The Human Touch

Professionals’ hands are important tools of their trade

Like so many people, I use my hands all day, every day. But I didn’t give them much thought as tools until I spent time with a local viticulturist, boutique bakery owner, egg farmer and full-service caterer. While their jobs are diverse, they share one thing: They rely on their hands to twist, stir, tie, hold and perform myriad other tasks.

They may use manufactured tools to help, but it’s their two hands, 10 fingers, that translate their passion for their jobs into tangible products we can all enjoy.

Gabrielle Moes, Seasons Catering

I ask Gabrielle Moes if she has beautiful hands. No, she says. Not anymore, she adds with a laugh.

“My hands tell my story—burns, calluses, scars, no nails …,” she says, casually taking inventory of her well-tended hands with their long fingers and clean, short nails. They have “lots of wear and tear,” she explains.

But her hands are beautiful: strong, resilient, reliable.

The classically trained chef and owner of Seasons Catering in Ventura says her hands deal with all of the elements of the business, from lifting heavy items to being her thermometer. She can tell when meats are cooked by how they spring back when touched. Gabrielle mentions that her husband says she has “asbestos fingers”—she can pick up items the rest of us would deem too hot without utensils or an oven mitt.

All the detail work she does comes from delicately grasping and shaping items using every aspect of her hands. For these tasks, it’s important to have sharp senses and a steady hand. Since we eat with our eyes, she says, plating presentation is everything.

For precision work, she relies on her tweezers, which are an extension of her fingers. Together they lift and place a flower petal, say, in just the right spot on a plate.

Along with everything her hands do, Gabrielle says she washes them 30 times a day.

The Ventura County native’s 15-year-old catering business not only encompasses her hands, but the hands of eight full-time employees, eight part-time employees and wait staff.

Gabrielle says she has an incredible team of well-rounded professionals. And she points out that carefulness and safety is always a concern. “If someone has a hand injury it affects the way things are done. Without the full usage of our hands we lose the vital skills to perform our job.”

Martín Ramírez, The Vineyards of Ojai

Heavy mist covers the serene upper Ojai Valley the day I visit Martín Ramirez. Together we survey several rows of grapevines on the Roll Ranch vineyard he created from the ground up, roughly 24 years ago.

To me, they are healthy vines with vibrant green leaves. As the owner of The Vineyards of Ojai, a vineyard management company, Martín sees so much more: the balanced ecosystem that produces the grapes for tomorrow’s wine.

As a leading viticulturist in the county, Martín says tending to the vines is all about hard work and working with your hands, from the spring budding to winter pruning.

These skills take years to learn, he says, and since the focus is on hands, he admits only a handful of people are trained to do this type of work.

From thinning the vines’ leaves, shoots and clusters to weed abatement and harvesting, I thought tending to vines would be hard on his hands. But upon inspection, Martín’s hands appear soft and injury- free, certainly proving it is not the case.

Providing a delicate touch to care for plants is vital to their survival and ability to produce a good harvest. Even the netting that covers the vines to protect the grapes from birds is light.

He demonstrates how delicate the grape tissues are by gently maneuvering each shoot into the wires training them upward only, one at a time with relative ease so they will get more sunlight. His agile touch completes each task effortlessly, as though his fingers automatically know what to do.

When harvesting grapes, his fingers wrap around a type of pruning shear that when placed around the clusters cuts them from the vine with a slight pressure and twist of the wrist. The clusters are placed into buckets and loaded into picking bins that are transported to the winery.

Martín says he had never given much thought to how important hands were to his trade. “I thought it was more about my mind,” he says, finding it difficult to explain. It’s more about translating the thought to the hands on how to do a task, he explains.

Working 10-hour days, seven days a week during the harvest, Martín says the work is not physically demanding but it takes a delicate touch. Even so, he says he has little desire to go anywhere else. “I’m so deeply in love with this land and its surroundings,” he says. “Why would I want to leave?”