In what is perhaps the most unlikely career switch imaginable, serious MIT graduate Stanley Feder, of McLean, gave up his analyst’s job at the CIA in the late 1990s and later his consulting practice to pursue a totally new and offbeat venture — making sausages. If that puzzles his friends and acquaintances, it’s a move he can easily explain: “I started because I have always wanted to be in the food business,” he says. “And I have a passion for cooking in particular. I had always planned to be a professional, but as I was nearing retirement age, I thought that if I wanted to get into it, now is the time.”
After making several trips to France and Italy, he completed two short apprenticeships with a European-trained master of sausage-making. “After that,” he says, “I decided to make really good sausages.”
