Nikola Skeledžija is a gastronomy professional, holds a master’s degree in economics, teaches culinary arts, and is an author with decades of experience in the education of future chefs and gastronomy professionals.
His professional path has taken him from hands-on work in gastronomy, through further specialist and academic study, to decades in education. As a teacher, he brings together theory, practical training, professional placements, and cooperation with industry, with the aim of ensuring that what is taught in school is continually tested against the realities of professional life.
Working directly with young people has always been central to his work. Over time, that experience led him to a question that reaches far beyond any individual lesson: what should education truly leave with a person once they have left school?
Knowledge, skills, and qualifications matter, but they are not enough if a person has never learned to think, make connections, question assumptions, and take responsibility for what they do.
This is where the essence of his educational philosophy begins: the individual as a thinking being.
Gastronomy Is Much More Than Cooking
He does not regard gastronomy as merely a culinary craft, but as an interconnected system: from the laboratory and the biochemistry of food, through primary production, agronomy, ecology, and public health, to the economics, history, culture, philosophy, and ethics that make food one of the fundamental elements of human society.
Food is far more than what eventually arrives on a plate. Behind it lie soil, water, energy, knowledge, human labour, markets, history, habits, identity, culture, and decisions made at every stage. The plate is often merely the final stop on a much longer journey.
It was from this understanding of gastronomy, combined with decades of direct experience in education, that the idea of Gastrohumanism gradually emerged — an approach in which gastronomy becomes a starting point for a broader understanding of human beings, knowledge, work, and society. Not because philosophy needs to be imposed upon gastronomy after the fact, but because those connections are already inherent in it.
The Individual as a Thinking Being
At the heart of his educational approach is the idea of the individual as a thinking being.
The purpose of education is not to produce someone who can accurately reproduce what they have been told. Such a person may become an efficient executor of instructions, but is unlikely to become an independent professional. What matters is the ability to understand why something is done, apply knowledge to unfamiliar situations, distinguish evidence from opinion, and remain willing to question one’s own conclusions.
A decision does not become untouchable simply because it is ours. If new evidence shows that an earlier conclusion was wrong, changing one’s position is not a sign of weakness, but of intellectual maturity. Stubbornly defending an error simply because we were the ones who made it is a far more serious problem.
He therefore regards doubt not as a rejection of knowledge, but as one of its driving forces. This is methodological doubt: the kind that demands evidence, verification, and a willingness to reconsider what we believe we know. Without it, there can be no serious science — and no serious education.
Human development, moreover, does not end with professional or technological progress. A person may master new technologies, techniques, or vast amounts of information without developing very much as a human being. Development must therefore also have personal, intellectual, ethical, and social dimensions. It is not enough for a person to be capable of more; what matters is whether they understand what they intend to do with that “more”.
School Lays the Foundations
One of the central principles of his teaching is that no one becomes a chef, a gastronomy professional, or a fully developed professional in any field solely within a school, training kitchen, or other controlled environment. That is where the foundations are laid — and laying them properly is already an enormous task.
School should provide knowledge, develop sound working habits, establish an understanding of the fundamental principles of a profession, and help students develop the judgement they will later need to distinguish good work from poor work. Practical training allows theory to be tested through direct experience, while cooperation with industry and work in real professional environments reveal what happens when the controlled conditions of school give way to deadlines, responsibility, organisation, pressure, and standards that can no longer be simulated.
It quickly becomes clear what has genuinely been learned and what still remains to be learned. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem begins only when a person starts to believe there is nothing left to learn.
School does not produce the finished professional. It lays the foundations on which that professional is built through work, experience, mistakes, reflection on those mistakes, and continual improvement.
Education must also be accessible, but accessibility must never be confused with lowering standards. On the contrary, education should uphold high standards that are professionally justified and appropriate to the individual’s age, development, and genuine capabilities.
The aim is not for everyone to be the same, nor for everyone to achieve the same result. The aim is to give each person a genuine opportunity to reach their full potential — without artificially making the path easier, but also without placing a ceiling above them in advance.
Approach to Writing
His writing begins from the same principle: things should be understood, not merely accepted.
His work lies at the intersection of gastronomy, education, economics, science, history, and social questions. A text may begin with coffee, an ingredient, a classroom lesson, a professional situation, a historical event, or an entirely ordinary feature of everyday life, but it rarely ends where it began.
What interests him is what lies beyond the first impression: what do we take for granted, what do we actually know, what do we merely repeat because we have heard it often enough, and what consequences follow from the decisions we make?
His writing combines research discipline, interdisciplinary thinking, and a distinct personal perspective. Personal perspective, however, is never a substitute for fact. A fact must remain a fact; an interpretation must be recognisable as an interpretation; and when the evidence is insufficient, it is more intellectually honest to acknowledge the limits of what we know than to fill the gap with a certainty we do not possess.
Criticism, for him, is not an end in itself. Rejecting everything simply to create the appearance of critical thinking is a rather cheap exercise. Far more difficult is the willingness to examine seriously an argument we dislike and to accept the possibility that the other side may, at least in part, be right.
He is particularly interested in education, knowledge, responsibility, the dignity of work, the relationship between the individual and society, and the human capacity for independent judgement.
In his writing, gastronomy is often the beginning, but rarely the end. It is a gateway into a much larger story about what it means to be human.
Deeds as the Measure
Titles have their purpose. So do diplomas and qualifications. But none of them, in themselves, guarantees knowledge, quality, or character.
In the end, professional identity is shaped by far more concrete things: how a person works, how they treat other people, what they do when they make a mistake, and whether they are prepared to accept responsibility for the consequences of their own decisions.
Knowledge that has never been tested in the real world remains incomplete. The same is true of good intentions. It is not enough to say what we stand for — sooner or later, what matters is what we have actually done.
His professional, educational, and authorial approach can perhaps best be expressed in a single sentence:
Let our deeds speak for us.