When we begin food businesses, we knead care into our meals with pride and excess. Everyone loves the taste of craft, and craft persists. It’s why workshops on old skills oversubscribe and cookbook publishers still commission whole books on fermenting. It’s why high end restaurants still serve warm bread and freshly churned butter to begin a meal, no matter how complicated it’s going to get later.
Making from scratch translates effort and care into taste, texture and smell.
Frozen chips and industrially manufactured mayonnaise (for example) can create friction in your kitchen. I’m being dramatic, but it feels like abandonment of the person who eats, by the cook who chose to be just that. A cook. They’ve walked out on their reason for being, straight through the easiest door to better margins and labour costs.
The argument, I don’t have time to make them by hand anymore, may have basis in truth. But I’m belligerent. I don’t want to believe that. Make one less dish on your menu, take some extra time, create a routine that brings to the table not just bread made from scratch, but the joys of care received. That’s not an easy answer but it’s why you’re here, isn’t it? And anyway, easy answers don’t make beautiful businesses.
Or maybe the business side of food making’s changed you? Maybe what drove you to uplift your life, your day job, your family, isn’t driving you anymore? It’s harder than you thought it would be, yes. If you’ve changed your mind, if you’re sure that frozen chips are now necessary, you could buy into a franchise instead. You’ll make better margins selling a commodity that fills and never satisfies.
I’m being hyperbolic, sorry. But truly, if you haven’t changed your mind, stay here with us awhile longer, and we’ll help find a way back to the place you came from. Where feeding people meant more. They can pick up the the rest from the supermarket on the way home.
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