A pair of shoes can tell a lot about the wearer’s personality, as experts would say, but in the kitchen it will tell you only two things: life or death.

This isn’t something they taught in our school: none of the professors, the chef instructors, or the culinary consultants ever highlighted this important bit of information to the naïve kids busting carton after carton of eggs to perfect a French omelette. Which makes me question the kind of institution my parents chose to bet their money on, or perhaps the priorities of the educators in the culinary industry. After all, I didn’t see this fact in any of our textbooks – and there were many – nor in other source materials. They told us how to butcher all the animals in the barnyard, how to pair them with which cheese and which wine; they taught us the chemistry and the nutrition and the maths, all the equations from a sourdough’s yield to its calories. Once, we were blindfolded and led to a table where about 15 different herbs were distributed into small white bowls. The task is to name each one correctly according to only their smells. Chef’s aren’t the most forgiving, I can tell you this much.

I learned the perils of having the wrong pair of work shoes the hard way when I interned at a grand hotel kitchen, at the age of 18. We were provided uniforms, but we had to bring our own hairnet (for those with hair), hat, socks and shoes. If you were inclined, you could also bring your own knives. As I entered the department I was assigned to, fully outfitted, overwhelmed, shaking, I wondered why people looked at me like a manslaughter waiting to happen. It turns out it was exactly that. I was wearing cheap kitchen clogs. Plain black clogs I got from the flea market for a quarter of the price you’d pay if you bothered with a good pair. They were what I wore in school because I was told they were perfectly fine for culinary class. My mistake was never looking at our instructor’s shoes. 

Not a week into the internship and I already had at least two near-death encounters. One was slipping on a slice of carrot as I was crossing kitchens, and the other was almost banging my head inside the walk-in freezer, where I slipped on the icy floor. It’s a slippery slope. I was already planning to get new ones after the freezer incident. Some nice, non-slip clogs with good insoles, as God intended. My plans were hastened with the news about one of the chefs in the bar lounge having a knife-to-clog incident. Knife-straight-through-the-clog incident. It was a horror story that went on and on for months. Any new intern regardless of their footwear would be told the story as a warning, and as a response, some would get their clogs of the steel-toe variety. Some just checked their school’s insurance policy. The butchers always told us we should learn from their example, as people who always accounted for all parts of their body when working – including the knife.

The good chef who got injured recovered and eventually came back to work. He was all smiles and said it didn’t hurt as much as it looked, but we noticed he was donning the heaviest steel-toe clogs. We all treasured our feet a bit more after that.