Befriending bacteria

Now that I have documented the gastronomic delights I enjoy on an average day in French cooking school, I think it’s only fair to describe some of the less savory aspects of my routine as well. Perhaps the most startling revelation concerns the topic of hygiene, sanitation and food safety.

On the first day of class, we all stood around in our chefs’ whites, nervously eyeing one another and drinking coffee until Chef gave us the go-ahead to grab knives and start chopping. I stepped up to my cutting board and picked out an onion, but something seemed to be missing. Something pretty important. Can you guess what it was?

We never washed our hands.

Remember that Seinfeld episode when Poppy exits the men’s room stall, fixes his hair and then heads off to the kitchen to prepare a special meal for Jerry? And Jerry is left standing in the bathroom, staring desperately at the sink where Poppy failed to wash his hands? That’s how I felt.

“Wow. Am I going to have to eat this stuff?” I thought. And eat it I did.

Now I hardly give it a second thought. Since our first day, there has hardly been any discussion of sanitation, no mention of the dangers of cross-contamination, and there is still no hand-washing requirement before class begins. (Note: I want to update this. In the beginning of the intermediate course, we had a three-hour class on hygiene and sanitation.) Every day we prepare fish, raw poultry and meat on our cutting boards and then cheerfully chop vegetables on those same boards after lightly wiping them down with a damp sponge. Some sort of cleansing product – a French version of Mr. Clean – appeared near the sink last week, but we’ve never used it. Meats, shellfish and eggs hang out on the counter unrefrigerated for a few hours at a time. Sometimes we share dirty spoons to taste dishes.

Most of the time it doesn’t seem to matter. Everything we’ve made has been cooked, so if our meat or veggies were contaminated, the bugs would hopefully get killed by the high temperatures. But sometimes we’ll chop up a pile of raw garnish on those same meaty cutting boards, and that’s when it starts to gross me out a wee bit.

Also, we’re encouraged to taste everything we make in all the different stages of preparedness, so we sample raw ground pork and chicken and uncooked egg yolks. There just isn’t that same fear and suspicion of bacteria and raw meat that we have in the U.S. Every day I see people in bistros happily scarfing down beef tartare, or buying dim sum from traiteurs who display their dishes in unrefrigerated cases. When I lived in England, I remember freaking out at my flatmate Adam, who would prepare big pots of beef stew and chili con carne and then leave them out on the countertop overnight instead of putting them in the fridge. Amy, one of my classmates, says that her host family in Spain used to store their meat in a cupboard.

A few months ago, Randy and I watched a documentary about advertising and marketing. They interviewed a French man who develops marketing strategies for American companies. He said something like this: “In France, cheese is a living thing. People know that it needs to breathe and grow, to ripen and mature. But in America, cheese is dead. It is sealed in plastic and placed in the refrigerator, like a morgue. When we advertise it, we emphasize its sterility.”

When it’s put that way, the American attitude towards food sounds hopelessly depressing. If you go to an outdoor market in Paris, chances are you will see feathered chickens with heads and feet still attached, whole skinned rabbits, squirming fish and prawns with waving feelers, and delicate, aromatic fruit that hasn’t been engineered for hardness and transportability. Yes, the supermarkets here have the same wrinkled and aged produce that ours do, but why buy it when it’s just as easy to find beautiful fruit and veg at the many produce shops throughout the city? Consumers here demand a higher standard than we do, and this standard insists that produce and meat remain closer to animation and life than to death. Somewhere along the way America seems to have confused cleanliness (or at least an illusory notion of cleanliness that involves Styrofoam packaging and symmetrical fruit) with freshness and flavor in our foodstuffs, and now we have neither. Give me a freshly killed chicken with glassy eyes over a factory farmed, hermetically-sealed thigh or breast specimen any day.

At home, I’m definitely neurotic about food safety. Perhaps this comes from the hysteria of the mass media, or from having food poisoning twice, or from being infected with mono while living in my hygiene-optional hippie co-op in college, where all forty of us shared toothpaste and razors and stuck our dirty spoons in giant tubs of peanut butter until somebody sane pointed out how disgusting that was.

But I think we also have pretty good reason to be suspicious of our food in the U.S. Anybody that’s read Fast Food Nation will agree that our system of beef processing is scary, dirty and difficult to track. I’m not sure what France’s system is like, but I suspect that there is at least more accountability. And perhaps I’m naïve, but if I’m going to eat raw meat anywhere, it would be at the Paris Ritz, where butchers and fishmongers are constantly poking their heads in our classroom with our daily order.

Consistent handwashing is a non-negotiable point for me. Anytime, all the time, can’t do it enough. But another part of me is excited to embrace the faith in the quality of the products here, to leave my paranoia back in Chicago and say, “Yes! I will buy you, room-temperature chicken! I will sample you, raw pork stuffing! I will leave you out to ripen on the countertop, deliciously alive unpasteurized cheese!”

Just let me wash my hands first.