re: Charlie Trotter Found Dead in Home

Trotter's approach to learning should be the model for all who aspire to cook for a living. Get a bottom rung job at the best restaurant in your home town. Work your way up for a couple of years and make sure you actually want to do the job for a living. Then identify chefs around the country, if not the world, and start applying for bottom rung positions in their kitchens. Whenever you stop learning you move on.

Culinary school will not teach you anything you can't get paid to learn on the job. It's up to the individual candidate to push themselves in their career which often means moving and starting off lower than their last position in a lesser kitchen.

Or you could rack up 40k (and often much more) in loans just to get a $10-12 an hour job that you could have gotten with a year of experience in any halfway decent kitchen anywhere.