The Chef Bubble

First we had the dot-com bubble of late 1999 and into 2000. To work our way out of that mess, our government engineered a housing bubble, which burst in late 2007, and which is still bursting even as we speak. So how are we going to work our way out of this housing bubble/ credit crisis/ totally fubar economic situation? By engineering a chef bubble, evidently.
   When I go work out, I usually walk past the cooking school a few blocks up. Been doing it for years, but it's only been in the past six months or so that I've noticed a dramatic increase in the number of cars parked along all the side streets. Used to be that all the cooking school people parked in the parking garage right behind the main building. Not no more. The students are crusing up and down every street for blocks around, emerging with their little white hats, hounds-tooth-checked pants, and gargantuan recipe books. There are a lot more cooking school students now than there were even a year ago. A LOT more.
   This is understandable, when times are tough trade school enrollment goes up. People want to know they have a skill they can actually make a living with, as opposed to, say, being an expert in putting together Power Point presentations. But there's a problem here, one I don't think the cooking school faculty is letting their students know about.
   There are far fewer chef jobs than there were before. Americans are eating out less, restaurant profits are down overall, and restaurants are closing their doors across the country. So when all these new cooking school students graduate, where are they going to go? Sure, right now they're greasing the gears of the economy with their tuition money, the school employs more instructors, they build more classrooms which employs more contractors, they buy more food which keeps the delivery companies and ConAgra in business. But then what? The economy can only absorb so many classically trained and accredited chefs, and right now there are definitely more on the supply side than the demand side of this economic curve.
   Before you know it, we'll have rank after rank of cooking school graduates with nowhere to work, making crepes on the exit ramps for spare change.
   So how do we work our way out of the chef bubble? Maybe we start a carpet cleaner bubble. Or a board game bubble. Wait, I got it. A stripper bubble. Yeah... a glut of strippers would put a definite spark back in the economy. At least in the glitter, baby powder, and 6-inch transparent shoe sectors.