{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/cooks-all-other/", "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology", "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.", "scored_at": "2026-08-11", "model": "claude-opus-5", "occupation": { "title": "Cooks, All Other", "soc_code": "35-2019", "category": "Food", "us_employment": 19350, "median_annual_wage": 37690 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 48, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 15, "embodiment": 17, "liability_shield": 3, "trust_premium": 7, "judgment_accountability": 6 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "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.", "embodiment": "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.", "liability_shield": "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.", "trust_premium": "Personal and private-household cooks build real standing with the families and crews they feed — the camp cook everyone knows by name is not interchangeable mid-season — but the commissary and central-kitchen half of this category produces food that reaches an eater who never learns who made it, which pulls the average down to 7.", "judgment_accountability": "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." }, "rationale": "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.", "outlook": "Demand for hands in kitchens holds over the next decade, but headcount concentrates: high-volume repetitive production migrates to automated commissaries while scratch cooking, remote-site, and personal-cook work stays firmly human.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "embodiment", "change": "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.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 2 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "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.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "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.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "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.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "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.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 } ], "ceiling_note": "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." }, "adjudication": null, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 15870, "wage": 27990 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 18570, "wage": 28650 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 19340, "wage": 30760 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 19080, "wage": 30460 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 18170, "wage": 30720 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 18590, "wage": 33390 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 18650, "wage": 35920 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 23590, "wage": 36210 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 19350, "wage": 37690 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": 21.9, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }