by Dan Charnas
■What can I buy less of?
■What items can I use more often and how?
■Which recipes can I learn that will help me use more of the items that usually go to waste?
■What preparations can be a regular place to use my leftovers? For example, legendary chef Jacques Pépin makes what he calls a “fridge soup” every week. Salads are another way to enliven leftovers.
In the home kitchen, lack of preparation and knowledge can lead to serious waste. If saving food is something you care about, this is a great way to get practice limiting waste in other areas of your life.
HABITS: BEHAVIORS TO REPEAT
RUN A SUITE OF ROUTINE CHECKLISTS
Here’s another version of the checklist technique you learned in The Second Ingredient: Arranging Spaces, Perfecting Movements to help you use the little scraps of time and space that present themselves as an approach to total utilization.
I grade papers on the train, listen to the news while I walk, and answer e-mails while I’m on hold with customer service. As long as I don’t need to rest, I jump at these opportunities. But lack of preparation often prevents me from using time and space as they present themselves. There is so much to be done, and it’s hard to have that “time filler” work on hand when you need it. Creating a suite of time-use plans can keep you more conscious and ready to use more of your “small time” and help you internalize those Routines as habits. These plans might include:
Downtime Routines—things to do while waiting for things: in line, on the phone, even while slow Web sites load. If you have to stay in place while you wait, a Downtime Routine could be something that requires very little physical movement, like straightening your desk or flagging and returning e-mails. Or if you have more freedom to move, it could be as physical as exercising, filing, or washing the dishes.
Distraction Routines—things to do when you can’t concentrate or need a break from a particular project. We all have intense work to do that requires us to take plentiful breaks. But when we don’t want that “break time” to devolve into unproductive time, we might want to use those scraps of time to get things done on other projects. I do a lot of organizing and communicating during the times when I need a break from writing.
Route Routines—things to do when you know you are going to be in or passing through a particular place. Perhaps you walk to the copier a few times a day to retrieve papers. Use that walk to deliver something on your way there, like dropping off your expense report with the finance department. If you are taking a car trip to the city for leisure, there might also be an errand you can do on the way. This habit is a great example of balanced movement.
PRESERVING PEOPLE
Dismissal is a natural reflex during and after conflict, whether that dismissal is figurative (“That person is crazy!”) or literal (“You’re fired!”).
Here are habits that can help you transform conflict into constructive action and preserve and strengthen relationships.
■For every argument or disagreement you have with someone, channel your emotions into a private activity by listing the following: (a) one thing you could have done to prevent the conflict; (b) one thing you learned about the concerns of the other person. Regardless of whether you feel you’ve been wronged, your job is to think about yourself as having some power over the situation, and to think of the other person as human.
■When a colleague or employee fails or falls short in his performance, list the following: (a) what he is good at doing; (b) what he is not so good at doing; (c) what you are good at teaching him to do; (d) where your teaching has failed to provide results. Your job here is to critique your own teaching methods in equal measure to your scrutiny of his performance.
This information will consciously and subconsciously prevent or transform future conflict.
A chef’s reprise: Humble pie
Chris Cosentino evangelized for offal on television shows like Iron Chef America and Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations. But TV nearly derailed his mission in 2009. He and a partner cohosted a show where they traveled to different American cities to compete against local chefs in both cooking and inane contests during which Cosentino downed obscene amounts of food as feats of endurance. A long-distance cyclist, Cosentino’s natural competitiveness and code of mise-en-place (finish the action, don’t quit) got the best of him. He flew home from a shoot with a distended abdomen, in excruciating pain. Pastore rushed him to a hospital, where a doctor told him that he had cancer. It was a misdiagnosis. What he did have was a lacerated, ulcerated stomach from severe alkaline burns, caused in part by ingesting a bowl of hot peppers.
His specialist put him on a restricted diet. He was the chef of an Italian restaurant and couldn’t eat tomato sauce or drink red wine. It took his stomach 5 years to heal. His self-respect took a little longer. People called him a sellout. Cosentino himself felt he had been part of a project that trivialized consumption, waste, and meanness. He witnessed his son and preschool classmates, after watching his show, trying to eat their lunches as quickly as possible. This was not what he wanted. Years later, at the 2014 Mad Food Conference in Copenhagen, Cosentino choked up while speaking of the experience, swallowing a different kind of humble pie.
Television was Cosentino’s crucible, but it became his redress. In 2012, Cosentino decided to compete in Top Chef Masters to win money for a Parkinson’s disease charity—his uncle had the disease, and Fergus Henderson had it, too. He won in the final round with his beef heart tartare, puffed beef tendon, blood sausage, and Rosalie’s tripe.
Back on his mission, Cosentino opened Cockscomb in San Francisco in 2014 with a menu that featured trotters, tripe, and the house special: a wood-oven-roasted pig’s head—all the elements cooked in different ways and arranged artfully on a wooden platter. He founded a Web site, offalgood.com, to share recipes and techniques with the average American. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Chef Dan Barber opened a pop-up restaurant called WastED, where Barber—joined by like-minded guest chefs from Mario Batali and April Broomfield to Bill Telepan and Alain Ducasse—created $15 menu items made from normally discarded ingredients: a hamburger made from discarded juice pulp, “dumpster dive” salad made from bruised vegetables, and a rich beef broth made from the hard, outer layer of dry-aged beef. Pete Wells from the New York Times wrote that “almost every bite was delicious, with a few exceptions.”
Both Barber and Cosentino marketed the revolution. “Chefs in restaurants with white tablecloths get lampooned for being precious and elitist in a growing world where a billion people are hungry,” Barber later wrote. “The opposite is actually true.” Great chefs see waste all the time—perfectly good but misshapen vegetables, organ meats—and it pains them that they can’t sell it. Barber wanted to educate the customer. Chris Cosentino hoped to change the way people ate and lived. His motivation hearkened back to the convivial homes of his grandparents in Rhode Island, their bounty and happiness. He wanted to honor their struggle and sacrifices, to live fully in the moment while at the same time honoring the past and guarding the future. Living this way wasn’t easy. It took guts.
Recipe for Success
Commit to valuing space, time, energy, resources, and people. Waste nothing.
Third Course
Working Clean as a Way of Life
THE COMMITMENTS OF WORKING CLEAN
MISE-EN-PLACE WORKS
Practiced successfully for decades by hundreds of thousands of people in professional kitchens across the world, the values and behaviors of mise-en-place are universal wisdom. Mise-en-place can work for us, too, providing a rock-solid foundation that will support almost anything our talent and willpower can create.
In this third course we extract the principles of mise-en-place from the kitchen and apply them to the outside world, combining them in a unified system of practical habits for everyday use. This system is called Work Clean—it’s mise-en-place that works for your life, whether you have an office job, are a te
acher or student, or just want to be more organized at home.
The Work Clean system shares the fundamental “work clean” philosophy of mise-en-place: commitment to three central values and the use of 10 ingredients or behaviors. But your version of mise-en-place will use different tools and demand different rituals from those of the kitchen.
In the sections that follow, we’ll review the commitments of working clean and introduce the Work Clean system of organization. We’ll also walk together through a typical Day of Working Clean, to see how we can integrate all of the above into our lives.
COMMITMENT PUTS US IN PLACE
The entrance requirement for mise-en-place is commitment.
The two terms are actually linguistic cousins. The French word mise and the English word commitment both derive from the Latin verb mettre, meaning “to put.” When we practice mise-en-place, we “put ourselves” in place. When we commit, we literally “put ourselves” with something or someone. Mise-en-place is the commitment we put in place to put ourselves in place, to make ourselves ready for life.
Cooks with commitment build lasting careers. Cooks without it lurch through spotty, unimpressive ones. Success without commitment can only come from luck or genius. And most people don’t fathom how much commitment it takes for a genius to rise from obscurity to acclaim. Watch any genius in action and you’ll see a genius in action. Genius isn’t a noun; it’s a verb.
Excellence requires commitment; your commitment demands adherence to your mise-en-place, your practice, your system. Anything else and you, too, will be counting on luck or genius.
“There are two ways to succeed,” says Chef Alfred Portale. “One is to be a genius, and the other is to be better prepared and work harder. And the latter is where I fall. My kitchen is never in the weeds. We can handle any volume. If you make sure that your mise-en-place is done perfectly, you are 90 percent of the way there.”
COMMITTING TO VALUES
When we work clean we commit to the three values of mise-en-place—preparation, process, and presence. These values take on a different flavor when taken out of the kitchen, but their essence remains the same.
Value #1: Commit to preparation with a 30-minute daily planning session.
Take 30 minutes every day to clear your workstation and plan the next day, a daily personal mise-en-place called the Daily Meeze. The Daily Meeze is the central, nonnegotiable habit of working clean.
In our lives we keep all kinds of nonnegotiable habits, things we do without fail and without excuse, whether they’re as mundane as bathing or as rigorous as exercise. We honor all kinds of promises to others. We show up dutifully at regular meetings. We pledge money and labor and time and abide by those agreements. We observe standard courtesies and often put others’ needs above our own.
But for all the pledges that we make to ourselves and others, most of us rarely make room for a regular practice of preparation and planning. We’ll spend a focused hour grooming ourselves but rush through 2 minutes of making a “to-do” list. We’ll clean the kitchen even when we don’t want to because we are afraid of the consequences, like insects and pests or an angry roommate, but our professional workspaces—both physical and virtual—stay chaotic even when we’re fastidious about our personal ones. We don’t think too much about the repercussions. Stale bread on our kitchen counter? We know what that attracts. Stale work on our desk? The ramifications aren’t as visible, but perhaps more insidious and damaging in the long run.
Taking a half-hour to clear your plate and plan your day ahead imparts serenity to your life. It offloads and logs all the things your mind, your devices, your bags, and your body have been carrying, and it provides vital assurance that you’ll consult that log on a daily basis without fail. In that sense, doing your 30-minute Daily Meeze can be as beneficial to your physical, mental, and spiritual health as nutrition, hygiene, exercise, or meditation.
I propose you treat your preparation routine as I treat mine: as a spiritual practice. Your Daily Meeze shares many commonalities with spiritual practices: Like yoga, tai chi, or martial arts, it involves repetitive, physical movements and mental concentration. Like that of meditation or prayer, its goal is to keep you focused on the highest good for yourself, your family, and your world. In addition to the other things I’ve done in my professional life, I’ve been a yoga teacher for 2 decades. So I say the same thing to you that I say to my yoga students: Just add the practice to your life and see what happens. Don’t judge it, just do it. Resist the temptation to say that your practice was “bad” because you didn’t get everything done. Thirty minutes a day of any dedicated practice—from piano to planning—is bound to transform you.
My own teacher always used to say, Do your spiritual practice, and everything else will fall into place. So when Thomas Keller says, in effect, keep your station clean and everything will follow from that, he’s tapping into that same spiritual wisdom, and it’s like hearing the voice of my own teacher again.
Just do your Daily Meeze, and everything will fall into place.
Value #2: Commit to a process that makes you better.
Now that you’ve prepared your plan, you must follow it. And if you want to get better at what you do, you must examine the results of your plan and your product and make corrections.
Commitment to a process that makes you better means following the schedule you’ve set for yourself, using checklists, and cultivating better techniques and “life hacks.” It means incorporating the values and habits of working clean into your workday. It also means a commitment to the inverse: altering or abandoning processes that make you worse.
How can you tell whether a process makes you better or worse? Understand first that what we’re after is excellence, not productivity. Productivity is working hard. Excellence is working clean. Plenty of well-meaning people equate working hard with a work ethic. But what’s so ethical about working wastefully into the night while the people you love wait for you? A work ethic must include ethics or it isn’t worth a damn. Any process that helps you balance your professional obligations with your personal ones is a process that makes you better.
Striving for productivity alone presents a danger in that a quest for productivity often crosses the line between valuing process and fetishizing it. Productivity is not the solution to all problems. Humans are beings with other commitments and considerations. We need work and we need rest. We need periods of focus and also times of aimlessness. We need time for ourselves and time for others. Without balance, the work will suffer in the long term anyway. Committing to productivity alone is like committing to only inhaling, never exhaling. That kind of commitment will kill you.
Yet productivity at any cost is the secret to the success of so many executives, chefs included. These men and women have sacrificed not only their own well-being but that of others around them: spouses, children, employees, customers. Many culinarians cop to this: They work themselves sick, and then they sicken themselves even more with drink and drugs and then keep working through it all. This severe polarity of tension and release, alas, is one of the hazards of a life dedicated to excellence in any field. But just as we see the hazard, we can envision the ideal, the commitment to process that makes us better; not just efficient or productive, but better in an all-around or holistic way.
Opposite the process fetishists are the process dodgers. To these folks, the idea of following schedules, checklists, and rules—even if they created them—connotes banality, drudgery, and boredom. Process dodgers believe they are artists, and that creativity needs complete freedom. But true creatives—the people who actually make the food, the art, the architecture, the products, and the services we enjoy—understand that excellence comes from cultivating a craft through dedicated, dogged practice. True artists have a process.
As long as we consider our betterment, we’ll stay healthy. We won’t be the kind of managers who make bad decisions on behalf of the people who work for us, nor tolerate such abuses from our ow
n managers. The product of our commitment to the right process—fed by knowledge and guarded by empathy—is a real work ethic.
Value #3: Commit to being present in whatever you do.
Working clean requires your presence on a number of levels.
The first level demands that you be and stay present physically: that you show up for yourself and for your fellows, and also that you don’t give up on yourself or them. Japanese cooks have a great word for this behavior: keizo-ku.
The second level demands that you be and stay present mentally: becoming one with the work, being “with” the work but also “with” your comrades at the same time. This manifestation of presence—to be focused and open—is the goal of mise-en-place: Commit to the plan and the process yet remain aware of the shifting circumstances around you.
Committing to presence means that we cultivate a practice of listening. When you listen, where are your eyes? Are they on your computer screen or phone, or are they on the person speaking? When you listen, where is your body? Is it pointed into the conversation, or away from it? When you listen, where is your mouth? Is it fixed to speak, or is it relaxed and open? When you listen, where is your nose? Are you breathing slowly, or is your breath held? When you listen, where is your mind? Are you hearing the words and using your mind to divine the subtext, or are you listening to your own inner narrative? Being able to listen with the coordination of your entire being, body and mind, is perhaps the most powerful human skill. It’s also one of the hardest things to do, which is another way of saying you will only get better at it if you practice. The better you listen, the more control you will have to wield your powers of attention in more complex ways. The better your focus, the more you’ll be able to extend that focus over a greater area.