Photo: Flickr/dichohecho

You like to cook. But most importantly, you like to eat. And you like to talk about it.

Here’s the issue: you’re hardly alone.

If you want to make a career of this, your toe-hold into the world of food is likely to begin with a food internship. Helene York of The Atlantic recently wrote about how to land one. Food interns, she says, range from new graduates to those mid-career, and there are a variety of opportunities for all. No matter your food passion, there’s an internship that can help you explore it. Farming? Nutrition? Hunger-related issues? York gives suggestions on where to look.

I loved her tip for goodfoodjobs.com. This site is one of my favorites: no-nonsense jobs from reputable companies, clearly presented. Another place to look is One Day One Job, a website not dedicated solely to food jobs, but one that intermittently features interesting ones.

What The Atlantic article forgets to remind readers, however, is that any food intern should be ready to work for free. This may mean you have to get a second job. Yes, to afford the work you are doing, you might have to do even more work. I remember cleaning and chopping over 50 pounds of kale and Swiss chard at one unpaid internship. That’s a lot of greens for not a lot of green!

What makes me a resident expert? See paragraph one. This is exactly where I found myself a few years ago. After graduating from culinary school and pursuing a degree in journalism, I knew that becoming a food intern was the best way to combine writing and food.

How to start towards your very own food internship? What makes you different from all the others, and how are you going to express that?

For those with no clear idea where to look, make a list. Write down all the restaurants you patronize, food-related companies you’ve heard of, all the food magazines you read and all the cooking shows you watch. By going to the websites of these organizations, you’ll find who is offering positions, where to send your resume and whom to call as a follow-up. Prepare yourself, though: to find what you need, it might not be as easy as clicking a link, so be ready to inquire on your own.

This is how I found my first official food internship as a kitchen intern for America’s Test Kitchen. I had the opportunity to test recipes for publication and to develop one of my own (not for publication) at the end of the term. I learned the advantages of a solid mise en place, and to follow directions carefully.

Something else to keep in mind: for your first food internship, make your initial decision be whether or not to work in a restaurant kitchen. It’s a great place to start if you really want to understand food and do some serious cooking. You’ll probably get some scars–the kind you can see, also the kind you can’t!–but you’ll be glad you did. The scar on my right hand, for example, taught me to keep my knives sharp. A very important lesson. Maybe also a metaphor for life.

As I write, I am attending Boston University for a Master’s in photojournalism and I am again a food intern. Working for Public Radio Kitchen, I get to fine-tune my writing while covering Boston’s food happenings. It’s great experience. They haven’t yet asked me to clean 50 pounds of anything, but maybe that comes after the honeymoon phase.