Work Clean (13 page)

Then you cook.

What happens in these next moments is the second stage and true test of mise-en-place. Do the objects you've so carefully arranged go back to their rightful places, or does the station you've set become chaotic?

Even the most refined systems become useless unless maintained. It is not enough to find a “right place” for everything. Cooks can't use a static system; the system must move. So the real work of mise-en-place isn't
being
clean, but
working
clean: keeping that system of organization no matter how fast and furious the work is.

For chefs, cleaning as you go is a commitment to keeping order through disorder.

The cutting board is the holy of holies, with its own articles of faith. Chefs believe nothing but food should ever touch the cutting board—not plates, not pots, not pans, nothing that can contaminate the board or spread a mess elsewhere. (Many Japanese cooks consider the cutting board sacred; when Bobby Flay jumped atop his board during a televised battle in 2000, his competitor Masaharu
Morimoto retorted that Flay was “not a chef.”) Cooks constantly wipe the board with a moist towel; some chefs use a mild bleach or vinegar solution to avoid cross-contamination—for example, when salmonella bacteria in the juices of a chicken breast come into contact with raw vegetables.

Chefs extend this meticulousness from the cutting board to the objects around it. Michael Ruhlman devotes a section of his fond monograph of Thomas Keller's The French Laundry in
The Soul of a Chef
to the cooks' practice of wiping down bottles of cooking oil.
Why
, Ruhlman intimated,
be this fanatical?
Keller answered: Oil from the outside of the bottles transferred to fingers that then transferred to nice clean plates, making them not so nice and clean. The longer a cook waited to clean the bottles, the harder it would be to get them back to their original state.

The kind of cleaning that great chefs and cooks do transcends hygienic or aesthetic concerns. When a cook falls behind in her work—“in the weeds” or
dans la merde
(French for “in the shit”)—the first thing that her chef will look for is the cleanliness of her station. Often the chef will find a cutting board littered with food scraps and juices, dirty tools lying around, garbage everywhere.
Messy station equals messy mind
, chefs say.
Clean station equals clean mind.
In the kitchen, chefs train their cooks to wipe down their stations at the first sign of confusion or panic.

When chefs and cooks talk about cleaning, the conversation often shifts to cleaning's psychological and spiritual merits. Dwayne LiPuma teaches these benefits to his young students with an analogy that hits home.

“Say you have a roommate,” LiPuma begins, “and your roommate's a pig, really sloppy, unorganized, all over the place. . . . Tell me, how are you gonna feel knowing that the sink's full of stuff, there are clothes all over the place? You start to build this anxiety, your mind starts to get cluttered, you start to get a little flustered. But you won't pick it up because it's not yours, because it's not your
job, right? But you get so frustrated that one day when your roommate is at work, you clean the whole house. Now it's the way
you
want it. You sit in that chair, how's your mind? How do you feel? You're decompressed! You feel better.”

LiPuma takes his students back to the kitchen: “Now you're trying to cut something and you're working around a box. You're working around dirt. All this stuff and your mind starts to close down. You start to feel closed in. You get claustrophobic. But if I can keep my station open and clean, my mind stays open and clean. I breathe beautifully, and I just cook fantastic.”

It's no mistake that LiPuma cites the breath as a reason for cleaning. The breath powers athletes and artists. It underlies the great spiritual and holistic traditions of the East, like martial arts, yoga, and tai chi. In some traditions, connecting with the breath is not only healing and centering, but the highest aim of life itself.

What many chefs seem to be aiming for, then, is not cleaning for the sake of cleanliness, but rather cleaning as a spiritual practice. Chefs see a direct correlation not only between the condition of one's station and one's mind, but also between the tolerance of dirt and the tolerance of distractions, and between the disposition of oneself to cleaning and to responsibility
in general.
Thus the idea of “working clean” is not only personal but collective. Our roommate's mess becomes our mess. Our mess becomes our coworker's mess. This collective responsibility is why our best kitchens often look and feel cleaner than our best hospitals. The chefs
themselves
—the “doctors” of the kitchen—do the cleaning.

This holistic view of cleaning—that it should be integrated into every moment of a chef's work, and that cooks clean not just for one but for all—creates the foundation for excellence in the professional kitchen.

No chef works clean primarily for the spiritual benefits. He works clean because unclean food can kill people.

The chef's fastidiousness may seem foreign to those of us who
work in offices because we aren't forced to clean. And many chefs don't clean when they're not forced to, either. Wylie Dufresne's kitchen was among the most pristine I had seen. But Dufresne didn't apply mise-en-place to his other workspace, his office—not only because his considerable willpower was tied up in maintaining the kitchen, but also because the physical imperative to clean his office simply wasn't there. No one will die because our desks are messy. But we, the deskbound, miss the huge mental and spiritual benefits of
working clean
in our spaces and systems.

Remember our friend Jeremy? (See “
Chaos: How We Work without Mise-en-Place
”.) So many of his problems during his dark day in the office could be solved by this one behavior, cleaning as you go. Jeremy fixates so much on
drilling the work out
that he doesn't take care of his own physical, virtual, psychological, and physiological territory, the places from which all that work arises. He's never conceived of working clean. Why take the time for something so frivolous when each minute spent tidying is a minute of good work lost?

But when Jeremy “works dirty,” he loses time: 2 minutes looking for his notebook, 15 minutes finding that sheet of price quotes, 20 minutes solving someone else's computer problem, 10 minutes searching for one e-mail, 5 minutes sifting through his inbox for receipts, 15 minutes walking around without thinking about where he's going, plus all the delays and extra work he's caused himself through carelessness, from chasing those release forms to an impending and tense meeting with Stephen, who is now troubled by Jeremy's performance. Some brief moments taken to restore order (returning things to their proper places, putting paper in marked files) totaling no more than 10 minutes' time could have saved him nearly 90 minutes, plus the harder-to-calculate but significant cost of the tension between him and his boss and colleagues. Working clean on a regular basis would likely take only seconds in transitions between tasks. But those seconds can make the difference between supporting and disappointing people, between success and failure.

I recall how my desk used to look before mise-en-place, and I see piles of work left in place for weeks and sometimes months, work that I let ossify. I left those objects on my desk—papers, books, envelopes, random household items—with the best of intentions, to remind me to get them done. But these things clogged my professional arteries. They made my desk a place that I was slightly but perceptibly more reluctant to go. They also made my organization tools—my list and calendar—less effective because I knew that they weren't comprehensive, that there were some items I deemed “too important” to go there and thus left lying about where I could see them. They made the job of cleaning more difficult because exceptions to cleaning breed ever
more
exceptions to cleaning. That's the reason why the game of counting seconds and minutes spent or saved by cleaning misses the point. One simply cannot foretell the cost of chaos and mess.

A story: I came home one day and went to throw something in the kitchen trash can while my wife was cooking dinner. My wife had placed an empty baking pan atop it. I grabbed the pan to move it and felt my flesh sizzling. I spent the next 24 hours dealing with second-degree burns on four fingers, time and pain that could have been spared if I'd had the
presence
to think before I grabbed the pan, or if my wife (whom I adore and who felt horrible about this) had taken the extra few seconds of
process
to put that hot pan in a safe place. The incident left us both feeling stressed and distracted. A few seconds of cleaning can save hours of trouble.

In the office, working clean is a choice, not an imperative. But when we know the true benefits of cleaning as you go, our choice to do so can transform everything about our work lives.