Staging means to work as a stagiaire, which, basically is the French term for a chef's apprentice. Stagiaires assist in the kitchen, mostly at the various stations such as fish, meat, garde manger, and vegetables. Stagiaires in Michelin-starred French kitchens could be assigned such glamorous tasks as finding the four perfect leaves on a head of lettuce or washing kilo upon kilo of mushrooms. A stagiaire almost never cooks, spending 12 hours a day at the preparatory tasks of a kitchen. Because European chefs begin apprenticing in their early teens, an adult American stagiaire could work alongside a 15 year-old French colleague. Daniel Boulud (owner of Daniel in New York City) began his apprenticeship at age 14 -- living alone in an apartment owned by his uncle. Jean- Georges Vongerichten (of New York's Vong and JoJo) also apprenticed in his teens and recalled his training in Becoming a Chef (1995: Van Nostrand Reinhold, p. 89):

At first, I never saw the stove. I really learned about the products. We had all these wild animals coming in, like hare and pheasant. I was plucking pheasants, cutting chickens, and cleaning meats and fish. The first year I learned what a good carrot is like and what a bad carrot is like, and all the seasonal foods. I was trained like that.....Some days you'd spend 17 or 18 hours in the kitchen. Two or three days in a row of that, before Christmas, with so much preparing and things, you'd say 'Why am I doing this? My friends are running around chasing girls, and I'm at the stove.' It was tough.

For more on apprenticing, see Becoming A Chef, by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1995. See especially chapt. 4.