Saturday, July 13, 2013

Link roundup

1.  Believe it or not, this is part of an argument against culinary schools:
For some of the larger non-profit culinary schools, there seems to be a revolving door sort of arrangement with a lot of the corporate food companies and hotels. Basically, what happens is once they graduate cooking school they get paid anywhere from $75,000 to, say, $100,000 to work at resort like Beaver Creek or Kona Hawaii. Any beautiful place. They're going to put them up, they're going to pay them a lot of money, and they're going to subsidize their housing. And they're going to do that for two years. They'll work in corporate hotel kitchen where they're not going to learn intuition. They're going to have a fun time, absolutely. 
But by the time they're in their third year or so where they should be learning the fundamentals and honing their skills, they're going to want to move on and become a sous chef or whatever. But they're not going to be able to do that at that particular restaurant. More than likely, they're going to come back to the States or a major city and they're going to have two years of experience under their belt, but experience that really taught them not that much. They feel that they have a lot of experience to offer but they really don't.
2.  Spider-tailed viper.

3. "Corruption is so systemic in Zimbabwe, one of Africa’s poorest countries, that a local hospital charges mothers-to-be $5 every time they scream while giving birth."