Investigating the workplace stressors of young cooks and chefs: implications for mental health and wellbeing interventions

Working conditions create significant stress which have deleterious impacts on their physical and mental health, on their families and social lives. The working conditions are exacerbated by a deeply entrenched occupational culture that promotes varying forms of bullying and harassment. These combine to often leave chefs physically and mentally exhausted. Coping strategies are generally ill-advised and include habitual drug and alcohol abuse. Apprentices report working in fear - paradoxical to their learning. Despite acknowledging they are a generation that has been raised to recognise that bullying and harassment, in its multiple forms, is unacceptable, and also possessing tools to call it out, the apprentices report being completely disempowered in toxic workplaces.