You Could Get Paid to Eat Pizza and Cheese
Talk about a dream job.
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Eating pizza and nibbling on cheese may be one of your favorite leisure activities. Now it can be your job.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research is currently seeking people who are “passionate about all types of foods, but especially cheese, pizza and other dairy products” — butter, milk, cheese powder, yogurt, but, alas, not ice cream — to work on the state-flagship campus as “Descriptive Sensory Panelists.”
If that’s you, note that applications for the positions are open only through Wednesday, June 21, at 11:55 pm Central Daylight Time.
Those hired for the positions after an interview round will be trained to become “expert tasters capable of verbally describing their sensory experience on the basis of appearance, texture, taste and aroma attributes for research and product development purposes” and “should expect to be tasting up to 24 cheese samples and 12 pizzas a week along with other food products,” according to the official job listing.
Each tasting session will be three consecutive hours long and you may be asked to work as many as three sessions per week, although scheduling may vary. You’ll be paid a $15 hourly wage — so you could get paid up to $135 per week to eat pizza and cheese.
Clearly, it’s not quite enough to live on — although you’d probably save on your food bill — but that hasn’t stopped hundreds of people from applying for just five available positions. The new hires will work alongside an existing panel of 15 tasters, who are called upon to evaluate about 15 to 20 attributes of the pizzas they are tasting and sometimes to taste two pizzas at different temperatures at once.
Brandon Prochaska, the center’s sensory coordinator, seems a little perplexed by the outpouring of interest.
“Not that it’s not a good job or anything, but I think sometimes people see us as fanciful. It’s just eating cheese,” Brandon Prochaska, the center’s sensory coordinator, tells WiscNews.com.
Oh, and one more caveat. Tasters don’t actually swallow the cheese products; they spit them out after tasting and responding to them.
“You have to cleanse a palate basically between samples and if you swallow it, you’re going to maybe regurgitate a little bit of that, plus you get full,” Mark Johnson, a senior scientist at the center, explains to WiscNews.com.
Makes sense.
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