Hand Stuff

On the side of my bottle of Bombay Sapphire there's a little note that reads "hand-selected ingredients." I don't know why the body part is important to note, but they've got it on there. Does anyone care?

And does anyone actually believe these ingredients are all hand-selected? And what does that even mean, to be hand-selected. Does some buyer point to a picture of rose petals in a catalogue and say "those?" What do they think we think when we read "hand-selected?" That someone is selecting each and every juniper berry that goes into making 25 million liters of halfway decent gin every year?

And what does it say about the person who appreciates that? I don't know if I necessarily want to imagine someone rummaging through everything that goes into my gin. At best it's a false romanticization of the process, and at worst, a downright lie. Plus, this gin doesn't cost nearly enough to pay for what I imagine it costs for humans to hand-select the ingredients that go into it. Or does it and I'm just that out of touch with the cost of human labor?

Let's take the neutral grain sprit that comes into the warehouse from whatever white label distillery they get it from. Are human hands selecting each of the thousands of acres of wheat it took to distill that? I could imagine someone pointing to one field over another and saying, "that one," and then watching the combine harvest all the wheat. But then what?

Does someone go around and hand-select all of the 10 botanicals?

"Let's get the berries from that juniper tree, no, NO! Not that one it's threadbare...that one! She's a beaut. Yes. Good. And that one. NO! The other one...Good..."

Chat estimates that 12 million lemons are used each year to produce Bombay Sapphire. Are any of those hand-selected?

I've noticed this in restaurants too. Every steak is hand-selected. Every cocktail hand-crafted. Even the fries—something you'd think a machine could do handily—are hand-cut.

Just once I want the waiter to come out and say, "all our food is hands free. After the pandemic we realized no one knew how to wash their hands, so we decided to remove them from the equation altogether. Our kitchen staff? All amputees."

All I could say would be, "Well that's just amazing. Let's give them a hand."