn't train your staff you know they don't care they didn't even try when someone got a burn and you know he was trying to apportion blame to me by suggesting he said like oh well you know if you have these really high standards or these high expectations then you wouldn't be happy anywhere and I said you think that having a first-aid kit as good as Starbucks is too high in expectation you think you think that when someone gets burned having a bandage on hand you think that's too much of a next week you know you're had to keep bringing it vac to see it because he was trying to turn things around the conversation and make it seem as if the problem here was that I was complaining and not that there had really been a misstep or violation of protocol or a lapse in lapse in judgment to her organization or his lapse in responsibility on the part of the school and of course it was a long conversation and he said you know he said many things he was really trying to convince me to stay in the program of course money is a big part of that he said look I don't think you should let this bad experience with the burn and the lack of a first-aid kit and the disorganization and the bad conduct of one professor I don't think you should let that convince you to to quit this course and I said to him well if this were a situation where I felt really positively about the rest of the college program of course you'd be right you'd say okay this is just one particular program and another wise good college program but you realize my experience here is really negative and really terrible and we had to talk about that a lot veganism being the main thing we talked about their lack of preparation to deal with that so in that context of you being a college program charging a luxury price $12,000 that has totally discredited itself that's been crucially incompetent in precisely the areas I care about most where there have been a lot of red flags and a lot of problems in the first week already and then this happens of the burn you know I said look the BART it's not the straw that broke the camel's back because that suggests something very light and minor in itself this to me really was very significant it was very meaningful in terms of just I mean I said to him we talked about the issue of the dignity of the student and how are you gonna feel as a student in the classroom if you're treated this way when you have a burn he treated this way when you have these other problems we had in the course the emnity this creates between you and the the professor the invidious division to you and the professor this it's um but I also just said to him look I had to go out for my 30-minute lunch break and it's only 30 minutes long and when I came back I was still furious about the way I had been treated and administrated over this barn furious okay you you really want me to go back in the classroom in this situation were you guys with your conduct you've completely poisoned the educational experience me you've really created an invidious situation an adversarial relationship between the professor and the student and in a situation where you're working in a small classroom hands on face to face for long hours from 8:30 a.m. until at least 4:30 p.m. p.m. every day you know hands on what is it you get two or three professors and 16 students it's very close you know sorry 14 14 students and you know you you've completely poisoned that for me with with the conduct and attitudes the professors in this first week so no it's it's not just the straw that broke the camel's back it really matters to me it's a log good not a straw in and of itself the fact that you didn't live up to my reasonable expectations from how we handled burns at Starbucks in 1997 it matters the fact that I may not have a permanent mark on my arm for no reason and the callous attitude of this professor towards it it does in itself matter when you're in a position where you're paying $12,000 and you're spending 60 percent of your time in class cleaning dishes really today in the morning session I did dishes three times I spent the majority of my time today not learning not doing anything just doing dishes that's due to bad organization and bad equipment and bad choices that make setting up when we already have this dispatch situation and now you want me to come here and hate the professors and be hated by them you know because that's the other thing at the Nvidia sness they're a little bit afraid of us now because we're the vegans who won't just get along with the vegans who won't eat meat we're gonna tell you the vegan some aren't happy to just you know bake and even eat you know these other kinds of cakes and pastries are non vegan food you whatever why would we be why would you be even enrolled in this program we'd be holding any other program from one of the high end you know cuisine course that did meat and dairy and stuff this is the whole point this is supposed to be the one institution that was really open to us and embraced us in a in a positive way so guys it's for me it's a crushing defeat in a lot of ways you know I said to Melissa earlier um some people mistake me for an egomaniac here's how an egomaniac would respond which in some ways is a really kind of positive upbeat attitude towards life is a kind of survivalist attitude an egomaniac would just say well I was too good for this institution anyway they don't deserve me I can do better or I'll find a better college or even if you don't if you decide to drop the topic entirely that somehow just blame the other party and find no blame in yourself and just reassure yourself that you're always too good on I don't feel that way at all I have none of that excuse making going on in my mind that none of that you know self-justification going on in my mind I just feel awful I feel like I devoted the better part of a year of my life to this and it's gonna leave a huge gap in my year and in fact and it makes the next 10 years of my life very uncertain and this was something that meant a lot to me because of vegan activism because of my relation with my daughter just the idea of baking cakes for my daughter my own kind of family role ultimately even my relationship to you guys with with YouTube so this is now a huge black hole that I got a fill I got to take my time and energy and talent and pour it into something else and of course that may turn out for the best but at this moment I have no excuses and I'm not casting blame on anyone else you know what I mean like I don't I don't demonize the other people I can even recognize that for them from their perspective they were doing the best they could and that shows when I said to them well do you ask a Muslim to cook pork do you ask a Hindu or a Buddhist or something to cook beef and they just it just never entered their heads they thought about veganism like a nut allergy you know what I mean that that really is it they thought about it like having a student who's allergic to peanuts and it's not in closing this video and by the way you may have noticed the video for this did not have a single edit it was one take continuously but this video has a bunch of a bunch of edits a bunch of jump cuts because I'm really exhausted I'm really emotionally worn down with this I've been through you know fury and disappointment and you know this has been such an emotionally draining day I'm exhausted you know in a in a profound sense here but it's gonna mention to close this video on the very first day of class in cuisine College each of the professors and each of the students gave a little short lecture about who they were their life their involvement in baking but in almost every case it was also about what job did they have before they got into because for most of these people going into cuisine was a mid-career or transition or midlife transition so one of the and I mentioned this to Tony in a conversation that one of the instructors said that she had a totally different career in academia she just vaguely said she wasn't academic so I seemed she was something like an assistant professor or maybe just a teaching assistant university but she had somehow been going through the academic process at a high enough level to be employed by University I presume the teaching capacity and she said she got to the point with that job where she just felt so crushed by it and every Monday she said I've read Monday before she went to work she would cry she would Quran Monday's before before when at work and then she hit a breaking point and she decided to start from scratch and go back to college and learn how to be a baker that was now more ten more than ten years ago so she now had more than ten years of baking experience before it was a mid-career transition and the way I put it to Tony was you know you don't think if I stayed here that I'd be in the position of crying every Monday before I come to your classes at this college like it's that bad what you've set up here in terms of the invidious and adversarial situation where you know I I don't want to be here I don't want were these drift they don't want to work with me you know I mean they there's a there's a veneer of professionalism there but you know all this behavior on the professor's part they're you know they're really shaken up they really have an animus against me and I don't want to show up and fight it I mean I'm better off I'm better off putting my energy into you know into anything else sure that's that's how I put it to Tony but more broadly you have to ask yourself also if the job you end up doing is paying you $12 an hour maybe $15 an hour and you're spending your time washing dishes with people who are high school dropouts and illegal immigrants there's a lot of illegal immigrants working in kitchens working in food services who are getting paid the same amount of money you are you know if that's the path you're going on and yeah I mean all this stuff Tony target with it and being treated abusively and nobody caring when you get a burn and no first aid kit and no health care and just you know total indifference and and you know callousness to you so what do you think do you think there's nobody in this room for whom this decision to go into baking his career it's gonna be something they're gonna wake up and cry about on Mondays I leave you with that thought guys we got into this you know for all the right reasons and you know I really feel I'm getting out for just the same reason that I encountered in studying Chinese in university in Canada studying Japanese University in Canada studying so many different topics political science Buddhism you know Pali Sanskrit India so many it talks into so many headings the quality of university and college education in Canada is abysmally low at any price you could have a terrible education at luxury prices that in a nutshell is my experience with Northwestern Culinary Academy of fan Coover I'm going to go put in a yelp review evolution