Culinary knowledge is hard-earned and frugally passed down from one culinarian to another. This frugal practice is, however, gradually diminishing as culinary professionals are increasingly turning to social media to disseminate their culinary knowledge, exposing their intellectual property and culinary secrets publicly amid the process. Such practices come with immense consequences and responsibilities, especially for chefs with higher social status in the culinary domain. Exploring this phenomenon, this paper details how an elite culinarian—Chef Wei Loon Tan, one of three Malaysian pastry chefs who won the 2019 World Pastry Cup—navigates his responsibilities as a culinary elite on Instagram. Adopting an interpretive case study design, this paper focuses on how Wei Loon embraces his ambassadorial and generative roles as a Malaysian culinary knowledge bearer. The research findings converge to form the Generative Model of Culinary Knowledge Sharing, an original conceptualization for knowledge management theory and practice.

烹饪知识来之不易，并且节俭地从一位烹饪师传给另一位烹饪师。然而，随着烹饪专业人士越来越多地转向社交媒体传播他们的烹饪知识，并在此过程中公开他们的知识产权和烹饪秘密，这种节俭的做法正在逐渐减少。这种做法会带来巨大的后果和责任，尤其是对于在烹饪领域具有较高社会地位的厨师而言。探索这一现象，本文详细介绍了一位精英烹饪师——主厨 Wei Loon Tan，他是赢得 2019 年世界糕点杯的三位马来西亚糕点师之一——如何在 Instagram 上履行他作为烹饪精英的职责。采用解释性案例研究设计，本文重点介绍 Wei Loon 如何接受他作为马来西亚烹饪知识承载者的大使和生产角色。研究结果汇聚形成烹饪知识共享的生成模型，这是知识管理理论和实践的原始概念化。