I’m a chef and I’ve been living a lie about the quality and origin of my food

I’m a personal chef for a upper class family in the US with very high standards (they want only the finest, freshest, best quality everything, no matter how early in the morning I must get up to get there, no matter the expense, etc) and I’ve just started to hate the amount of bullshit involved with cooking for them. They specifically demand that I only use “farm to table” produce, meats from local butchers, fish from the market down the street, and in general insist that I use nothing processed, or boxed, or of low quality, or anything that isn’t “good for you”, or anything that isn’t shy of perfection. <br><br>This is a huge pain in my ass, and is extremely time consuming and expensive. I wake up at 4am to get to the fish market, I have to go to 3-4 different butchers just to get a variety of meat for the week, and finding a produce place that sells to chefs/restaurants on a small scale is impossible unless I want to break the bank every time, or I can go to the farmer’s market two towns over at 5am every Sunday. <br><br>I just can’t keep up with all the bullshit anymore. One day I was making some appetizers for a party they were throwing and I was supposed to make cheese and charcuterie platters with cheese from the local creamery and prosciutto from the Italian place in town. I had just gotten off a 14hr shift of cooking the day before and had no energy to go to 3 different places for a party that was supposed to be simple and casual, so I just went to the grocery store down the street from my house (which is not in the same town as theirs) and got some prosciutto and cheese from there and used that. <br><br>And you know what? Nobody noticed. Nobody cared. I could’ve fucking belived it, nobody noticed. I put that prosciutto and cheese on a nice plate with some fruit and nuts I had toasted and nobody suspected a thing. They ate it all and loved it. I put some sausage that was “made fresh daily at the local butcher” into a pasta sauce, when really it was just some shyters from walmart and they thought it was the best thing they’ve ever tasted. <br><br>I’m gonna keep on doing this and see where I end up. I think I’m gonna start substituting more and more big box brand stuff for all the “farm to table” stuff they want and see if they ever notice.