These days, no one is a cook any more. Everyone is a chef. Culinary pride is measured in Michelin stars, magazine centrefolds and the number of local farms name-checked on the menu. There is an all too common belief that dignity in cooking comes from a starched white jacket, perfect teeth, a publicist and a TV contract.

But that, of course, is untrue. Well-coiffed celebrity chefs take pride in their intricate skills, the ingredients with which they work and the beautiful and delicious plates they produce, but cooks in low-rent restaurants take equal pride in their speed, their scars and their ability to do a difficult job well, sometimes under terrible conditions. I spent most of my 15 years as a cook working in these kinds of places.

Take the roadside fish house in Florida where I spent my nights working the fryers. This was not a great restaurant. However it was the kind of place that people eat in most of the time — cheap, fast and easy; perfect for grandma, the kids, and tourists with little money and less taste. But there was a pride in the kitchen that had little to do with cuisine, but everything to do with food.

On a typical Saturday night, at the last possible moment before the early-bird rush, I would start to carry in the stock in volumes you would barely believe. Two hundred pounds of precut, frozen french fries in waxy brown 10lb bags. Eight five-gallon buckets of floury beer batter. Hundreds of pounds of cheap fish in plastic tubs. There were cases of calamari already going gooey in the humid air, more cases of breaded clam strips, of stuffed mushrooms and chicken cutlets. And this was just my station. All around me, the rest of the six-strong crew were bringing in their stuff, stacking their favourite pans on the wall racks in their own secret, special order; twisting the bottles of sauce and cooking wine snout-down in their speed racks, and slotting their knives into the spaces between cutting boards, angled for fast draws. Over the next six hours, together in the heat and the crash and the clamour, we would feed nearly 1,000 people.

This was my team – not pretty, not nice, not famous – but competent, fast and tough. They were professionals who could face down crushing numbers night after night, finding glory and worth in simply doing the job – turning and burning through long hours for low pay with no holidays, no sick days, no reinforcements or relief in sight. What's more, they loved the food. Maybe not the fact of it – this hamburger, that cheap cut of haddock – but certainly for being able to make something good come out of something so basic. A perfectly seared slab of foie gras or giant truffles are beautiful things. But so, too, is a nice chop when you need one, or a greasy fish fry soaked in vinegar.

Fourteen hours – one solid shift – on the hot line of any busy local will teach you more about the rough reality of feeding the public than any year in some precious cooking school. Many of the great chefs working today started off as good cooks working the neighbourhoods, below their skill level, just like me – cooking dirty to pay the rent until something better came along. They learned their moves in the heat and submarine closeness of some killer galley, churning out cheeseburgers, falafels or tacos. And somewhere along the line, like me, they learned to love not just the job, but the food, too. Any food. All food.

In the years I spent on the low end of the trade, I knew chefs who'd scream and swear and throw pans and torture cooks for any little slight. I stood beside guys who went to jail for stealing food stamps from old ladies, for sticking up convenience stores. But I've also seen these same people quit good jobs rather than do wrong by the food. I've known cooks in greasy spoons who loved their knives so much they named them. Tex-Mex grillmen who worked whole shifts with searing pan burns or broken fingers rather than let their friends down by leaving the line a person short in the rush. And young sous chefs from street corner bistros that no one has ever heard of who got butcher's diagrams of pigs tattooed on to their bodies. I've watched them take beaming pride in a simple pan of mussels, in cutting a microscopic brunoise, in the perfect placement of scallops in a pan.

In the end, all cooks wear the same whites. They all do the same job: feeding people, providing for one of their basic needs. All else aside, that's a noble thing. • Jason Sheehan is the restaurant critic at the Seattle Weekly. His book, Cooking Dirty, is published by Atlantic on 11 March (£16.99).