While it was never my plan to be a professional chef, I can without a doubt that my career began the day I stepped foot in a commercial kitchen for the first time at 15 years old to be a part-time dishwasher.
After washing dishes and pots and pans for a year and a half, I proved myself to be an effective assistant cook and learned how to use the fryer, the grill, and the ovens.
That job didn’t last for another year, but I secured another assistant cook gig at a different restaurant before I entered culinary school at 19 years old. It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to get through culinary school, but it taught me everything I needed to know to be a professional chef in a high volume kitchen. My cousin always wanted to become a marijuana grower, so I told him to start out small in the cannabis industry. He decided to apply for a job as a basic plant trimmer. This got him inside not just a marijuana company, but also within the cultivation side of the operations. He was working directly for marijuana growers. After a few years doing as much work in cultivation that he could manage, he finally got a chance to be a junior grower. Now he’s a master grower at an elite cannabis company known for its connoisseur grade marijuana. He trains junior growers in his capacity as master grower and is happy to pass his knowledge onto others. While the marijuana companies are becoming more corporate, they still rely on the skills of the growers to produce quality cannabis products that can compete with those offered by other companies in the business.