EXPOSED
This catch-all category covers cooks who don't fit restaurant, institutional, fast-food, or short-order buckets — camp cooks, commissary and central-kitchen cooks, personal and specialty cooks. The work is almost entirely hands-and-eyes: knife work, grill and range timing, plating, judging doneness by smell and feel, hauling stock in tight hot spaces — none of which language models touch and current kitchen robotics only handles in narrow, high-volume, fixed-menu stations. What's exposed is the paper layer around the job (recipe scaling, prep lists, portion costing, ordering) plus the medium-term risk that high-volume production cooking gets consolidated into automated commissaries, which is exactly where a chunk of this category already sits.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $30,760 → $37,690 -2.0% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+5.5%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 19,350 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +5.5% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 48/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~3,700 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
Assistant CookFalafel Cart CookFraternity House Cook
The BLS uses Cooks, All Other for work that doesn't fit any named occupation, so it covers roles that have little in common with each other. Two consequences worth knowing before you read anything below:
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Tasks largely resist digitisation Butchering a case of chicken thighs, adjusting a braise that's tightening too fast, plating 60 covers on a camp line with no fixed menu, and dealing with whatever produce actually arrived that morning are tasks no software executes — the 15 rather than 18 reflects that recipe scaling, prep sheets, and portion costing are already being handed off, and commissary-style batch cooking with fixed specs is the part of this category robotics is actively targeting.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments You stand for eight to twelve hours in 95-degree air moving 50-pound stock pots, working hot oil and open flame, cutting on a wet board, and in the camp and remote-site variants doing it in a field kitchen or galley you didn't design with equipment that fails mid-service — a 17 rather than 20 only because much of it happens indoors within a defined kitchen footprint.
No licence, no signature requirement A food handler card or ServSafe certificate is a county health department formality, not a licence; the health inspector cites the establishment and the operator or executive chef signs the HACCP logs, so nothing legally requires that a specific credentialed human be the one holding the knife.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs Calls like pulling a protein at temperature, dumping a batch that smells off, or re-firing a table are consequential but resolved inside standardized recipes, spec sheets, and posted cook temps — the ambiguous decisions about menu, cost targets, and staffing sit with the chef or food service director above you.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (15/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (3/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (7/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (6/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 16 of this occupation's 48 points (33%).
Embodiment (17/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 63/100, still EXPOSED.
Two-tier split is genuine here: recipe scaling, prep sheets, portion cost and par-ordering are the automatable tier; the residual job is doneness judgment, substitution under a missing delivery, and cooking to an individual client's allergy/texture/religious constraints. If the paperwork tier is absorbed by kitchen-management software, the measured day's work becomes almost entirely the unautomatable tier.
Not a lever that rises much — already 17. The only realistic upward pressure is task-mix: if commissary/central-kitchen volume cooking consolidates into automated lines, the surviving roster of this SOC skews toward camp cooks, remote-site and offshore/wildfire-camp cooks, and private-household personal chefs, all of whom work in non-standard, unmapped kitchens (mobile trailers, ship galleys, client homes) where fixed-station robotics has no install path.
State adoption of the FDA Food Code provision requiring a Certified Food Protection Manager physically present during operating hours (rather than merely on payroll) — plus the allergen-awareness certification mandates already law in Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan and Rhode Island — makes a named, certified human the person of record for HACCP logs and allergen calls. Extension of that presence requirement to remote-site and mobile feeding operations would pin the sign-off to a specific cook on site.
Narrow but real in the personal/private-chef slice: clients contracting through agencies for in-home cooking are buying the person, and USPCA-style personal-chef contracting is priced per-human. Growth of medically-tailored-meal benefits under Medicare Advantage SSBCI, which reimburse prepared meals for chronic-condition members, would push demand toward cooks whose named certification and allergen accountability are contractually specified.
Where the cook is the sole food authority at an isolated site — wildfire base camp, drilling camp, expedition, ship galley — they own the call on discarding a broken cold chain, feeding 300 people from what actually arrived, and catching an allergen with no supervisor and no resupply. If the category's composition tilts to those settings, the role's owned consequential decisions rise; a documented HACCP corrective-action signature requirement would formalize it.
The limit. Ceiling is modest. Nothing here creates a licensure moat like nursing or engineering: food-safety certification is a short course, not a protected practice, and no board can be lobbied into requiring a licensed cook to sign anything a manager can't. The realistic path tops out near the mid-60s and comes mostly from composition shift — the commissary tier leaving the category — not from the remaining work becoming more defensible.
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 1,810 | $35,500 -6% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 1,120 | $42,860 +14% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 1,040 | $38,850 +3% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 860 | $27,900 -26% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 830 | $42,630 +13% |
| Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro--Franklin, TN | 700 | $33,220 -12% |
| Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX | 420 | $35,070 -7% |
| Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ | 400 | $46,960 +25% |
| Burlington-South Burlington, VT | 80 | $57,320 +52% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 80 | $53,910 +43% |
| Las Vegas-Henderson-North Las Vegas, NV | 290 | $51,220 +36% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 48. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.