The People Who Stay – And the Ones Who Definitely Shouldn’t Be Trusted with Candy – By Chef Bill Walker – Culinary Arts Instructor, EPHS

There are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who leave when things get difficult… and the ones who look around at the chaos, sigh deeply, roll up their sleeves, and say, “Well, I guess I live here now.”

I have spent most of my life accidentally becoming the second kind.

Not because I’m noble. Let’s get that out of the way immediately. I am not standing on a windswept cliff making dramatic speeches about duty while a string section swells behind me. I am usually standing in a kitchen, holding a whisk, wondering who burned the garlic and why it smells like regret.

But somewhere along the way, between teaching, cooking, and making a series of questionable but enthusiastic life choices, I started to notice something.

the people who stay are different

Not louder. Not flashier. Definitely not better at telling stories at dinner parties. (In fact, they are often terrible at dinner parties because they are too busy refilling everyone’s water and quietly fixing the salad situation.) But they have this… gravitational pull. A steadiness, that invisible force that just reaches people without announcing itself. That’s it, that’s what these people are. Like the one person in the kitchen who doesn’t panic when the tickets stack up, but just starts moving faster in a way that somehow calms everyone else down.

My mother was like that.

She taught in a school that most people treated like a temporary stop on the way to somewhere better. A professional layover. The kind of place where teachers arrive with good intentions and a carefully packed emotional carry-on, then slowly start browsing SchoolSpring listings in nicer districts.

She stayed for twenty-nine years.

Twenty-nine years is not a job. That’s a declaration. That’s planting a flag and saying, “This is where I’m needed,” even when every logical part of your brain is whispering, “You could absolutely go somewhere easier and no one would blame you.”

And that’s the thing about staying. It is almost always defensible to leave, and that’s what makes staying interesting.

I didn’t fully understand that until I found myself in Johannesburg in 2003, participating in something called the World Cooks Tour for Hunger, which sounds like a Food Network special but is actually a group of chefs collectively deciding to use their superpowers for good instead of just arguing about risotto texture.

We showed up, we cooked, we fed people. Simple in theory.

Less simple when you are handing out food to thousands of children and realizing, very quickly, that the scale of need is something your brain is not equipped to process. It’s like trying to measure the ocean with a tablespoon. You keep going, because stopping would be worse, but you also understand that what you’re seeing is going to stay with you.

It should stay with you.

Now, at some point during this trip, I made what I believed was a kind, generous, and deeply thoughtful decision. I gave candy to children.

If you are reading this and thinking, “That seems nice,” I would like to gently suggest that you have never been immediately surrounded by a rapidly multiplying crowd of children who have just discovered that you are, in fact, a walking piñata.

What began as a sweet gesture turned into a full-contact situation in under ninety seconds. I went from “generous visiting chef” to “man being gently crushed by enthusiasm” at a speed that would impress a NASCAR pit crew.

Security intervened and I was rescued. This is, without question, the dumbest sentence I have ever lived through.

But it also fits neatly into the larger theme. Sometimes your best intentions go sideways. Sometimes you trip on the metaphorical staircase of life while holding a literal flag in front of a large audience.

And yes, that also happened.

There was a big charity dinner. Grand staircase. Music. Flags. Each chef descending with dignity and grace, representing their country like a culinary Olympian. I was the only American.

So naturally, I tripped.

Not a subtle stumble. Not a quiet misstep. A full, committed, gravity-embracing descent that made several hundred people collectively gasp in perfect unison, which, if nothing else, proves that audiences can achieve harmony when properly motivated.

I popped up, because what else are you going to do? Stay down there forever? Become part of the staircase? And here’s the beautiful part: they applauded. Loudly.

Because people understand something important that we don’t always give them credit for. They don’t need perfection, they need honesty. They need you to get back up, laugh, and keep going.

That’s when it started to click for me. The people who stay are not the people who never fall. They are the people who fall, get up, and then go right back to doing the thing that matters.

Which brings me to Dr. Billy Gallagher.

Billy was a giant in the culinary world, a British chef who had built something extraordinary in South Africa, a career and a purpose rooted in that country’s soil. Then he was carjacked. And in the aftermath of that violence, he was left paralyzed from the waist down.

His family urged him to come home. To stay in the UK. To rest, to heal, to finally be somewhere easier. And no one, not a single person would have blamed him for it.

He went back to South Africa.

I was fortunate enough to meet him in 2003, the year he organized the World Cooks Tour for Hunger, the very event that brought me to Johannesburg. He invited me into his office, which was exactly what you’d expect from a man of his stature: rich wood paneling, beautiful bookshelves, a desk that had clearly witnessed important conversations. The kind of room that feels like it has weight.

And then, completely out of place on the wall behind him: a Bob Marley poster.

I must have looked at it a beat too long, because he pointed to it and said, simply: “A hungry man is an angry man.”

That was it. That was the whole explanation. That was why he came back.

He didn’t need a long speech. He didn’t need a ten-point plan or a mission statement. He had seen the hunger, he understood what it produced, and he had the skills to do something about it. So he did. Despite everything, despite the wheelchair, despite the easier road waiting for him back home.

That’s not resilience as a concept. That’s clarity as a practice.

There’s a line from a Rush song, “The Larger Bowl,” that’s been rattling around in my head for years, about how some people get the larger share of the world’s luck. It’s not subtle, it’s not trying to make you feel better. It’s just sitting there like a perfectly plated dish you didn’t order, forcing you to decide whether you’re going to eat it or pretend you didn’t see it.

Billy ate it. My mother ate it. And somewhere along the way, without making a big announcement about it, I realized I had been nibbling at it too. Teaching in a tough school. Showing up early. Staying when it would have been easier to go somewhere with better parking and fewer broken ice machines.

Not because I’m heroic. Let’s circle back to that. I am still the guy who caused a minor candy-related incident on another continent. Let’s keep expectations realistic. But because once you see it, once you understand that your skills actually matter to someone else, then leaving starts to feel… off. Like walking out of a kitchen mid-service because it got busy. Which, to be clear, is not an option unless you are looking to be chased down the street by very angry line cooks.

The longer I do this, the more I believe that cooking is a superpower.

Not in a Marvel sense. No one is flying over East Providence flinging perfectly seasoned risotto at crime. But in a real, grounded, quietly powerful way. You can feed people. You can take a bad day and make it better. You can stand in the middle of chaos and create something that nourishes someone else. Rush had another word for it: the work. In “Bravado,” they wrote about pressing on regardless, about doing the thing even when you can’t see the outcome. That’s the kitchen. That’s teaching. That’s staying.

And the people who stay? They understand that instinctively. They don’t always explain it well. They don’t always package it into neat life lessons or inspirational quotes. Sometimes they just show up, day after day, and do the work.

Which is less cinematic.

But a lot more real.

So yeah, I’ve tripped down a staircase. I’ve been nearly taken out by a swarm of candy-seeking children. I’ve made more mistakes than I can count, both in kitchens and out of them.

And I’m still here.

Still teaching.

Still cooking.

Still showing up.

Because at some point, without really planning to, I became one of the people who stays.

And honestly?

It’s a pretty good place to be.