The role of ship's cook is one of the more exposed positions onboard any vessel, not only responsible for the well-being of the crew, but also as an important economic arm of the managing owner. However, ensuring that the right skills and competences are in place continues to tax ship-owners.
Some may recall the days when the last assigned deck rating was, soon after joining, pronounced to be cook responsible for the preparation of three meals a day regardless whether he could cook or not. Today, regulations require owners to ensure that ships' cooks are trained, qualified and found competent, but it is unclear which certificates are needed.
"Flag states urgently need to define regulations for ships' cooks and put them in force to meet the demands of Maritime Labour Convention 2006 (MLC 2006)," says Professor Captain Ralph Becker-Heins of the Bremen Shipping University. "The current reality is that owners and managers have little evidence that the cooks they employ really do have cooking and hygiene skills and is not going to poison the crew."
Despite pre-employment selection, a large proportion of the seafarers constitute a group of workers with evidence of poor health probably caused by diet and lifestyle. There are no common standards for the training and certification of seagoing chefs. The problem is aggravated by the diminishing number of qualified ship's cooks on the maritime employment market.
As Captain Eugen-Henning Adami, the chairman of the Cyprus Shipping Chamber and president of Mastermind Shipmanagement, points out, this skills gap has significant implications for seafarers.
"Today a cadet is on average 21 years old when joining ship," says Adami. "By age 45 the first prolonged problems with diet-related diseases appear, like high blood pressure, cholesterol etc. The cadet and officer actually served 18 years on board of our ships and spent only six years on vacation. We actually made him sick."
The Sea-chefs Project takes a new approach to the problem. The project is being led by the Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement Training Centre, with partners the UK, Cyprus, Latvia and Germany. It focuses on delivering a standardised, fast-track system for training seagoing cooks. On the one hand the project aims to define uniform standards of competence for ships' cooks; on the other hand it aims to attract hotel and catering personnel to the maritime sector to address the shortage issue.
Given the numbers of SOLAS vessels worldwide, there should be a population of about 200,000 ships' cooks. Nearly all training is carried out at private training institutions. In many countries, however, Sea-Chefs has found that cook training is not an issue and is offered only sporadically. Moreover, international training standards, officially accepted by the IMO under a specific regulation, are missing completely. To date, nearly all international jurisdictions have ignored the existing legal bases regarding standards for cooks aboard ships.
However, all flag states will have to take action with the upcoming ratification of the MLC 2006. By that time at the latest, a common understanding must have been achieved regarding unified training standards.
Sea-Chefs plans to contribute to such an initiative. The International Cooking Certificate (ICC) has created a sustainable, widely introduced system that is setting new industry standards for cooking worldwide. Sea-Chefs believes this is an opportunity for the maritime sector to join this trend by enriching the existing ICC syllabus with a maritime module. As far as the existing content is concerned, the ICC already corresponds largely with the core curriculum presently applied at maritime cooking centres. The key subjects to be added are provisioning, menu planning, hygiene and ship safety.
The Seachefs Project seeks to provide a blueprint on how to fill the gap between existing teaching programmes and the specific demands of a ships' cook working onboard. In addition, the Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement Training Centre has developed and published an e-cookbook intended as a guide for professional seafaring cooks with budgeting and cost control modules added.
