Apologies for the long hiatus from posting here. It seems I can either do it or write about it, but apparently not both, at least not when the doing is as relentless as it has recently been. In the weeks prior to my grandmother’s passing and then in pre-, peri-, and post-Thanksgiving prep and recovery, I have been tackling a lot of food-related things. Many of these things I would like to have shared, especially before Thanksgiving. I did take notes. Maybe I will share them yet.
Meanwhile, pleasantly, Amy and I have had a surprising number of conversations with people who have begun focusing on Paleo-ish food strategies to support their health and lifestyle goals. Some conversations have been passing exchanges at Holiday parties, others direct requests for our ideas.
Since our approach to food follows from solving our own specific issues, I don’t always feel like I have much personal authority—or any professional authority—to address some of the 
challenges our friends and family are facing in their unique, individual lives. For instance, an important part of our experience is in managing our lives with a low-FODMAP diet in which, for what can be a period of months if not longer, many fruits and vegetables, especially raw, are reduced or eliminated while things like bone stock, meat and fat are increased. Our experience with these nutrient dense, gentle foods that ease digestion does not necessarily translate to a friend’s interest in becoming lean. (Although, depending on what that friend has been doing instead, it may well.) Conversely, someone’s successful strategy for reducing waist circumference by eating lean proteins and raw veggies may be very unhelpful to someone seeking reprieve from FODMAP sensitivity or inflammatory conditions like IBS or ulcerative colitis.
What does translate to all health goals no matter how disparate is an ongoing commitment to prepare one’s own food. Reassuringly, the exhortation from the health-conscious to get thee to the kitchen seems to be decreasingly novel. Thriving local farmers’ markets and a growing abundance of excellent ancestral-style cookbooks suggest that in some circles, dodging standard American fare is becoming more common. With any luck, and barring government/corporate intervention, this will continue. Following whatever short-term production-pressures local growers may feel, we may then begin to see a wide-scale economic shift to food production that looks more and more like traditional husbandry and stewardship with a byproduct healthful food.
Despite this reassuring trend, the concept of preparing one’s own food is in fact still novel for many, and is even intimidating. Fortunately, there are now many websites, hopefully including mine, that help demystify some of the elements of food preparation. (I’ll link to a few good ones at the bottom of this post.)
What is rarely discussed, however, is the extremely important but unsexy other side—the backside, if you will—of preparing one’s food at home: cleaning.
One could reasonably gamble that a beautifully photographed, glossy, angelically lit sink full of dirty dishes will never grace the cover of a cookbook. Moreover, TV shows that elevate cooking always airbrush the cleaning. What happens to all that cookware on Master Chef?
I think this is unfortunate. I hereby submit that good strategies for cleaning one’s kitchen and dealing with dishes are not only essential to our grassroots health and economic recovery, but may be the universal first topic to discuss with people who are new to ancestral eating.
If you want to get healthy and stay that way, maintain a clean, orderly kitchen.
That’s it, the secret promised in my title. A little tongue-in-cheek, yes. But did I overpromise? Maybe not.
From both a psychological and emotional perspective, one is more likely to cook for oneself or one’s family if the workspace is clean and the tools of the trade organized and ready for action. Few things dissuade food prep like a kitchen that first has to be cleaned before it can be made dirty again and then be cleaned again.
From another perspective, simultaneously practical and psychological, the types and qualities of the dishes one might prepare will be reduced with every unavailable utensil or piece of cookware. This limits both creativity and spontaneity. Creativity not only yields good food, it makes working in the kitchen fun, which in turn makes it a sustainable activity.
Meanwhile, the mere option to be spontaneous removes one of the great disincentives to cooking: that it’s such a hassle. It’s reassuring to know that even if one’s day gets away from him, he can still get home late from work and have all the necessary resources to whip up a quick, healthy, unplanned meal. Importantly, remembering that looming, gross pile on the counter when one is midway through a late commute from work makes one vulnerable to the siren-song of fast food.
An unkempt kitchen, in other words, can sabotage one’s efforts at health. A clean kitchen supports them. I argue that people new to home cooking should be inoculated with the following rule: the meal is not complete until the counters and sink have been cleared and the dishes that had crowded them washed. In a manner of speaking, the goal of preparing the meal is not the meal itself; it is both the meal and a clean kitchen. This thinking not only pays long-term dividends, it supports smart short-term thrift in both movement and resources when cooking.
Some tips for keeping it tight:
Preemption
Keep things unrelated to food out of the kitchen. This is a minor discipline that goes a long way to keeping a kitchen oriented around the purpose of producing good meals on an ongoing basis. Without it, watch how things like car keys, gym bags, mail, iphones, purses and wallets mysteriously migrate to the valuable real estate of your counter-tops. (If you use it for recipes, the iPhone/iPad is obviously welcome.)
Wash before washing.
The dishwasher won’t remove caked on food. Use elbow grease to do this.
Clean dishes as soon as possible after use.
Many foods adhere to cookware and dishes. Egg yolks and protein matrices from stocks and glazes, which are common in a paleo/primal eating, are eager to adhere to certain surfaces. If you need to get a meal out pronto with no stops, at least get the cookware in warm, soapy water, then clean after the meal.
Know your dishwasher (if you are lucky enough to have one).
Almost every dishwasher is imperfect, increasingly so as manufacture of them is influenced by what passes in modernity as environmentalism. There are areas in your dishwasher where dishes just won’t get clean, and others where they will. Pack your dishwasher accordingly. Also, understand the flow of water in your dishwasher. A wrongly placed mixing bowl can often prevent water from reaching any other dish in the washer.
If you have time to lean…
…you have time to clean. An old coworker of mine used to ruin perfectly pleasant downtime conversations with this admonition. However, it helps here. I like to find moments when I have gotten some process underway and would otherwise just be waiting. Brewing coffee, waiting for water to boil, just got the roast in the oven—these are great opportunities to do some cleaning. Taking advantage of them helps free me up later for such things as pleasant dinner conversation.
Enlist family
If you are the cook in the house, ask family members to support ongoing healthy home meals by doing the dishes.
If you are not the cook, do the dishes yourself, being mindful to do it well. The object is not to make the evidence disappear, it’s to provide your home cook the space to be creative, spontaneous, and joyful during the preparation of the next meal. In other words, doing the dishes supports your goal to be fit and healthy.
It’s helpful, too, if family members see their between-meal snacking as potential dirty-dish-producing disincentive to your shared healthful efforts. Thinking this way, the snacker might elect to put clean dishes away while hanging around the kitchen between meals.
Holiday/Party prep
This is a special category. During Holiday/Party food prep, I find it very useful to focus on having clean counters and an empty dishwasher before guests arrive. I elevate this to a sort of vision quest. I want my work to be done when people arrive. I want to relax, enjoy their company, and share in the pleasure of eating the food I made. But then, I’m the cook in the house. If you are not the cook, you will want this for whomever is—at least you will if you want future Holiday meals that support your goals.
An empty dishwasher obviously makes clean-up easier. Importantly, guests often volunteer to 
do dishes. I think it’s not just kind but also practical to provide them an empty dishwasher. It not only avoids the dreaded situation in which you have both unwashed/half-washed dishes in the dishwasher and unwashed dishes in the sink or on the counter, it also returns you and your guests more quickly to the far more important task of hanging out together.
While preparing food this Thanksgiving, there was hardly a moment during which I did not have the dishwasher running, usually on a shortened cycle so I could make room for the next batch. Much as I do prefer to run the washer only when full, I definitely ran the washer when less than full that day, especially when the dishes were large pieces of cookware that would have prevented other dishes from getting clean anyway.
Thanks for reading.
If you have tips for cleaning, please share!
Here are three very helpful websites for food preparation as viewed through recipes I like:
