Assess your kitchen’s readiness for action: Is it clean and neat enough?

Clean is not necessarily neat, and neat is not necessarily clean..is it? And beware! There is another catch...

I will tell you the story of the day I learnt the difference between clean and neat. As many of my stories, this one also starts with my mom, Cornelia. I remember so very clearly when I was in secondary school, she one day returned from the shops shocked at something that had happened in the café where she was buying juice or something. These were the days before drinking straws were all separately packaged in their own paper sleeve. They used to come in up right boxes all bunched together standing on the café counter, like they still do. While mom was waiting to pay, someone had accidentally knocked the straw container off the counter and all the straws went flying to the flor. What so appalled mom was that the shop keeper simply picked them up and returned them to the counter. She made a huge fuss about the lack of hygiene displayed and, needless to say, never took another straw for her juice from any container until the day that straws were wrapped separately.

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How did this teach me the difference between clean and neat? You would need to see my mom’s kitchen to understand.

It surely does not look neat. There is always some kind of tea or tincture drawing somewhere on the stove or on a counter. She always has some other project going like sprouts sprouting, marrows marinating or kombucha mushrooms mushrooming. She likes her appliances on the counters at hand. She also wants her herbs and her salts and her things no more than arm length away. Yet I can vouch for the hygienic state of her kitchen. She gets domestic help once a week and one day I found Kathy carefully picking up every bottle of something, cleaning it and putting it right back. Mom’s kitchen is clean, but not neat.

Neat is what you get on appliance advertisements on television: kitchens that look slick and beautiful, but no one has ever cooked in them before. I used to look at these adds as a teen and wish that my kitchen would one day look like that. My mom and I had numerous fights over the state of her kitchen, because even then I loved to cook and play there, but always battled to do anything in between all the projects and paraphernalia that cluttered the counters.

Of course now I have my own kitchen and I understand how difficult it is to keep counters clean, but it is my daily mission to do so and go to bed with neat counters. I was very touched and flattered when my friend Sarah came to give me decorating suggestions for my kitchen and she asked if my counters will always be so empty, because then little art works on the tiles would look very nice. I did not hear the second part of her question the first time, I only heard that she thought my counters were empty...

Where do you sit when it comes to clean and neat? Here is another of my graphs to help you find yourself. Like always I believe we need to strive towards clean and neat kitchens – at least to a point where we love being there and not be falling over stuff as we try to make supper.

Here are some short descriptions to help you place yourself and to motivate you to strive towards the upper right hand quadrant.

Lower left:
This is the quadrant for those kitchens that are neither clean nor neat. The worst of these kitchens end up on TV programmes like “How clean is your House?” or Oprah, where the kitcheneers get diagnosed with some disorder like hoarding syndrome or the like. There are dirty dishes to the ceiling and take-away containers spilling over the rubbish bin, because, really, the kitcheneer had long since given up cooking: there are no more clean dishes. All manner of pests and bacteria live there, but no more humanoids...
Upper left:
These kitchens are neat, but not necessarily clean. This would be the neglected kitchen, where no one spends any quality time. If a mess is made, it stays there and is discovered weeks later when the batchelour discovers the green moldy growth on the slice of pizza he left there. Or maybe the single working girl finds the three cups of coffee she had meant to rinse three days ago when she last had a cup with friends, still waiting in the sink covered with ants that came looking for sweetness and moisture.
Lower right:
This Is mom’s kitchen, it is not neat, but it is clean, or at least gets cleaned regularly: once a day where the messes were made and once a week in between. And while mom loves her kitchen, she frustrates herself because she seldom feels she is finished and often wonders where to start. This is because of all the little projects running simultaneously.
Upper right:
What we want is a kitchen that is clean so nobody catches anything from sniffing the air, but that is also neat enough so that you are inspired to cook and eat and wash up there. It is a fact that if you want to eat healthier, you must start preparing your own meals, even if that means peeling a carrot.

But there is a catch!

If you are not cleaning with biodegradable non toxic and non caustic solutions, you will remain below the vertical line. Your kitchen may look clean, but it is in fact polluted with all manner of chemicals. Unless you rince very carefully all dishes and wipe counters and other surfaces like ovens with clean water after cleaning, these chemicals become part of your diet. And if you do not ingest them, you absorb them through your skin as you wash dishes, bleach dish towels and clean surfaces. You even breathe it in when you clean your oven with that revolting fuming oven cleaner.

All sorts of serious and less serious diseases have been linked to cleaning products from tumors, birth defects, cataracts and Alzheimer’s to sinus, hay fever, asthma, headaches, menstrual problems, fatigue, lack of concentration, food intolerances, eczema and insomnia. Ouch! Taking this into account, where do you place yourself now?

Petro Janse van Vuuren

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Petro Janse van Vuuren

Feed and Eat.com

Assess your kitchen’s readiness for action: Is it clean and neat enough?

Clean is not necessarily neat, and neat is not necessarily clean..is it? And beware! There is another catch...

Subscribe to the Feed and Eat Digest

But there is a catch!

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