Making the Chef

Why you work clean ...

There are many reasons that you work clean ... to me, cleanliness reflects your state of mind ... what's on your cutting board represents what's going on in your head. When things get dirty, and you don't clean up, you start to get behind, start to panic. A small mess becomes a larger mess and it slowly starts to contaminate everything you touch. It becomes impossible to do things right.

And that's a good reason for working clean. I buy into the principle and I make sure to work clean, keeping my mind at ease, focused, and making sure that I'm not cross contaminating when I work. You don't throw stuff on the floor, you sweep it into your hand and throw it away. You minimize the number of bowls you use. It's more efficient and less messy.

But there's a more important reason to work clean.

In my current kitchen, the night porter, the guy who cleans the floors, who empties the grease traps, who washes the floor mats, comes in every night from 10 PM to 1 AM, seven days a week to clean. Now that's not so bad unless you consider the fact that the night porter is also the same guy who does the dishes 5 days a week, working from 7:30 AM to 3:30 PM. He busts his ass working those 11 hour split shifts, in addition to coming in on his days off to clean out the kitchen.

He's a great guy, hard working, with a large family back in Mexico, and I don't want to make his life any more difficult than it already is. Every bit of mess that I leave behind, he has to clean up.

My thoughtlessness results in him wasting a small part of his life.

And that applies to anything you do. If I throw away some unused vegetables, I'm wasting part of someone's life. Someone spent their time and energy growing and harvesting those vegetables. Most people wouldn't even give a second thought to wasting a bit of vegetable, but when you start thinking about it, everything in the kitchen is sacred.

Burn a piece of meat? Do you even think about the fact that an animal died to provide that meat for you? I guarantee if you had to kill that animal yourself, to understand on a visceral level that to get that piece of meat on the table, you have to take a life, you'd have a greater respect for your product and be damned sure not to waste it.

It's a sin to waste anything in a kitchen. That's why you work clean. That's why you work smart. That's why you don't waste a bit of anything.

posted by LindyChef @ 11:21 PM