Daily writing prompt

What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?

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In my undergraduate years, my major was Foods in Business, a major designed to position people into the food industry. This was not what I ultimately did with my life, having discovered Family and Consumption Economics, and my life’s work, my junior year. But as an undergraduate, I wanted to work in a consumer affairs position, or even better, in a test kitchen.

I took a class my senior year called Food Science, where we spent the first half of the semester learning the chemical and physical properties of food, and the second half of the semester testing hypotheses about food. Mine was testing for substitutes for butter in baking poundcakes — margarine, butter flavored shortening, and regular shortening with butter buds flavoring. (Note: people preferred shortening over everything, including butter.) I fell in love with test kitchen work and, if it weren’t for the fact that I loved the thought of graduate school more, I might have gone into test kitchen work.

So, if I had a choice of any job to step into for a day, I would walk into a test kitchen. I think I remember the basics 40 years later — standardized recipes where one weighs all the ingredients on a scale (including a very sensitive one for small amounts like baking soda and seasoning), tasting rooms with good ventilation, white walls, and neutral lighting, testing of texture, crumb, and viscosity using simple and complicated testing. I think I can do it for a day with very little coaching.