“Why aren’t you wearing gloves?” said a comment under an instagram reel of a baker at an East End coffee shop shaping a beautiful tray of focaccia. “It’s so unhygienic”.
I quickly realised I was getting irritated as I scrolled through the comments of people agreeing and disagreeing profusely. Honestly, I was kind of shocked. Why would a baker wear gloves? Since when did food need to be hygienic?
For some reason, it’s pretty common to be grossed out by homemade food. In some ways, I understand the feeling – when I was a kid I’d want food in packets, exciting anonymous food from as far away as possible. Now I long to eat food made fresh from scratch, I want to be able to see the person who made it. I wish I could talk to the grower who sowed, tended and picked the summer fruits I buy from the shop. If I taste something amazing in a cafe I want to ask the chef for the recipe. When I buy wine from someone, I’m keen to hear if they’ve visited the vineyard and ask what it was like.
I don’t see these things as luxuries, although the market may have deemed them so. I don’t think human touch is ‘artisan’ or high-end. It is what makes food, well… food. Eating is an embodied act – and so is feeding.
I listened to an interview a few weeks back with Sandor Katz, author of The Art of Fermentation. Very interestingly he said that the concepts of purity and contamination are what come to mind for people when they think about fermentation, that they assume everything needs to be sterile. But then he said the following:
“Everyone’s always freaking out with their fermentation, wondering: how do I protect it from contamination? But contamination’s everywhere. Everything is contaminated, so it’s really about encouraging enough growth of the organisms that are producing, let’s say, the acids which are going to protect it from the random growth of other organisms on it. So purity is impossible and contamination is inevitable. And even with those factors fermentation has been practiced in every part of the world for thousands of years.”
What we think of as harming us, germs and bacteria, is the very thing that makes so many foods delicious. I’m not talking here about personal hygiene or chefs cutting corners, but that so many of the most wonderful foods only become what they are through fermentation – and more specifically, bacteria.
It feels against my better instinct to leave something like sauerkraut or sourdough starter outside of the fridge, but once you train your intuition all of your senses begin to recognise what’s happening. The act of cooking becomes even more wonderful. We don’t need to live by best-before labels when we have noses, and it won’t harm us to taste a little of something to see if it’s gone sour.
I don’t know about you, but it’s machines I don’t want touching my food, not humans. Michael Pollan has a name for edible foodlike substances, which just simply are not food. Food is made by living creatures – it’s literally grown in shit, and left to bacteria to form the complex taste that companies try so hard to produce with machines.
Sometimes, I forget that I don’t have to do things quickly. The process is part of the joy. I almost forgot until I read something Julius Roberts said in The Farm Table that I can whisk egg whites to stiff peaks without an electric whisk! How could I forget that we had muscles before we had machines? It may be a tough task, but the reward is great. Why let machines have all the fun?