The Last Blue Collar Alchemist

If there was ever a worry about AI coming for my job, I missed the memo. Yes, I’ve seen that cartoony burger flipping arm and the automated fry baskets but honestly, technology can have those jobs; worrying how brown some potato sticks are distracts me from plating the showstoppers anyway. On the whole, having some mechanical muse take over any part of what I do will never make it on my bingo board because last time I checked, there wasn’t an algorithm for alchemy.

Usually the word alchemist pops up in some try-hard’s pitch to get you to get you to like them by mentioning that they have, in fact, read The Alchemist (“oh, you haven’t?”). They’ll drop it like a moral mic, proceeding to detail how it changed their life, followed by how it can radically improve yours; if you’re lucky, they’ll offer to borrow their copy. 

Culinary alchemy is different, though. On the surface, it’s the obvious: daily miracles of turning impermanent ingredients into something more, something at times lasting. But beneath that thin doily of transformation is where the true conjury lives: labor turned livelihood. It’s nothing new under the sun; our earliest laborers spun the same straw into the DNA of their communities. But finding purpose, permanence, and placement feels increasingly harder these days, as all three are losing the battle to binary code. And though I’m in no rush, I do sometimes wonder if I’ll live to read the day a sex bot writes the Michelin Guide.

To those who know me—and anyone else who loves a good gripe—I’ve voiced my sentiments about corporate culture and the cult of ambition. My re-entry into what’s unabashedly the bluest of collar work has arrived just as the dead weight of the white-collar work world begins to float to the surface, singed under the fluorescent glare of synthetic cognition. We’ve built our replacements trying to ease our own suffering—and in the process, forged a new affliction entirely: existential unimportance.

In the kitchen though, a different Dao thrives. There’s a monkish quality to the work—uniforms, repetition, ritual, shared struggle. Among cooks, I’ve noticed a growing comfort of place, a quiet pride in our ability and for the first time, a sense of stability in job security. There’s a shift happening: from laborer to artist, from transient to torchbearer. Maybe it’s the creeping awareness that we might just be the last of the water buffalo.

Our craft, simple as it may look from the outside (seasoning, stirring, sipping, serving), is ironically AI’s hardest code to crack. In the early aughts, being a cook was seen as a pit stop, a post-college gig to outgrow once you “found yourself.” The time of the ego chef was peaking on network television, skewing the work genre as one solely strived for in the vein of pop celebredom. Media glamorized the apron as costume for the anointed few, not as armor for the everyday. The art of alchemy was lost to the performance of it; feeding for fame. But cooking, real cooking, never lent itself to spectacle because the nature of the beast isn’t a skill that can be Tik Tok filtered into stardom. You might be able to present pretty food, but you can’t fake a good meal.

Cooks are the last bastions of transmutation, turning scraps into substance and stories while the algorithm watches, still coming up short. Kitchens remain a space of human subtlety—stubborn, sweaty, and alive, and they have always survived: through war, migration, collapse, and climate crisis. Someone will always be there at the stove, caramelizing onions to that visual amber readiness and catching pin bones before they catch your throat. To ferment, to reduce, to plate, all arts that can be studied and imitated maybe, but never replicated.

Imagine the world reaching such a drab place that we settle for the microwavable pop-up meals from Spy Kids (don’t get me wrong, it was cool af). But wouldn’t that mark the end of preference? The death of differentiation? Palates trained to a corporately approved nutritional label. That might be the true apocalypse.

So for now, we cook in peace and in pride with our aching feet and tweezer fingers, quietly assured that our pain isn’t for nothing. It’s that we feel at all that saves us from disposability. That’s our Philosopher’s Stone. With knives freshly honed and mise en place set, we preserve the rituals of harvest and presentation, forever toeing the line between ripeness and rot.

Maybe we’re addicted to being needed. Maybe that’s the last acceptable addiction, the one that keeps us clocking in to turn chaos into order because it’s a feeling that many are losing in the wake of artistic mimicability. But in a time where more working class people are experiencing surmounting pressure to prove their worth, there is refuge in knowing the human experience remains the most stubbornly unautomatable act of all. It is our proof that alchemy still exists,  and we are its last practitioners.