This is our mantra.
It came about when I was doing my mock-the-stereotypical-white-madam-bossing-her-gardener-around-in-faux-Zulu bit…
“Pagati la faga la broom lapa side Loongarns and then faga the wheelbarrow down there. Then just wena go to the flowerbed and just make it nice, see?” Madams just love it when Lungani (aka Loongarns) makes it nice for them.
What started as a running joke mocking my “favourite” white stereotype, has since become our mantra. Everything we do, we attack with our core value of, “Does this make it nice?” Do we make it nice for each other? Do we make it nice for others? Do we make the world nice? Making it Nice is the fucking best.
(Full Disclaimer: This does not mean that I’m not an asshole sometimes.)
Imagine our surprise when we were watching a “toon” (TV show) about Daniel Humm and we saw that this is his EXACT philosophy? There it was, on HIS kitchen wall. To say I nearly died is an understatement. I had to rewind and pause, and just bask in the niceness of it all. Just a few weeks prior, Jono and I had decided that we wanted to make a feature wall outside our home reading “Make it Nice” in really kiff graf art so it looks edgy rather than “Live, Laugh, Love”. But we also want it to have a slightly twee element too. We shall call this new aesthetic “Gritwee”.
Daniel Humm beat us to it. He has a whole restaurant group called “Make It Nice”.
“GET OUT OF TOWN!”
Daniel makes it so fucking nice. People said it was impossible to have a Michelin-starred plant-based restaurant. He was called a lot of not-nice names and people said he would fail. Daniel middle-fingered everyone and continued to make it nice. He made it so nice that he won awards.
I’ll say it louder for those who don’t know Jackal & Hide. The best way to change human behaviour is to change our environment. Just having more plant-based options means that people will try new things, and hopefully reduce their meat intake. You don’t have to give up meat if you don’t want to. But just fucking try new things. It won’t kill you to skip meat for one day. Do Jono and I eat meat? Yes. And when we cook it we make it so nice because we believe we owe it to make it nice. But we also make plant-based food so nice that we often prefer it.
Daniel Humm is brave, and making it nice often takes bravery. Often, you sacrifice a lot and take big risks because people think that “making it nice” is idealistic and won’t make money or even break even. Making it nice means saying “no” to things you don’t believe in, and often this means saying no to money. Here’s the thing, money doesn’t make it nice, people do.
