You can join the catering profession with no virtually no qualifications, and start at the bottom in low skilled kitchen positions.  After a few years of in house training in food preparation, hygiene and basic cooking skills you should be able to advance to an assistant cook position, and beyond that you could become a head cook, running establishments such as cafes, bar kitchens, fast food restaurants and cafeterias.  Although head cook positions can be well paid, it could take you a long time to advance to this level, and it is unlikely you will get a job working for any of the top fine dining kitchens without any qualifications.

To be a top chef you will need some formal catering training, and to start off it is a good idea to gain high school, college or culinary school basic diplomas in food preparation, hygiene and business administration.  Don’t forget that executive chefs run all aspects of their kitchens, from the food preparation through to the staff training and produce sourcing, so it is important for you to have some qualifications in business practices.  Once you have basic catering qualifications you will then be able to apply for internships in the food service industry and these will typically start off as low skilled positions, but in very good professional kitchens in top hotels, restaurants and event centres.

It takes many years of training and experience for a chef to acquire the level of skill needed to be an executive chef in a top restaurant, and although you can learn a lot about the industry by working in top kitchens, many chefs find it much more beneficial to complete further two to four year advanced catering courses, either through colleges or culinary institutions, as these focus on honing essential chef skills, and gives individuals an advantage when applying for positions in top kitchens where the standards of even the lower skilled positions available are very high.

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Charles Robert Darwin

Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire on 12 February 1809, and was related to two important men of this time, Josiah Wedgwood the famous china manufacturer and also Erasmus Darwin, who was one of the most prominent intellectuals the 18^th Century.  Darwin had a comfortable upbringing, and originally studied at Edinburgh University with a view to following a medical career.  However his interest in science and the nature of divinity prompted him to move to Cambridge, and in 1831 he joined what was to become a seminal scientific expedition for him, on the survey ship HMS Beagle.

During this time the popular belief in the creation of the world and humanity was that described in Genesis in the Bible, in that God created the world in seven days.  However many intellectuals and great scientists throughout history had dared to question this belief, and the 17^th and 18^th Century saw many new theories on this subject.  Darwin was not the first scientist to become interested in the idea of evolution, and he was influenced by Lyell’s ‘Principles of Geology’, which highlighted the existence of fossils, clear evidence that animals had existed on the planet for much longer than anyone had first thought, and indeed for much longer than humans.

Darwin’s ideas on evolution themselves evolved over time, and the breakthrough came when he visited the Galapagos Island, which so clearly illustrated how the same species (namely the finch) could evolve uniquely over time to suit individual environments.

The most important thing about Darwin’s theory of evolution was that he worked on it for 20 years, collecting an impressive, and most importantly an almost irrefutable body of methodical scientific evidence to support his theory, so that when he finally published his work ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection’ in 1859, his arguments and the evidence he had collected was so overwhelming that it smashed all prevailing theories before it, and quickly changed the way everyone thought about the creation of the world.

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