Great Food Jobs 2 Featured on News-Sentinel.com

Just in time for the holidays and all the related excesses of food and celebrations of family traditions around the table – culinary author Irena Chalmers has come out with an informative and highly entertaining book on careers in the food industry: “Great Food Jobs 2: Ideas and Inspiration for Your Job Hunt” (Beaufort Books, 2013, $17.95 – also available as an e-book).Written as what Chalmers calls an expansion and companion to an earlier title (“Food Jobs: 150 Great Jobs for Culinary Students, Career Changers and Food Lovers,” 2008, $19.95), “Great Food Jobs 2” divides this massive industry into 10 areas of work: restaurants, retail, art, media, science, publicity, history, farming, education and relief work. In her introduction, she also makes this distinction: The people in these roles all share a passion for food, but not necessarily for cooking. Indeed, only a fraction of the jobs described in this book involve the actual preparation of food.

Each chapter includes a short list of three to 20 relevant job titles and descriptions of the work, as well as book recommendations, anecdotes and quirky trivia such as the menu for the last meal on the Titanic. Chalmers ends the book with short sections on job hunting and future trends in the food industry, both of which feel sufficient given the related information embedded in the earlier chapters.

What sets this book apart is the combination of delightful writing and the surprising applicability of Chalmers’ advice to people pursuing careers in almost any field. I honestly believe an electrical engineer could have as much fun reading this book as a pastry chef would. And both would walk away with career tips to apply in their respective fields.

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