Too many cooks they say…spoils the broth and so is this cookathon business
When Chef Dammy aka Damilola Adeparusi in Ekiti State began her marathon cooking, ostensibly to beat Hilda Baci’s Guinness Records…then Hilda’s feat hadn’t even been certified. I wondered who encouraged her to do the same. In fact, there was a report that Chef Dammy was ill-advised by her pastor to challenge Hilda’s feat.
What vision did the pastor see to command Chef Dammy on that useless cooking marathon for 120 hours?
What laurels did he tell her she would win…or maybe customers?
Will there be more demand for her food seeing she can cook ceaselessly?
I hope so. But you must know that cooking isn’t just about the number of hours you can engage in it, what of taste?
But Chef Dammy’s ill timed challenge, left a sour taste in the mouth. It was such a copycat.
Why attempt to break an uncertified record?
Then another cook from Ibadan, Chef Temitope Adebayo began trending, claiming he would beat the 120 hours, that’s when I began to laugh. Who are these cooks clowning around the pots?
They could have picked some other feats to achieve and we would rally around them, cheering them to victory but no, they told themselves, “no bi to cook? I can do it.”
And in doing it, they inadvertently tried to dim the shine on another compatriot.
I found it unoriginal and even distasteful that our people hadn’t thought deeply and hard about a feat they were about to challenge. I felt they hadn’t done their due diligence and like many things we Nigerians jump into head first, they had not calculated the cost.
That’s the shame of it.
You see, Hilda didn’t just wake up to challenge Lata Tondon’s 2019 feat, she took her time to prepare for it. She waited five years.
She made plans.
She called people.
Had several meetings with stakeholders in her immediate circle, and suggestions were made and dropped. They examined the pros and cons of cooking for such a long period of time.
They contacted GWR on modalities and everything was done to the standards given by GWR. Then she began to cook and oh, what a crowd she drew.
Her burner was yet to cool when we began to hear clanging pots and clashing utensils of two other cooks wanting to beat same record. There are suddenly too many cooks this period.
Word out is Guinness World Record has stated that Chef Dammy did not send her applications for the feat. I am hoping this isn’t true, but if it is, Chef Dammy’s 120 hours cookathon is for naught.
It’s painful because she, like many of us Nigerians, just jump into things because we see others succeeding at it and we think we can do the same. I wish Chef Dammy had done something else. I wish she had made the right inquiries before embarking on such a grueling and thankless certificate-less task. Maybe, just maybe we would all have been petitioning GWR to consider her skills and give her the darned certificate.
Yeah, I read she said it was to test her skills and not for recognition, boohoo!
If it were so, she needn’t have publicised it. She would simply have cooked for whatever hours and we wouldn’t care.
A lesson to us all, here.
No bi everybody drum be your dance
No bi everybody clock be your time
And even if you think you can do the same thing someone has done, find something that will differentiate you from them!
Post script: So I hear Chef Dammy wants to properly apply and cook for 150 hours next month. Aha, so the 120 hours was meant to beat a record, only she didn’t properly apply for it…hummn. Ok, girl, go for it but I wish you were doing something else, still, the sky is big enough for another Nigerian cook to soar.