How I Earned $200K Making Spaghetti Sauce in the Amazon Jungle

I'm a chef you've never heard of. I don't own any restaurants, nor have I worked with anyone famous or cooked anywhere with a Michelin star. My last position was working as an executive chef in the middle of the Amazon rainforest for a gold mine.

The problem is, I fucking hate cooking. It's the worst job I could imagine. It damages your body and your bank account.

But cooking has given me unreal opportunities in places few people travel—Antarctica, Afghanistan, Somalia, Cook Islands, to name a few—and I've traveled in Kenya, Colombia, Cambodia, and 35 other countries.

I got into this career by accident, starting as a dishwasher (although it was under a very talented and charismatic chef). This was 15 years ago. I began cooking at a steakhouse in British Columbia, but yearning to get the hell out of my small town, I blanketed Canada and far-off places with resumes for another job.

A hotel in the small town of Resolute—way the fuck up north in Nunavut—was the first to call. It may have been my biggest mistake, because it was the beginning of years spent in isolated or war-torn environments around the world. Resolute, one of the northernmost settlements in Canada, is located on a small island in the Arctic Ocean. I had a boss who treated me well; he was Indo-Canadian, born in Africa but had relocated to the Arctic. He told me during my phone interview that the hotel employed two chefs and two cooks, but when I got up there, it ended up being only me and one other chef. That chef would make "stew" by combining boiled vegetables with thick, brown packet gravy, but soon enough he got fired for making shit like that. So then it was just me and a stack of Company's Coming cookbooks, feeding 150 people three times a day.

We were a busy place. It was a hotel that saw its fair share of travelers trying to make it to the North Pole by bike, ski, or dogsled. Even Top Gear came by to film their episode of driving to the North Pole. My room was in this hotel, and my kitchen was about 200 feet away.

The next job came at the other end of the world, literally. I spent a year at the geographic South Pole and was one of only 14 Canadians to have ever done so. The sun doesn't shine for months and there's only one sunset and one sunrise a year. 2004 to 2005 was a long, cold year. That's when I started smoking. My year, we had 86 people wintering over, the largest crew ever. Of course, almost all of our food was frozen, and in the middle of winter we saw temperatures of -100 degrees Fahrenheit (-73 degrees Celsius) or colder. There were two years of food outside just in case something ever happened that would keep people stuck there. I was an overweight alcoholic at the time but the executive chef (who is an amazingly creative and super nice guy from Denver) took a chance on me and let me stay the year. By the end of winter, my XL chef whites were bursting at the seams.

After that, I needed somewhere warmer: Bermuda. I lost 100 pounds and made shit pay, but I was enjoying the island life and a relationship with a waitress at the bar where I worked. Before long, though, I got fired and had to move back to cold country—the Canadian Arctic, this time a small town called Inuvik.

Inuvik is a fun, crazy place full of derelicts (many being my good friends) who don't quite fit in down south. It was there that I tried my hand at waitering—but since they are shaky hands, it didn't quite go over so well.

Next up was catering for forest firefighters in British Columbia. The money was good and we saw a lot of backcountry BC. The end came, however, when I woke up one day to a new manager telling me how to make scrambled eggs and other basics. After I tossed a meatball at his head and then followed it up with a drunk email to management to go fuck themselves, I was on my merry way.

After fire camp, I took a chef management position for remote dining facilities in Afghanistan. I worked three months on and three weeks off. I loved every minute of it there. I had 91 staff from various countries and we fed 1,500 to 2,000 people a day. I was able to change the menu written by the Department of Defense (DOD) to include more homemade items: They would have "pizza day" on the short order bar, but that consisted of frozen mini-discs. It was the same with burgers and almost everything else. But we had flour, water, and yeast, so I thought, Why not make our own pizza rather than this shit? We have ground beef, so why not make homemade burgers for a couple thousand people? On Halloween of 2010, I wore a banana costume while standing over the grill, making fresh crepes with caramelized bananas.

The soldiers deserved better than the food program that the DOD (their menu is designed for efficient, budget catering in remote areas) and most of the contractors provided for them, and it wasn't long before my menu had reached multiple facilities. Even though the prime contractor took credit for it, I was happy to know that these guys were able to get good, often restaurant-quality food from staff I had trained. We would have the odd rocket attack and a few "iffy" rides on some Chinooks, but that just kept you on your toes, and I think that's why I loved it so much.

When that ended, I was offered a job in Somalia, a country that hasn't really had a government in 20 years—what could go wrong? I was contracted by a very large humanitarian organization (you could probably guess which one) to whom I asked a lot of questions, mostly about security, before I arrived. They would repeat the same thing: "It's getting better in Somalia. You have nothing to worry about."

I was soon on a plane to Mogadishu with our operations manager. After landing, we had to take a short, 50-meter walk between the plane and the airport. About 25 meters in, explosions went off and black smoke curled into the air, about half a kilometer away. People were panicking and rushed into the airport, which is chaos any time of day, let alone during a terrorist attack. It turned out that the attackers blew up the building I was supposed to work in before I had even started. That was June 19, 2013.

I spent three more months in Mogadishu, biding my time and waiting for the camp to be rebuilt. I mostly catered small gigs, including a formal dinner for the Somali president and his entourage to break the Ramadan fast. We transformed a ramshackle building into a fine-dining venue, complete with a three-course meal. It was supposed to last three hours, but 15 minutes after sunset, it was all over—they were so hungry and the food was so good, they polished it off in record time. I went to get myself some dessert, stashed in the security hut, only to find out the guards had eaten all of it.

The base didn't reopen; the organization just closed it down and let me and the others go. I found my way to Nairobi, where I was trying to remember life before instant coffee, and promptly found ArtCaffe at Westgate Mall. As luck had it, I met a girl and she invited me for a trip to Rwanda, only a day before terrorists hit that very cafe during an attack on the mall.

A bit wary of near-death experiences, I headed back to Canada to help a guy open a new restaurant in BC. I hate working in restaurants, but I have always wanted to open one, so I took the chance. We were slammed on opening day and the cooks just turned to me as if to ask, "What the fuck do we do?" But we made it through the opening with flying colors, and ultimately it turned out to be fairly successful.

After that, I took a short holiday to Cabo San Lucas. Sitting on the beach, I just knew I had had enough. With stress snapping every last bit of my common sense, I sunk into the worst of Mexico. I barely made it out alive, my nose buried deep in a certain white powdery substance. But a friend messaged me about an emergency gig back in Canada, so I scraped together my last pesos to buy a ticket that turned out not to be valid, requiring me to phone a friend for a lifeline.

Canada was what it always seems to be: rescue-turned-boredom. Being short on money and bumming cigarettes and liquor from a girl 13 years younger than me just stirred the itch for crazy places again.

In November of 2014, the phone rang. It was a gold mining company that was starting up in the Amazon—in Suriname, to be exact. The pay was nuts: $192,000 per year, work one month and get one month off, and get paid the same every two weeks, even on vacation. Soon enough, I was in the rainforest working at a gold mine.

The kitchen was temporary, like much of the landscape during the construction of the mine. One day, you would see a lush green hill; the next, it would be completely flattened. Our kitchen was built for 500 people, but we ended up catering for 2,000. In the beginning, we made a hell of a lot of spaghetti sauce.

Fuck, it was stressful. On my first day there, I walked into our small meat room to see chicken and fish thawing in tepid water in the same sink.

Every day in the kitchen, we would butcher 400 kilos of chicken and 400 kilos of other various meats in a room about the size of a minivan. The kitchen was made out of press board, so it soon started developing holes in the floor and was in a constant state of disrepair. There were few stainless steel counters; most were wooden. An ocean of raw meat, dirty dishwater, and chemicals started to develop below the kitchen, and in humid temperatures constantly at 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius), a stinky cloud remained over us for months.

I wrote numerous letters to management, explaining that my staff and the people on site were at risk of getting food poisoning. It fell on deaf ears, and it still makes me sick. We all received constant emails and sat in meetings about "safety culture" and "zero harm," yet when it came to food and installing proper equipment, the company had its priorities elsewhere.

My boss was a little French man—a control freak, easily earning the moniker "Napoleon." He was responsible for camp services yet couldn't cook; he never lifted a finger to do anything useful and was long past his prime. We would constantly fight, and he kept pushing and pushing me. So in July, even with the pay and the months of holiday, I quit.

Now I'm doing what I always do between gigs: going to another country, waiting for the next adventure, blowing the savings and dreaming of leaving the industry. But it always sucks me back in, because despite it all, I do love the life.