Conquistadors

An Inca suspension bridge in 1877 and the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson.

Conquistadors from Spain came, they saw and they were astonished. They had never seen anything in Europe like the bridges of Peru. Chroniclers wrote that the Spanish soldiers stood in awe and fear before the spans of braided fiber cables suspended across deep gorges in the Andes, narrow walkways sagging and swaying and looking so frail.

Yet the suspension bridges were familiar and vital links in the vast empire of the Inca, as they had been to Andean cultures for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532. The people had not developed the stone arch or wheeled vehicles, but they were accomplished in the use of natural fibers for textiles, boats, sling weapons — even keeping inventories by a prewriting system of knots.

So bridges made of fiber ropes, some as thick as a man’s torso, were the technological solution to the problem of road building in rugged terrain. By some estimates, at least 200 such suspension bridges spanned river gorges in the 16th century. One of the last of these, over the Apurimac River, inspired Thornton Wilder’s novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.”

Although scholars have studied the Inca road system’s importance in forging and controlling the pre-Columbian empire, John A.Ochsendorf of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here said, “Historians and archaeologists have neglected the role of bridges.”

Dr. Ochsendorf’s research on Inca suspension bridges, begun while he was an undergraduate at Cornell University, illustrates an engineering university’s approach to archaeology, combining materials science and experimentation with the traditional fieldwork of observing and dating artifacts. Other universities conduct research in archaeological materials, but it has long been a specialty at M.I.T.

Students here are introduced to the multidisciplinary investigation of ancient technologies as applied in transforming resources into cultural hallmarks from household pottery to grand pyramids. In a course called “materials in human experience,” students are making a 60-foot-long fiber bridge in the Peruvian style. On Saturday, they plan to stretch the bridge across a dry basin between two campus buildings.

In recent years, M.I.T. archaeologists and scientists have joined forces in studies of early Peruvian ceramics, balsa rafts and metal alloys; Egyptian glass and Roman concrete; and also the casting of bronze bells in Mexico. They discovered that Ecuadoreans, traveling by sea, introduced metallurgy to western Mexico. They even found how Mexicans added bits of morning-glory plants, which contain sulfur, in processing natural rubber into bouncing balls.

“Mexicans discovered vulcanization 3,500 years before Goodyear,” said Dorothy Hosler, an M.I.T. professor of archaeology and ancient technology. “The Spanish had never seen anything that bounced like the rubber balls of Mexico.”

Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist of ancient technology who helped develop the M.I.T. program, said that in learning “how objects were made, what they were made of and how they were used, we see people making decisions at various stages, and the choices involve engineering as well as culture.”

From this perspective, she said, the choices are not always based only on what works well, but also are guided by ideological and aesthetic criteria. In the casting of early Mexican bells, attention was given to their ringing tone and their color; an unusually large amount of arsenic was added to copper to make the bronze shine like silver.

“If people use materials in different ways in different societies, that tells you something about those people,” Professor Lechtman said.

In the case of the Peruvian bridges, the builders relied on a technology well suited to the problem and their resources. The Spanish themselves demonstrated how appropriate the Peruvian technique was.

Dr. Ochsendorf, a specialist in early architecture and engineering, said the colonial government tried many times to erect European arch bridges across the canyons, and each attempt ended in fiasco until iron and steel were applied to bridge building. The Peruvians, knowing nothing of the arch or iron metallurgy, instead relied on what they knew best, fibers from cotton, grasses and saplings, and llama and alpaca wool.

The Inca suspension bridges achieved clear spans of at least 150 feet, probably much greater. This was a longer span than any European masonry bridges at the time. The longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span between supports of 95 feet. And none of these European bridges had to stretch across deep canyons.

The Peruvians apparently invented their fiber bridges independently of outside influences, Dr. Ochsendorf said, but these bridges were neither the first of their kind in the world nor the inspiration for the modern suspension bridge like the George Washington and Verrazano-Narrows Bridges in New York and the Golden Gate in San Francisco.

In a recent research paper, Dr. Ochsendorf wrote: “The Inca were the only ancient American civilization to develop suspension bridges. Similar bridges existed in other mountainous regions of the world, most notably in the Himalayas and in ancient China, where iron chain suspension bridges existed in the third century B.C.”

The first of the modern versions was erected in Britain in the late 18th century, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The longest one today connects two islands in Japan, with a span of more than 6,000 feet from tower to supporting tower. These bridges are really “hanging roadways,” Dr. Ochsendorf said, to provide a fairly level surface for wheeled traffic.

In his authoritative 1984 book, “The Inka Road System,” John Hyslop, who was an official of the Institute of Andean Research and associated with the American Museum of Natural History, compiled descriptions of the Inca bridges recorded by early travelers.

Garcilasco de la Vega, in 1604, reported on the cable-making techniques. The fibers, he wrote, were braided into ropes of the length necessary for the bridge. Three of these ropes were woven together to make a larger rope, and three of them were again braided to make a still larger rope, and so on. The thick cables were pulled across the river with small ropes and attached to stone abutments on each side.

Three of the big cables served as the floor of the bridge, which often was at least four to five feet wide, and two others served as handrails. Pieces of wood were tied to the cable floor. Finally, the floor was strewn with branches to give firm footing for beasts of burden.

More branches and pieces of wood were strung to make walls along the entire length of the bridge. The side covering, one chronicler said, was such that “if a horse fell on all fours, it could not fall off the bridge.”

Still, it took a while for the Spanish to adjust to the bridges and to coax their horses to cross them. The bridges trembled underfoot and swayed dangerously in stiff winds.

Ephraim G. Squier, a visitor to Peru from the United States in the 1870s, said of the Apurimac River bridge: “It is usual for the traveler to time his day’s journey so as to reach the bridge in the morning, before the strong wind sets in; for, during the greater part of the day, it sweeps up the Canyon of the Apurimac with great force, and then the bridge sways like a gigantic hammock, and crossing is next to impossible.”

Other travelers noted that in many cases, two suspension bridges stood side by side. Some said that one was for the lords and gentry, the other for commoners; or one for men, the other for women.

Recent scholars have suggested that it was more likely that one bridge served as a backup for the other, considering the need for frequent repairs of frayed and worn ropes.

The last existing Inca suspension bridge, at Huinchiri, near Cuzco, is virtually rebuilt each year. People from the villages on either side hold a three-day festival and gather stiff grasses for producing more than 50,000 feet of cord. Finally, the cord is braided into 150-foot replacement cables.

In the M.I.T. class project, 14 students met two evenings a week and occasional afternoons to braid the ropes for a Peruvian bridge replica 60 feet long and 2 feet wide. They were allowed one important shortcut: some 50 miles of twine already prepared from sisal, a stronger fiber than the materials used by the Inca.

Some of the time thus gained was invested in steps the Inca had never thought of. The twine and the completed ropes were submitted to stress tests, load-bearing measurements and X-rays.

“We have proof-tested the stuff at every step as we go along,” said Linn W. Hobbs, a materials science professor and one of the principal teachers of the course.

The students incorporated 12 strands of twine for each primary rope. Then three of these 12-ply ropes were braided into the major cables, each 120 feet long — 60 feet for the span and 30 feet at each end for tying the bridge to concrete anchors.

One afternoon last week, several of the students stretched ropes down a long corridor, braiding one of the main cables. While one student knelt to make the braid and three students down the line did some nimble footwork to keep the separate ropes from entangling, Zack Jackowski, a sophomore, put a foot firmly down on the just-completed braid.

“It’s important to get the braids as tight as possible,” Mr. Jackowski said. “A little twist, pull it back hard, hold the twist you just put in.”

No doubt the students will escape the fate of Brother Juniper, the Franciscan missionary in Wilder’s novel who investigated the five people who perished in the collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey.

Brother Juniper hoped to discern scientific evidence of divine intervention in human affairs, examples of “the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven.”

Alas, he could not; there is some of both good and evil in people. So his written account was judged heretical. He and his manuscript were burned at the stake.

If the students’ bridge holds, they will have learned one lesson: engineering, in antiquity as now, is the process of finding a way through and over the challenges of environment and culture.

Firefighters said they were making major progress against a wildfire that roared across brush-covered hills in the city's sprawling Griffith Park on Tuesday, triggering evacuations of homes and some of the city's most famous landmarks.

A wall of flames raced across ridges and jumped fire lines late in the evening as the fire drew closer to homes and the Griffith Observatory, one of the locations for the 1955 film "Rebel Without a Cause."

Hundreds of firefighters and five water-dropping helicopters rushed to the landmark park — a mix of wilderness, cultural venues, horse and hiking trails and recreational facilities set on more than 4,000 acres on the hills between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.

Interim Fire Chief Douglas L. Barry said late Tuesday that fire had "laid down" and that authorities hoped an aggressive attack in the morning would bring it under control sometime Wednesday.

Late Tuesday, authorities called for a mandatory evacuation of homes that sit along the park's southern edge as the fire burned out of control. Helicopters flew dangerous water-dropping missions after dark and no homes were lost by late evening.

Police officers drove through the parkside Los Feliz district ordering people out. "You need to evacuate, you need to evacuate your houses immediately," one said. "The fire is coming toward the neighborhood."

Residents helped direct traffic through tight neighborhood streets.

"I was just able to get a few things," said Ed Stephan, 83, who helped his wife into their car as ashes fell from the sky. "We're not too worried but want to get out of here and observe the law."

More than 200 residents were expected at an evacuation center, said fire Capt. Antoine McNight.

The fire destroyed Dante's View, a trailside terraced garden on Mount Hollywood, said City Councilman Tom LaBonge. "This is a very sad night for Los Angeles," he said.

Rangers evacuated the park's Vermont Canyon area, which includes the Los Angeles Zoo, two golf facilities, a merry-go-round and school, said Jane Kolb, a city Department of Recreation and Parks spokeswoman.

Fire Capt. Rex Vilaubi said the evacuations were voluntary and the areas were not in imminent danger of being overrun.

Nearly 1,300 utility customers lost power in Los Feliz when flames downed power lines, said Department of Water and Power spokesman Joe Ramallo.

Authorities were investigating whether the fire broke out after a person discarded a cigarette at one of the park's golf courses, a law enforcement official familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.

The person tried to put out the fire but was badly burned and was taken to Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, the official said.

The blaze erupted on the second day of a heat spell. The National Weather Service said downtown hit 97 degrees, 23 degrees above normal, tying the record for the date.

In 1933 the area was the site of one of nation's worst wildland firefighting tragedies, a blaze that killed 25 firefighters.

 

New Orleans, LA

Young Leadership Council volunteers initially thought just a few hundreds dollars were taken in a Sunday morning break-in -- but it turned out the crooks took something much more valuable.

"Bottom line: they took information that had credit card numbers and people's names," Chris Reade said.

Individual memberships between January and August were taken, and instead of just informing the people that it affects, the YLC sent letters to about 700 members.

"The letter states that there was a break-in, that people's information my have been compromised, and that if you have any questions to call the office," Reade said.

He said only about 100 people would've been affected by the burglary.

Amy Boyle, YLC's executive director, said the organization now has to deal with a problem it's working to prevent.

"Our organization is dedicated to building up the city, and we're working on some of those anti-crime initiatives. So, while this is a set back, it certainly doesn't mean our organization or our members or even I am losing faith in what we're trying to build here," she said.

Forget Florida: Louisiana leaders are trying to attract snowbirds to the Pelican State.

Four cities and three parishes are certified retirement communities, including three in southeast Louisiana -- namely Covington, Thibodaux and all of Jefferson Parish.

The state will launch a marketing campaign to help the communities attract retirees.

Culture, a warm climate and the cost of living are the state's selling points.

Koi carp, goldfish, and a collection of giant tropical ferns: The only thing missing from this model modern Asian garden is... the garden.

Complete with white reflexology pebbles underfoot, the breezy oasis is situated high on the twelfth floor balcony of one of Singapore's ubiquitous government-built high-rises.

Having an apartment garden relieves the "monotony" of living in concrete, said creator Furn Li.

"We needed something natural, like plants and fish, to add some life. It's a far-fetched idea for us to own a landed property, but, anyway, we have a nice garden here."

The rapid post-sixties rise of the urban tower block saw Asia's low-level landed properties demolished for mass housing projects; and made backyards the domain of the minority who can afford detached homes.

It also created a unique urban gardening culture which is starting to flower as new voices popularize the idea.

Setting himself the goal of "bring gardening to the masses" Singaporean Wilson Wong, 28, started the Green Culture website in September 2004.

With no gardening shows on television and plant nursery staff often puzzled about how to advise apartment gardeners, the forum has attracted hundreds of active high-rise gardeners, keen to swap ideas and plant cuttings.

"I thought I was the only one -- the only odd nut, the only crazy person interested in growing vegetables" said Wong, whose balcony-less flat houses 80 African violets, South American bromeliads and pitcher plants.

"Now people get to know each other. They exchange plants, they meet, they make nursery trips together. It makes gardening so much less painful."

The same desire to fill the void of local knowledge drove Hong Kong's Arthur Van Langenberg to write Urban Gardening, his response to the wealth of "glossy books dominated by sweeping lawns and massed tropical plantings."

Like others he started small -- growing vegetables in wooden packing crates on verandahs as a teenager.

Now the 66-year-old doctor, who never dreamed of owning a tree, has avocado, papaya and lemon trees in meter-deep troughs. Hundreds more plants grow in pots and in the lawn that he planted on his first floor apartment's bare concrete yard 15 minutes from Hong Kong island's CBD.

"When people first looked at the photographs in the book they didn't believe I could grow all those plants. The Hong Kong Gardening Society came over to check!" he said.

LOST ROOTS

Engineer Furn Li's four-year transformation of his concrete balcony won him Singapore's inaugural apartment gardener of the year award last year. Created for his wife, it reminds him of growing up surrounded by trees in Malaysia, he said.

While others lack the time and resources to build beautiful fountains and custom-fit fiberglass fish tanks, many share the desire to connect with pre-high-rise roots.

Eighty-two percent of Singapore's 4.5 million people live in cookie-cutter tower blocks built by the government Housing Development Board (HDB), with the rest either in high-rise private condominiums or private houses.

But memories of pre-high-rise life in the "kampung" -- the Malay word for village -- remain strong, explained Boon Kiat, whose lush seventh-floor balcony is alive with orchids, violets, ylang ylang, and a red flowering rose.

"People miss their kampung days when they had durian and banana trees; so they try to bring their childhood back into the apartment," the 36-year old engineer said.

STATUS SYMBOLS

In cramped cities, owning green space ties into wider issues of who can afford what, said Singaporean academic Lai Ah Eng, who studies community social relations.

"Where you live and in what type of dwelling is one of the main status markers in land-scarce and status-conscious Singapore... Though there are also those who don't care a hoot."

A green image has long been a hip selling point for property developers knocking up condominiums with names like Orchard View and Blossom Grove.

Now governments are touting greenery's many benefits.

As well as reducing air and noise pollution, plants lower ambient air temperatures through evapo-transpiration, and by blocking heat from the sun with their leaves.

Beijing has pledged to add 100,000 square meters of roof gardens every year from 2007-2010. And last month Singapore, the "garden city," unveiled its first "green" housing estate, with walls of cooling greenery hardwired into its architecture.

"From the scientific point of view, every plant produces a cooling effect," said Professor Nyuk Hien Wong, of the Department of Building at the National University of Singapore, who designs the green walls.

"The rule of thumb is one degree less is a five percent (energy) saving."

Against this backdrop, Asia's apartment gardeners are taking a small, but important, step in the right direction, he said.

"If you look at it as one individual unit doing that, it may not be that significant. But if everybody is doing it, there may be a very big impact."

London beat the glamour of Monaco, New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo to become the world's most expensive place to buy residential property, a survey showed on Tuesday.

Residential property in the British capital costs on average 2,300 pounds per square foot, or 36,800 euros (49,889 dollars) per square metre, according to the 'Wealth Report 2007.'

That beat nearest competitor Monaco, where property costs an average of 2,190 pounds per metre or 35,000 euros per square metre.

The data was supplied by the estate agency Knight Frank and Citi Private Bank, a division of US banking titan Citigroup.

Their annual report said that top-end property prices were being driven upwards by high net worth individuals (HNWIs) -- or people whose investable assets are valued above 5.0 million pounds.

"The dramatic increase in central London prices against the background of a more sober market has demonstrated the influence of HNWIs upon property," said Liam Bailey, head of residential research at Knight Frank and author of the study.

The 'Wealth Report 2007' included a residential index which compares a basket of properties in 70 prime locations around the world, analysing capital values, rents and investment yields.

Bailey added: "Over the next five years, we believe the trend of growing wealth and greater wealth concentration will continue.

"London will be a key location for future investment and will be a conduit through which this wealth will be invested.

"The prime markets will continue to outperform here in the UK, Europe and internationally."

With media technology changing at breakneck speed, the advertising industry is trying to figure out how to keep up. For years, its bread and butter has been the 30-second television commercial — but these days, as any multitasking teenager can tell you, a 30-second spot is hardly hip.

So many ads try to take you somewhere else, or involve you interactively. One recent ad for M&M candies, for example, suggests that "There's an M&M in everyone," and invites viewers to visit BecomeAnMM.com to discover their inner candy-coated chocolateness.

That M&M commercial was created by BBDO, a venerable Madison Avenue shop that's been an ad-industry byword for nearly 80 years — and that's working to change with the times.

BBDO's history goes back to 1928, when George Batten merged his company with Barton, Durstine and Osborne. The firm became famous not only for its advertising, but for its name, an alliterative mouthful that comedians couldn't resist. Jack Benny, for instance, made a ripsnorter of a routine out of a directory-assistance request and an operator who couldn't quite keep the spelling straight.

That was in the 1940s, when the agency handled the advertising for Benny's radio show. By the '60s, TV had overtaken radio, and the agency, now called BBDO, came to master that medium. Bill Bruce, chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO New York, says he joined the agency some 20 years ago for one reason.

"It was TV," he says. "TV, TV, TV. And at the time, it was working with 'A' filmmakers, 'A' celebrities, doing big productions." Remember those Pepsi commercials starring Michael Jackson and Michael J. Fox? BBDO created them. "It was the place to go," Bruce says.

That was the BBDO tradition. Now, that's history.

"The words I have proscribed from our lexicon are traditional, classical, mainstream," says Andre Robertson, CEO of BBDO Worldwide. The agency he heads has grown into a genuinely global advertising powerhouse, with 290 offices in more than 70 countries.

"These are words that are completely inappropriate for anyone in the business of creating work or content that we want people to access," Robertson says. "So we don't use those words. The last thing in the world I like to be described as is traditional."

BBDO is still the kind of agency that produces great TV commercials. And the 30-second spot can, of course, still deliver a mass audience to advertisers. But Robertson is well aware that advertising has to stay ahead of the trends in technology. So a couple of years ago, Robertson hired David Lubars as the new chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO North America. Lubars is an advertising star known for his creative approach to new media.

"There is risk and intuition and gut involved in this business," Lubars says. "You can't fight it. Everybody wants to test everything — but the thing is, you're talking about creativity and what will move someone. You've gotta have guts."

A few years back, Lubars was working at the Minneapolis-based Fallon agency when he came up with a concept that sounded like it might have promise: Hire major directors, like Ang Lee and Ridley Scott, to make short movies featuring a client's product, then show the films on the Web. Eight short films, one Cannes Film Festival premiere, and more than 100 million viewers later, BMW Films was an advertising-industry earthquake — a marketing triumph and an artistic success that's currently enjoying a second life on YouTube.

The films illustrate Lubars' approach to advertising. These days, he says, consumers have endless media choices.

"So it is our job to create content that is so engaging … that instead of us coming to you, and you have to take it, you come voluntarily," he says. "It is so great that you seek it out."

Both ad agencies and their clients have to buy into this new way of thinking, of course. Joseph Jaffe, a marketing consultant and author of Life After the 30-second Spot, says Lubars shocked the ad world when he got rid of some of BBDO's well-known creative directors — but he points out that Lubars was brought in to shake things up, and industries don't get reinvented without a little drama.

"One of his primary mandates in joining the agency was to inject new-age thinking, alternative, nontraditional thinking — and, frankly, diversify their portfolio away from the 30-second spot," Jaffe says. These days, people at BBDO like to say they're "media-agnostic." The buzzword is the integrated campaign: Print, digital, radio, TV all have an equal place at the table, Lubars says.

"There are so many different channels and mediums," he says. "The way to do it is to come up with a big upstream idea first, and then figure out where we are going to put it."

Lubars says even designers, who often were called on at the end of the creative process, are now in on a campaign at the start. Craig Duffney, BBDO's 30-year-old design director, worked on one such project for a TV network called G-4, which is aimed at 15- to 25-year-old guys. The network wanted a logo for a block of programming it was calling "Midnight Spank."

"First idea I went to was two monkeys holding fraternity paddles," Duffney remembers. "So we developed the iconography for it, and then they were like, 'We're going to present some TV, and we want to use the monkeys that you made for the logo, and we want them to do all this crazy stuff.'"

That was a case "where design led the TV idea," Lubars explains. "So it doesn't matter who leads; it's a matter of great brains sparking off each other."

The push to think differently isn't coming just from within the agency. It's also coming from the clients. One of BBDO's most innovative new campaigns was for General Electric. BBDO has been GE's advertising agency for 80 years, one of the longest-running relationships in advertising — which didn't stop GE executive Judy Hu from telling BBDO's Don Schneider that he'd better innovate, or else.

"I am constantly challenging the agency to come up with the next big thing," Hu says. "In fact, as soon as we were done with this, I said, 'OK, what are we doing next?'"

"This" was a campaign called GE One Second Theater, which Schneider, the agency's executive creative director, and his team developed while they were trying to figure out how to address the problem of viewers with TiVos and other digital video recorders, many of whom regularly fast-forward their way through commercials.

"We said, 'How about this: Let's not run from TiVo; let's embrace it,'" Schneider says. "Let's do what you can only do with a DVR, which is stop it."

Demonstrating how it works, Schneider shows what seems to be a standard TV commercial — except that toward the end, a series of words or symbols flashes by. It's an encoded message, designed to spark the sharp-eyed TiVoer's curiosity; the viewer has to stop the commercial to see what's there.

"When you go back with the DVR and step advance [one frame at a time], you see red curtains, you see the symbol GE," Schneider explains. "You press one more time, you see 'One Second Theater.'"

Viewers who were intrigued enough to hit the pause button, and who then clicked through to the associated Web site, spent an average of two-and-a-half minutes there — a number that made GE very happy. And that, says GE's Hu, is why agencies like BBDO must embrace the challenges presented by new media technologies, trying to stay ahead of the latest trends rather than waiting to see where they're headed.

"The biggest challenge is if you ignore it," she says. "If I were on the agency side, I would say the biggest challenge is that if you ignore [technological change], your client will find another agency who doesn't."

Erica Reichlin at CatFish Max in Seaford, N.Y., on Long Island. She owed nearly $84,000 as a graduate of the California Culinary Institute.

Rick Park started working at a Jack in the Box in Austin, Tex., when he was 18. He moved on to sub shops, pizza parlors and chain restaurants, turning out hundreds of meals during a shift.

But Mr. Park wanted to be a chef. So like tens of thousands of other young people who grew up in the age of kitchen celebrities like Bobby Flay and Emeril Lagasse, he enrolled in culinary school.

Two years after graduation, all the “Bam!” has been drained from the dream. Mr. Park makes $10.50 an hour at a bistro in Austin best known for its French fries, trying to pay down his student loans. While he dodges phone calls from the bank, his mother helps him make his $705 monthly payments, almost twice his weekly take-home pay.

“I wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” Mr. Park, 29, said before starting another night shift at the Hyde Park Bar and Grill. “I put my degree on applications, and they make fun of me for it.”

In the way that the work of directors like Martin Scorsese flooded film schools with students in the 1970s, and the television show “L.A. Law” packed law schools in the 1980s, the rise of celebrity chefs has been good for culinary schools.

But would-be top chefs face a challenge that most lawyers, engineers or nurses do not: few jobs in their chosen field pay enough for them to retire their student loans. As a result, as many as 11 percent of graduates at some culinary schools are defaulting on federal student loans. The national average for all students last year was roughly half that, at 5.1 percent.

Although the restaurant industry is expected to create two million new jobs in the next decade, the Department of Labor reports that in 2005, the latest year for which data were available, the average hourly wage for a restaurant cook was $9.86.

“The problem isn’t getting a job, the problem is getting a high-paying job,” said Susan Sykes Hendee, a dean at Baltimore International College and a member of the American Culinary Federation Foundation Accrediting Commission, which accredits many culinary schools.

Many of the schools offer two-year programs where the total tuition and supply costs can reach $48,000. Only a slice of that is covered by low-interest federal loans. For example, the most that students in two-year programs can currently borrow in federal loans is $14,125.

So many of them seek money from banks that are usually recommended by the school. The terms on some of these private loans can quickly get a young person with little borrowing experience into financial trouble.

Mr. Park said that when he and his mother met with a financial-aid counselor at the school, they were told that his payments on his private loan, from Sallie Mae, would be about $250 a month. But his first bill after graduation was for more than twice that, said his mother, Elise McClain, an English professor in Florida. They twice requested payment deferments while he looked for a job but when they began repaying the loan, both his principal and his monthly payment had risen again. The balance is now $46,198.88 at just over 16 percent interest.

“They had us sign a pack of papers,” Ms. McClain said. “Of course, it was as big as a phone book and maybe I should have paid more attention. I just feel so stupid.”

Advocates trying to change the student loan system say culinary students have a particularly difficult time with student loans.

“Truly the worst horror stories are from private culinary schools,” said Alan Collinge, who founded the grass-roots lobbying group Student Loan Justice and collects information from people with student loan problems. “The story is always the same. The school convinces the student they are going to be the next Julia Child or Wolfgang Puck, and the student will sign anything.”

Many culinary students come from blue-collar families and do not have the financial experience to navigate the world of college costs, Ms. Sykes Hendee said. “The majority of students are the first people going to college in their families,” she said. “It’s not the rich and famous going to culinary school.”

Culinary schools can only do so much when it comes to helping students avoid trouble with private loans, said Lynne Baker, a vice president of the Career Education Corporation, a publicly traded company that runs more than 80 colleges. Fourteen of those are culinary schools, including the Texas Culinary Academy, which Mr. Park attended.

“We always steer our students to try to exhaust all their federal and state loans before they look for alternative funding,” Ms. Baker said. “This is a national issue. The reality is the federal dollars just don’t cut it for students anymore.”

Culinary training can cost more than other kinds of schooling, Ms. Baker and other educators say, because classrooms are often small, fully equipped kitchens, and supplies include expensive food and wine. And, she added, her schools produce thousands of happy graduates, many of whom end up as executive chefs at hotels or own their own restaurants.

Certainly, professional training can help cooks move up quickly through the kitchen ranks. And culinary schools have produced many of the nation’s finest chefs.

But some of those chefs equivocate about whether the high cost of some culinary degrees is worth it for someone who just wants to cook for a living. Sufficient training could come from community colleges or other basic programs that offer certificates for less than the cost of a year’s worth of books, equipment and uniforms at a brand-name culinary school.

“Cooking is a trade you do with your hands, so basically culinary school is a $30,000 trade school,” said Ann Cooper, a chef who serves as director of nutrition for the Berkeley Unified School District in California. “What a lot of schools tell these kids is they are going to be sous chefs making $30,000 or $40,000 a year.” A beginning restaurant cook, by contrast, may earn about $20,000 a year.

Ms. Cooper is a 1977 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. When she attended, that school and Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island were at the top of a short list an ambitious student would consider.

Today, the choices have ballooned. When Dorlene Kaplan began publishing the ShawGuides to cooking schools in 1989, the book listed 125 professional schools offering everything from simple certificates to four-year degrees. Now, the book lists 447 schools.

Tim Ryan, the president of the Culinary Institute of America, estimates that 62,000 students are in culinary schools, 35 percent more than five years ago.

About 72 percent of the schools that offer two- or four-year culinary degrees are community colleges or public institutions, Mr. Ryan said. The rest are run by for-profit companies like the Art Institutes and the Career Education Corporation.

As a result of competition and of changes in the food industry, culinary schools are maturing. More schools are becoming accredited, and top-tier schools are raising academic standards and focusing on education beyond mastering French sauces. Liberal arts or business courses train students to work in a broader array of jobs like manufacturing, publishing, television and food science.

Good SAT scores and some experience in the food industry are required to get into the Culinary Institute of America, which has developed four-year tracks that emphasize writing, business skills, marketing and technology as well as cooking. A master’s program is not far off, Mr. Ryan said.

But for thousands of young people with Michelin stars in their eyes, the dream is not about working for a food corporation or mastering nutrition science.

They want to cook. They just did not realize how deep in debt they would end up.

Erica Reichlin said the California Culinary Institute in San Francisco, which she graduated from in 2005, helped her build a good foundation of culinary skills. But it also landed her almost $84,000 in debt, with a mix of federal and private loans she used for tuition, housing and other costs.

After working at a restaurant and for a caterer in San Francisco, Ms. Reichlin decided her culinary career and finances would be better served in New York. Besides, it was home.

Now Ms. Reichlin, 29, is executive chef at a Long Island yacht club and a line cook at a restaurant called CatFish Max in Seaford, N.Y. Her grandfather co-signed a new loan, and her payments are now about $600 a month at 8 percent interest.

Of the 32 people in her class at the culinary academy, she said, only 3 are still cooking.

One of her classmates, she recalls, bragged at the beginning of their program that he would make it to the Food Network.

“I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ” she said. “Now he’s working at a country club in Florida.”

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