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Skriven 2005-08-09 04:38:02 av Greg Sears (3:633/104)
     Kommentar till en text av Nancy Backus
Ärende: F unny
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By Tony Kornheiser, The Washington Post, Sunday, November 17, 1996

Apparently, the hottest postgraduate school in the country today is not
law school, which promises huge incomes, or medical school, which
promises huge incomes plus seeing people naked -- but cooking school.

The boom, particularly in the Washington area, has caught most experts
unaware.  Most experts are idiots.  The reason is as simple as butter on
toast:  Bethesda! Every night 1,595 new restaurants open in Bethesda,
and they need chefs.  Any type of food you want, you can find it in
Bethesda.  Kosher Mongolian food, nouvelle Eskimo cuisine with karaoke
on Friday nights, Polynesian-Hungarian, Swedish-Bangladeshi, Tex-Mex
with a tatami-mat sushi room.  God forbid you should need to find a box
of Band-Aids in Bethesda.  You would have to make do with a poultice of
shellfish ragout and leek confit.

Anyway, since there are so many jobs for chefs, the students aren't the
usual collection of deadbeats who attend professional schools like the
Certified Bartenders Academy.  These are doctors, lawyers and bankers
who are eager to become chefs so they can get in touch with their
artistic, expressionistic side, quit their odious $180,000-a-year jobs
-- and start making $325 a week.  There's a guy in Philadelphia who was
an intestinal surgeon for 15 years.  For 15 years the man used his
surgical skill to reattach microscopic threads of human tissue and save
lives.  Now he's stuffing translucent ravioli dough with wild mushrooms
and chicken mousse.  (It seems such a waste.  Any G.P. can stuff
ravioli.  A surgeon ought to be fileting mackerel.)

Now I've got nothing against people changing careers.  When I grew up in
the 1960s, it was typical for someone in midlife to decide that
everything he had devoted his professional life to -- say, investment
banking -- was a crass, selfish enterprise; overnight, these people
became flower arrangers or candlemakers or street-corner peddlers of
tie-dyed underpants.  There was even a name for this phenomenon.  Drug
abuse.

It is not drugs, however, but economics that seems to be playing the
biggest role in this recent cooking phenomenon.  The director of
admissions at the New York Restaurant School says he's "seeing a lot of
people who have been let go from corporations after 10 to 15 years."
You ain't seen nothing yet, pal.  In a month or so you'll be up to your
eyeballs in former Texaco executives signing up to peel lamb membranes.

Every one of these new-career cooks seems to be a food snob.  If there's
a sign-up sheet at these cooking schools, and one sign says "meatloaf"
and the other says "poignee de porte," everybody there would sign up to
learn how to cook poignee de porte, which is "doorknob" in French.
There's Francophile tyranny in these schools.  (Just wait.  In a couple
of years you'll be at McDonald's, and some former nuclear physicist will
ask you, "Does monsieur desire pommes frites with that?")

Accountants named Sidney or Marvin go to cooking school and when they
graduate, all of a sudden they're Jean-Pierre or Claude-Henri.  You have
to have a hyphenated first name to be a chef.  It's a rule.  That's why
cooking schools are popular in places like Texas, where so many people
are named Billy-Bob.

A woman I know is enrolled in one of these fancy-schmancy cooking
schools. She goes twice a week for three-hour classes.  Her teacher is
named something like Claude le Snot.  The class has spent the last four
weeks on, and I am quoting her verbatim, "eggs."  I asked her if she is
enjoying the class, and she said that it is, so far, one of the most
rewarding experiences of her life.  This woman is a veteran trial
lawyer.  She has put murderers in prison for life.  Egg whites excite
her?

I never went to cooking school myself; life is too short to spend a lot
of time scooping melon balls.  But I like to cook.  Especially
breakfast, because it contains all the major men's food groups --
sausage, eggs, toast, coffee, and lots of grape jelly.

The truth is, if I could have any job in the world, I'd be a short-order
breakfast cook at a diner.  I'd put on a white, starched apron, tie a
white kerchief around my neck and make breakfast.  Flip some pancakes,
chop up some potatoes and peppers and onions and grill 'em up.  Put it
all on a nice clean plate with an orange slice garnish.  People are so
happy when you put breakfast in front of them.  I've never seen one
unhappy person eating breakfast at a diner -- that's not counting the
guys who've come in with gunshot wounds, of course.  Yep, that's what
I'd do, cook breakfasts at a diner.

"And would you like to earn $4 an hour doing this?" my friend Gino asked
me.

Well, actually I was thinking more along the lines of $200,000 a year.
But maybe I could supplement my income by growing a second head and
appearing in a carnival.

"See, I'd really like to be a mailman," Gino said.  Gino is a big-shot
editor, which means he basically gets lots of money to do nothing.  "I
was a mailman once, as a summer job in college," he said, getting all
misty.  "I'd walk around in the fresh air, putting letters with people's
names on them into the right boxes.  People were happy to see me.  I was
happy to see them.  I was doing something important, getting stuff to
people who needed stuff.

"See, I can understand," he said, "why a tax lawyer would like to make
caramelized apple pouf-pouf.  He's actually making something.  That's
the problem with America. Most jobs produce nothing tangible.  Unless
you're building houses or driving a mail route, you're probably an
assistant manager of the data processing unit of the human services
division for the office of the undersecretary of commercial fisheries
management.  Nobody makes anything anymore."

Except, apparently, reservations.

© Copyright 1996 The Washington Post Company



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