Every few weeks I’m invited to speak to the newly arriving students at culinary school. I tell them I teach a class on love affairs.

I am the matchmaker.

I want to know what each student loves (not what he or she likes) to do.

With a little bit of luck, I can suggest ways in which they can marry their hobby or unique skills with their culinary knowledge as they seek a long and fruitful career.

I’m astonished to discover how many budding chefs yearn to own a truck. A truck that serves every kind of food from cupcakes and rice pudding to Korean barbecue.

Today I talked about the calendar. The US Tennis Open is coming up. So is the World Series. A sports fan may want to cook at the private dining room of a sports franchise or become a private chef for an athlete.

Dancing with the Stars employs a personal chef for each competition. Personal chef jobs are on the rise. It is one of the best jobs for an entrepreneur who can start a business without requiring a capital investment.

I spoke about jobs in art and design; photographer, food stylist, kitchen designer, and special event cake designer. Create a wedding cake in oil and acrylic paint to frame and preserve for ever and ever (or as long as the marriage lasts.) become a chef in a museum, create a food exhibit, become a lecturer on the topic of food in fine art? Become a recipe developer for Panera or Starbucks (or Dunkin D’s.)

Tasting is a good and well paying job. Taste ice cream, coffee, tea, olive oil. Chew gum. No kidding. Nestle is one of the companies that employs chewing gum tasters. There are real jobs that require super taster to… well…taste…all day. .

How about becoming an ethicist, a futurist or a trend tracker?

Or work on Wall Street analyzing food companies?

Or work for a food foundation or as a humanitarian or lobbyist or inspector to trace the source of contaminated food.

Here are just a few ideas for working in the food media: investigative journalist, vegetarian columnist, historian, folklorist (why do so many Jews go out for Chinese dinner on Sundays?)  The late Professor Alan Dundes examined this question with his students who also study the allure of violent sports, holiday traditions and even the mystique of the vampire.

Said Dundes: “As a psychoanalytic folklorist, my professional goals are to make sense of nonsense, find a rationale for the irrational and seek to make the unconscious conscious.”

How about taking up a career as a food memoir writer, biographer, commentator, geographer (do you know what a food geographer does?) trade magazine reporter, supermarket observer, radio host, (I’d like this job myself,) essayist, restaurant reviewer, food book reviewer (not only cookbooks but also food books dealing with politics, profiles of food companies etc.), catalog writer, TV star, ingredient shopper for TV star, TV producer, obituary writer for former food celebrities. Preparer of last meals in the federal penitentiary leading to a possible book contract for Meals to Die For.

I had only three minutes to describe my food jobs class so I didn’t have time to even mention careers in education, farming, science and technology or rare, unusual and extraordinary culinary careers so instead, I’ll get around to them in this blog. Please come back soon.

And.

Have a nice day (as they say at the bank!)

Decisions, Decisions… You’d think, it would be relatively easy to decide what to do next. The fortunate few do indeed know exactly what they what they want to do. The rest of us must wrestle with uncertainty and anxiety or as the Cheshire Cat said to Alice in Wonderland, “If you don’t know where you want to go, any road will take you there.”

We all face the puzzle of what to do next: there are far too many choices. For example, if  you decide to write a book with the title, The Chicken Dishes of the World, you’ll drown. You will never be able to make even the smallest dent in so large a topic. It would be far easier to narrow the field and concentrate on the Chicken Dishes of Chicago.

I’m going to suggest two diametrically opposite ways to starting a job search. The first is to take your time and use a telescope to explore all the possibilities and all the possibilities within the possibilities. Only then will you be able to employ a microscope, (the opposite way), to refine your options.

You could decide to become a tea taster or a coffee taster or an ice cream taster or an account executive promoting beef or pork or peaches or pears or another commodity. You could become a personal chef.

Personal chefs are a rapidly-expanding segment of the food world. This is a food job that enables you to become an entrepreneur without investing any capital. If you are a good cook, you don’t even need to have a formal degree from a culinary school. Did you know that the U.S. Postal Service once employed a personal chef to provide meals for the cycling team it sponsored?

You could also think about becoming a private chef for a movie star, a sports hero or a television anchor.

A private chef is not the same thing as a personal chef.

A chef can earn $80,000 a year— tax free—working on a luxury yacht, cruising the Greek Islands. The perks here are: there is no rent to pay, no car payments to make and there are plenty of people to sleep with every night.

Recipe developers working for NASA come up with ideas for dinner for astronauts. They can also find employment with food companies and restaurant chains and supermarkets. Recipe testers check the accuracy of recipes for magazines, cookbook authors and food  processors.

Recipe developers are not the same thing as recipe testers.

As you see each different career category contains its own specialized branch and we’ll explore each area as we go along with later posts.

A food lover with a vibrant palate and the ability to write well but with no formal culinary degree may find happiness as a restaurant critic or restaurant memoirist.

Perhaps, you could consider a career as: a literary agent; a cheese shop owner; a food and travel writer; an artisanal bread baker; a wedding cake designer; a food photographer; a bed & breakfast owner; a food entrepreneur or investor or a teacher. There are more jobs opportunities to explore than you may have imagined.

Donald Rumsfeld

As former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, famously observed: “There are known knowns: these are things we know we know. There are known unknowns: these are things we know we don’t know. There are unknown unknowns: there are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

Whether you are interested in science or supermarkets, in engineering or accounting, human relations or writing, in traveling or staying at home, there is a job in the food field for you. Better yet, you can dream up something that had never been done before and make it happen.

After all, the food world involves history and geography, science and technology,  economics and finance, art and design, marketing and publicity and literally dozens of other disciplines. Your task is to decide which path to take.

Christopher Robin & Winnie the Pooh

I came across a lovely quote from Christopher Robin to Winnie the Pooh. He said, “Promise me you’ll always remember you are braver than you believe and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

And do you remember Dr. Benjamin Spock, who comforted generations of anxious mothers by saying, “You know more than you think you do.”

You can start your journey to find a new career by imagining you are Santa Claus. Make a list of all your qualifications. What have you done so far? Where have you been. What have you learned? Who do you know? The last thing on this list may be the most important.

Fill several sacks with all this information and pile them on the sled. Rewrite your resume. Compose a cover letter. Have a new photograph taken. Put on your Santa’s suit frame of mind. Climb aboard the driver’s seat and take the reins of the reindeer. They will run neck and neck with one animal getting his nose ahead with a surge of hope, and the other falling a little behind as his stomach churns with fear. Whichever gains the ascendancy will determine the road you take.

As Suze Ormand tells us: “You Own the Power to Control Your Own Destiny.”

Now I have two more pieces of advice. One is illegitimi non carborundum, which freely translated means, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

I’ll share the other piece of advice next Monday so I hope to bring it with you then. In the meantime, I’ll continue the food writing posts every Wednesday.

Chef Candy Wallace, APPCA Founder

One of my students asked me, ”Exactly what is a personal chef?”

I was happy to tell him about my dear friend Chef Candy Wallace.  I’ll let her speak in her own voice: “As a personal chef I have actually replaced Mom or Grandma in my busy clients’ kitchens. I like to think I’m making a contribution to my clients’ well-being and quality of life. This is almost as important as the evening meals I design and prepare specially for them. As I see it, I’m paid to do three of my favorite things in life: shop, cook and nurture.”

Through her own experience and generosity, Candy has long defined the role of the personal chef. After a decade of being a personal chef, training future personal chef professionals, and promoting personal chefs’ contributions to society, Candy launched an evolutionary next step in October 2006 that still reverberates throughout the foodservice industry, indeed, the nation.

In 1996, Candy founded the American Personal Chef Association, which now embraces private chefs into its ranks. The new American Personal & Private Chef Association (APPCA) provides a home for a largely disenfranchised and overlooked – but increasingly important and influential – segment of culinary professionals.

As the leading voice among personal chefs in the United States, Candy and APPCA have provided support and opportunities for private chefs even though its core mission served personal chefs. Unlike others, Candy understands the similarities and differences that characterize the needs of each group.

The greatest attribute private and personal chefs have in common? According to Candy, “both embrace a desire and the opportunity to consistently prepare and serve “palate specific” meals to their clients, according to their clients’ schedules and special needs.”

Although the two roles are often confused, Candy offers a characterizing distinction. A personal chef is a small-business owner. A private chef is an employee.

Personal chefs prepare meals for a diverse clientele on a regular, occasional or one-time basis for a contracted, often negotiated, fee. In many cases, meals prepared by personal chefs are stored appropriately for later reheating by the client.

Private chefs, by contrast, tend to work for a single client, whether an individual or family, and are paid a salary (often with employment benefits). Most meals are prepared for immediate service. A private chef may or may not live on the same premises as his or her client. Also many private chefs have responsibilities beyond cooking that include managing household, maintenance and grounds staffs and contractors. A personal chef never lives on-premises.

If you are curious about what makes a great personal chef or a personal chef, if you are trying to get started and becoming a personal chef or a private chef, you can have no better friend than Candy and the APPCA. “Our goal is to foster culinary comradeship and offer advice from that age-old thing called experience,” says Candy. “We also want to communicate to the world the special roles personal and private chefs play in American society. I think our tagline says it all: “Partners in Lifestyle Solutions.”’

I strongly urge you to learn more by visiting www.personalchef.com or calling 1 (800) 644-8389. It could change your life!