I remember reading a post from a well-know chef who proclaimed that cooking is not a life or death trade, it is, after all, only food. I am sure that his point was to remove some of the “holier than thou” references associated with celebrity chefs and restaurants, but still, the statement made me wonder. After a bit of cursory research I found some interesting facts to begin with:

• There are 16,700 results for “It’s Only Food” through Google
• There are over 1 billion results for “Food” using the same resource
• The United States boasts somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 culinary college programs
• The National Restaurant Association counts more than 990,000 free-standing restaurants in our country (not including business and industry accounts, hospitals, schools and office complexes)
• More than 13.5 million people work in the U.S. restaurant industry, that’s 10% of the workforce
• There are 2.2 million farms in the…