Last weekend, my wife and I began watching the recently released third season “The Bear,” the Chicago-set FX drama starring Jeremy Allen White as a chef. My wife loves the show, which airs on Hulu. She’s originally from Illinois, is something of a great cook herself, and she seems to have an affinity for guys with longish hair and receding jawlines, so it’s perfect viewing for her.

For the uninitiated, White plays a brooding chef named Carmine/Carmy/The Bear Berzatto. (Warning, possible spoilers ahead.) We learn over time that Carmy left the family nest to learn how to cook in fine-dining kitchens, where he quietly submitted to the teachings of masterful chefs, including a really demeaning one played by Joel McHale who you will want Carmy to punch. After his brother’s death, Carmy leaves that high-pressure world to sort out the chaos at The Beef, the family’s sandwich shop in Chicago. He then decides, presumably because he also likes yelling and being yelled at by family and coworkers, many of whom also have good hair, to turn it into a fine-dining establishment.

Speaking of hair, three seasons in, I continue to be puzzled as to why most of the staff fails to cover their heads while cooking in a commercial kitchen. A stated goal this season is earning a Michelin star (I warned you of spoilers). I don’t know much about how one earns a Michelin star — pretty sure you can’t buy them at Les Schwab Tire Center — but I’m guessing hair in someone’s food would not be a good start. A few years back on a busy evening at a certain local restaurant, a longhaired hostess helped deliver food sans head covering.

Did they forget to budget for hairnets? More than once, we see Carmy and his staff meticulously scrubbing the kitchen down to the last drop of grease. You’d think they might find a hair or two and start covering their domes, but what do I know? I’m nobody’s foodie, which is what I try to tell people the second someone starts talking to me about their dining experience and food preferences.

It never fails to encourage them to keep talking about spices I’ve never heard of, recipes I won’t try, etc. I don’t even start to get foodie culture, to be completely honest. We all need to eat, but they’ve formed a culture around this necessity of being alive. It’s like forming a hobby around sleeping, breathing or drinking water. I know this makes me a Philistine in some circles, but somehow I persist. So no, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I do know I hate finding hair in my food, especially in restaurants.

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Another thing that is interesting about “The Bear” is how there is so much drama and tension and yelling and arguing and, if you’re me, and you’re used to the cause-and-effect stories of other dramas, you keep expecting something explosive or violent or at least some resolution is coming, but it rarely does. Sometimes, when Carmy is not flaring his nostrils and plating food using literal tweezers, he will get in a shoving match with his foil, Richie, but that’s about it.

Below all the surface noise, there are a lot of scenes of people cooking and plating and serving food under extreme pressure. I thought there was quite a bit of stress and pressure working at a newspaper, but clearly that work does not compare to a kitchen in pursuit of a Michelin star. There is no way my blood pressure is lower after I watch an episode than beforehand.

Three episodes in, I’ve found this season of “The Bear” extra discombobulating, as the tension seems even higher, with more yelling and anger and sense-of-urgency vignettes instead of whole scenes with a through line. As my wife said after seeing what goes on in the kitchen during the third episode, it makes you feel bad for even going to restaurants.

But of course I’m going to keep watching. I just stumbled on a video on Threads by author, humorist and inventor Quinn Cummings talking about the third season’s theme. It’s a bit of a big-picture spoiler if you look it up, but her take is fairly general, offering a slightly better idea of what the heck’s going on, which has not been obvious through the first few episodes.

“I’m so genuinely delighted by what they have done because they didn’t have to do that,” Cummings said of the last episode. “Maybe that’s what has gotten under my dermal layer since the first episode, is that they’re not afraid to do the big, weird topics.”

I have my own unresearched theory about the show: It feels to me like the creators of “The Bear” sort of make the restaurant a microcosm of contemporary America: Many are angry and stressed out, there’s money going out as fast as it’s coming in, but hey, there’s good food to eat if you can afford it.