Hehe, I really don't think the chef board has enough traffic to really warrent /bumps every half hour, but that's just me. 
Whether or not BE is "worth it" depends on what you want to do, and what you have access to as far as in-game resource sources.
A chef can be "self sufficient" in a couple different ways. Let's assume you have Master Chef + Merchant 0001 (gets you four vendors and a limit of 1250 items, enough for most mid-sized food businesses). That leaves you with 133 skill points to work with.
You can add Scout 0030 + Master of any basic elite combat prof (no hybrids like BH, Smuggler, or CM). With this template you can make your own food (both for sale and to enhance yourself during combat), and gather all your own resources (including meat/hide/bone). At CL 54, you've got a fairly wide selection of creatures to hunt. Meat can be either kept for your cooking supplies, sold, or provided to a BE (along with flora) who is willing to make tissue schematics for you. Since BE schematics are run in food/chem factories, you've got the tissue manufacturing side covered too. BE prices for schematics range from nothing to 500k.
If you go BE 0404, you can make your own tissues, but you'll have a hard time getting the creature resources yourself. With just Chef / Merchant / 0404 BE you've got 41 skill points left, which will get you roughly a branch and a half in either brawler or marksman. Because of the BE pre-reqs, you've got hunting skills, but you're stuck with "small game" due to limited combat skills (although the medic pre-req for BE does give you some healing ability). However, you can still get creature resources through buying them, or making deals with customers or guildmates.
Most of this runs into what's more valuable to you: skill points, in-game time, or in-game credits? Having BE yourself saves you credits (unless you're getting gouged on meat prices), takes a little more time (the work to make the schematics isn't much, the time to run those through a factory is longer), and leaves you fewer skill points to try out other aspects of the game.
Personally, I've always been willing to pay someone else for the skills / manufacturing time and just buy crates of tissues. I do enjoy a bit of combat (and that's where most of the latest content has been focused on), so the credit cost was worth the extra skill points I have to spend in TK.
Kriles Ch'artoff , Chilastra server
Master Chef (retired)
Currently doing....stuff
