Beyond the Ivory Tower

Getting Paid to Eat

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By Todd A. Price

In graduate school, I published two articles and thought that I was prolific. Now I write two columns a week. In graduate school, I saved my cash and splurged on an occasional good meal. Today I have an expense account for food and pick up my friends' tabs. In graduate school, the faculty called me Todd and my students called me professor. Now I have a wallet full of credit cards with assumed names.

Through good timing and dumb luck, I became a food critic instead of a professor.

A year ago, I had given up on finding a faculty job and decided to focus on landing either an entry-level job in university administration or a nonacademic job at a nonprofit group. But the best work that I could find, after 115 applications, 27 informational interviews, and 6 job interviews, was a long-term temporary assignment answering the phones at a bank. That was not what I had expected to be doing as a 30-year-old with a dissertation in hand.

But then I never expected to be a food critic in New Orleans, either. Three or four times a week, I make reservations under a fake name. I find friends who are willing to eat for free, which is never difficult. At the restaurant, I tell everyone what to order and, when the food arrives, I demand that they pass me their plates for a taste.

Instead of a drink after dinner, I head home and hastily type notes about the garnish on the salmon, the color of the walls, or the attitude of the waiter.

A food critic is one of those jobs, such as a personal shopper or a Ferrari test driver, that I always wondered how someone ended up doing for a living. It turns out that a Ph.D. in Baroque Spanish theater can lead to a career as a food critic -- at least in my case.

We moved to New Orleans for my wife's job. After law school, she landed a prestigious one-year clerkship with an appellate judge there. New Orleans has a lot of great things -- food, jazz bands and endless liquor. A vibrant economy is not one of those things. I assumed that we would stay for only a year, so I resigned myself to adjuncting for two semesters. The following year, I could continue my search for a permanent job. I quickly picked up a job teaching two sections of Spanish grammar at a local university. I had two days' worth of work, and I needed something to fill the rest of the week.

I'll admit, when I'm honest with myself, that I went to graduate school not so much because of my love of literature but because of an infatuation with writers. I've always turned to the "About the Author" blurb before reading the first chapter. Where was the writer born? What school did she attend? What odd jobs did he pursue before first seeing his name in print?

If that dreadful Julia Roberts movie Runaway Bride comes on cable, I'll watch it again, with no concern about whether he gets the girl, just to see the fictional magazine writer get his story about the commitment-phobic bride.

I had wanted to write for years but always made excuses. Suddenly I had plenty of time and no reason not to write. In my first week in New Orleans, I saw that the local alternative-weekly was advertising for food writers to fill in for their restaurant critic. Food has been my obsession ever since I left my parents' house and discovered that not all vegetables came from cans.

I brainstormed six different story ideas, printed a copy of my résumé on stiff paper, and assumed that I would soon launch a career as a food writer.

Months later, I was still waiting for a response. Then, by chance, I met a food and travel writer. I told him about my desire to write. He offered me tips and introduced me to the same editor at the alternative-weekly to whom I had sent my original failed application.

The paper had a rote assignment that it was willing to risk on an unproven writer. It was nothing creative or glamorous -- simply calling up dozens of restaurants to confirm their hours and typing a few lines about their food. Boring work, but at least the editor would know my name if I e-mailed him an idea for an article.

I turned in the assignment and the next day the editor asked me for some story ideas. He liked the small samples of my writing. Perhaps more important, he liked the fact that I finished my work on time. Meeting deadlines is not that common, I learned.

I published a couple of short features. The editor mentioned that the paper's food critic had decided to step down. "Just so you know," he said. Later, at a party celebrating a special issue, the editor told me that I could skip the formal application for the food critic's job and just submit a few sample reviews.

I had somehow become the person that I always despised -- the inside candidate.

I never believed, however, that I would get the job. As the editors put me through one interview after another, I tried to dampen the expectations of my friends, who were already salivating at the prospect of endless free meals.

In the end, my careful study of articles about transferable skills got me the job. The editor-in-chief had been concerned about my lack of journalistic experience. I responded that my training as a scholar gave me similar skills: an ability to find information and an obsession with getting the facts right. He later told me that my argument won him over.

After a few months on the job, I've written a dozen reviews and eaten more than 50 free meals. I'm realizing, just as I did during my first year of graduate school, that I don't know nearly as much as I thought I did. I've been reading like mad -- buying books, tripling my monthly intake of food magazines, and following 30 different newspaper food sections.

Writing the first couple of columns felt like delivering a paper at an academic conference, where I always feared that a senior scholar would stand up and tell me how little I knew. Having lived through graduate school, I know that the queasy feeling that I'm a fraud will soon fade away.

My current job is only a first step. I will need to continue working part-time as an adjunct because I'm not even close to making a living. The next step is to sell some articles to national magazines or eventually apply to be a food critic at a larger paper that pays a full-time salary.

I've given myself one year. If I see the glimmer of a real career forming, then I'll continue writing. If not, then I'll be scouring the career guides again, looking for another way to recover from my years spent in graduate school.