It will be a sad day when "Sanitas Per Escam" becomes"Health via Soylent"

The vegetable vendor is one of the many un-American experiences when visiting with the parents in the old country.  Pushing his cart, he bellows the names of the vegetables he has to sell.  He is so loud that sometimes I can hear him over the phone if I happen to call my parents at the time he is hawking his goods.

He brings the vegetables to people.  Round the corner from where my parents live is a modern supermarket that sells vegetables and more.  The old and the new coexist in the old country.  But, as with many other aspects of life, the vendor pushing his cart is also becoming a rarity.

Here in my adopted country, cities like where I live feature Saturday Markets, through the growing season and when the weather is not atrocious--here, it is from early spring until mid-fall.  Instead of vendors pushing their carts along the neighborhood streets, they congregate at a place.  

The Saturday Market is a diversion from the routine, which is to get the supplies from supermarkets.   "[Buying] food can even be enjoyed as a leisure pursuit, rather than a daily chore"

In generations gone by, before the ubiquity of refrigeration and food preservatives, people were forced to go shopping every day – visiting half-a-dozen different shops to get what they needed for a single family meal. ... The arrival of supermarkets in the Fifties and Sixties was revolutionary. For the first time in history, ordinary people had access to an array of exotic foods from around the world, never before available under one roof. And, what’s more, it was affordable; large chains were able to buy mass-produced food in such bulk that food producers were lining up to offer them the lowest prices possible.

Even in the old country, mother does not buy vegetables every single day from that vendor, or from the supermarket, thanks to the fridge at home.  It is a different world there, here, and everywhere.

But, I suppose even buying groceries in order to cook at home is becoming rarer anymore.  Fancy kitchens seem to be more for decorative purposes than for cooking at home, it feels like.  It is also a phenomenal piece of evidence on the choices we have, without being restricted to eat at home after spending hours working with primary ingredients.  As Rachel Laudan noted:

If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, fresh, and natural foods. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the processed staples—salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea—produced by food corporations.

Even though cooking at home is easier with pre-processed ingredients, so that people like me can jump into a step 6 of the process, apparently quite a few think that cooking at home is a time consuming chore.  Why?

According to the researchers, the answer has to do with a reduction of mental effort. ‘Perhaps the most important and clear-cut effect of packaged foods is that they reduce the complexity of meal planning,’ they write. ‘The family chef can invest less time thinking about the week’s meals.’
In other words, in a world where nearly 100,000 new food and drink products are added to supermarket shelves each year, convenience food offers a valuable freedom from decision-making – a signposted shortcut through the bewildering cornucopia and competing claims of the contemporary food environment.

And, therefore, there are even folks even now who would rather chug synthesized "nutrition."  Even though I intellectually and emotionally understand the changes that have happened even within my lifetime thus far, reading about "Soylent," a few months ago, in "the end of food" made me highly uncomfortable, to say the least.  

Soylent has been heralded by the press as “the end of food,” which is a somewhat bleak prospect. It conjures up visions of a world devoid of pizza parlors and taco stands—our kitchens stocked with beige powder instead of banana bread, our spaghetti nights and ice-cream socials replaced by evenings sipping sludge. But, Rhinehart says, that’s not exactly his vision. “Most of people’s meals are forgotten,” he told me. He imagines that, in the future, “we’ll see a separation between our meals for utility and function, and our meals for experience and socialization.”

When the author of that piece lived a three-day weekend essentially on Soylent, she realized how much eating is more than merely about food:

You begin to realize how much of your day revolves around food. Meals provide punctuation to our lives: we’re constantly recovering from them, anticipating them, riding the emotional ups and downs of a good or a bad sandwich. With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad. On Saturday, I woke up and sipped a glass of Soylent. What to do? Breakfast wasn’t an issue. Neither was lunch. I had work to do, but I didn’t want to do it, so I went out for coffee. On the way there, I passed my neighborhood bagel place, where I saw someone ordering my usual breakfast: a bagel with butter. I watched with envy. I wasn’t hungry, and I knew that I was better off than the bagel eater: the Soylent was cheaper, and it had provided me with fewer empty calories and much better nutrition. Buttered bagels aren’t even that great; I shouldn’t be eating them. But Soylent makes you realize how many daily indulgences we allow ourselves in the name of sustenance.

Eating is not merely about food.  It is about relationships of various kinds:

With the people from whom we buy the groceries.

With the people who share meals with us.

With people who listen to our stories about dining experiences.

Oh well, maybe this is more evidence that I am becoming an old curmudgeon!  

Eat to live, but do not live to eat ... carried to the extreme!

Read the following sentences from the NY Times:

“I think engineers are ready to throw in the towel on the illusion that we’re having this family dinner,” he said. “Let’s do away with all the marketing facade and get the calories as quickly as we can.”
The time wasted by eating is, in Silicon Valley parlance, a “pain point” even for the highest echelon of techie. Elon Musk, Tesla’s founder, once said, “If there was a way that I couldn’t eat so I could work more, I would not eat. I wish there was a way to get nutrients without sitting down for a meal,” according to a new book on the entrepreneur, written by Ashlee Vance. 

When I blogged less than a year ago, worrying about Soylent and its philosophy, I didn't imagine that the Soylent industrial food would so quickly become a significant part of the tech-world.  Yet, that's what the NY Times is reporting:

Boom times in Silicon Valley call for hard work, and hard work — at least in technology land — means that coders, engineers and venture capitalists are turning to liquid meals with names like Schmoylent, Soylent, Schmilk and People Chow. The protein-packed products that come in powder form are inexpensive and quick and easy to make — just shake with water, or in the case of Schmilk, milk. While athletes and dieters have been drinking their dinner for years, Silicon Valley’s workers are now increasingly chugging their meals, too, so they can more quickly get back to their computer work.

So that they can quickly get back to their computer work?
Why this monomaniacal approach to work?
Why this reduction of life to work, work, and more work?
What the hell is going on?  

These workers, perhaps "slaves to work" is a better descriptor, do not seem to have any grasp--even the remotest understanding--of life and what it means to be human.  Ok, they do; at least Musk does:

Vance cites an anonymous Tesla employee who claims Musk upbraided him via email for missing a company event to attend his child’s birth. “That is no excuse,” Musk reportedly wrote. Musk has denied the claim, saying, “I would never do that.”
Maybe not. There is evidence in Vance’s book that Musk possesses at least some degree of sympathy for human frailty. For instance, a SpaceX engineer once vented to a colleague that he was nearing a breaking point after ruining both of his pairs of eyeglasses in an all-consuming work sprint that left him no time to see an optometrist. Musk overheard him, and within hours his assistant approached the employee with an appointment card for Lasik surgery, and Musk picked up the tab.

Oh well, it is his life and Musk can live it any which way he wants to.  Those techie engineers can drink their Soylent and bet at their computers 24x7.  I couldn't care about that kind of a life.  That's no life at all; I would rather not live if that were the only choice I have.

The other day, I walked by the river after work.

While walking, I spotted a pond turtle that was slowly crossing the path.  And stopped.  I worried that a bicyclist or a skateboarder coming at top speeds around the bend might not see the turtle and that will be the end of the critter.  So, I stood next to the turtle with my hands stretched to indicate a "stop" in either direction.  A bike came hurtling, saw me from afar and slowed down to a stop.  From the other side, a family on bikes immediately shushed at the chatty ones in the group and they came to a stop.  The turtle kept crawling at a turtle's pace and slowly meandered across.

Confident that I had passed along the watchman job to the group, I continued with the walk--in order to digest the dinner that I had, which included this salad that I made:

I tell ya, the countdown to 75 looks more and more appealing when I think about the likes of a Soylent-fueled future ;)

Struggle is a solution to the question of who you are

A few years ago, at an academic conference, my spiel was about how we can use the awesome satire of The Onion videos in order to get across important ideas to students.  I played a couple of clips for the audience and demonstrated the embedded intellectual aspects there.

One of the questions from the audience was not what I would have expected.  "How do you find such satire?"

I replied that I have been a huge fan of humor and satire right from when I was a kid, especially the sociopolitical kind.  I owe a great debt to Cho in this context.

Over the years, I have shared many satirical pieces--text and video--with students.  Sometimes--like I did this term--I even make sure to parenthetically note in the syllabus that the material is a satirical one.  I have had instances in the past when students have gotten pissed off thinking that the material is a real news report.

Often, satire is only a few steps ahead of reality.  Like this awesome Onion video from a number of years ago:



I laughed. We all laughed.

And then Soylent happened!

If you’ve ever skipped breakfast after rolling out of bed too late…if you’ve ever missed a lunch because of a busy schedule…if you’ve ever had a guilty conscience over a midnight microwave burrito…Soylent is made for you.

We apparently find food preparation to be a chore, and even eating food that others prepare to be time-consuming, that there is a market for feedbags!

It is now a tyranny of feedbags and other kinds of modern conveniences:

I don’t want to suggest that convenience is a force for evil. Making things easier isn’t wicked. On the contrary, it often opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to contemplate, and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most vulnerable to life’s drudgeries.
But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear.

If that sounds familiar to you, well, it is because two years ago--almost to the very date--I had blogged quoting the same author, Tim Wu. 

I wrote then:

I worry about technology because I am not entirely at ease with how technologies seems to determine what it means to be human.  I want humans to consciously think about this ongoing redefinition.  Whether it is in what we eat, how we meet up with people, how we have sex, I worry a lot, perhaps unnecessarily, that we humans are not thinking through enough.

In his recent essay, Wu writes:

The dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical work. But is physical work always a nightmare? Do we really want to be emancipated from all of it? Perhaps our humanity is sometimes expressed in inconvenient actions and time-consuming pursuits.

Inside, intuitively, we know that inconvenience is not always bad, and that sometimes we systematically pursue that:

Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without thinking of it as such. As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. These are the noninstrumental activities that help to define us. They reward us with character because they involve an encounter with meaningful resistance — with nature’s laws, with the limits of our own bodies

I will wrap this up with Tim Wu's own words:

 we must take seriously our biological need to be challenged, or face the danger of evolving into creatures whose lives are more productive but also less satisfying.

Food for thought

Having a few people around the dinner table is always a wonderful learning opportunity for me--to understand how human I am and, therefore, how much I prove that to err is human.  I never fail to err, it turns out.  I suppose that unlike that guy with a pointy cap, I am not infallible ;)

Getting together with people is about more than food, of course.  But, does the food have to be home-cooked?  Do people consider that as a waste of time?

I recall a husband teasing his wife at a party that the kitchen in their home is the most expensive room with all the fancy upgrades they had made, because now they were eating out more than before.  She immediately put him in his place with a sharp comeback.  The rest of us experienced quite an awkward moment.  We men, believing we are funny, easily connect our feet and mouths.  I suppose it is best for the males not to talk at dinners, whether or not the food is home-cooked ;)

Of course, cooking and food are not new questions.  Not new to this blog, where Soylent has been featured in more posts than I would like to.  But, seriously, how many of us would completely opt out of cooking if we could?

Take my favourite example, from a ground-breaking, obsessively detailed ethnography of the material culture of 32 middle-class Los Angeles households based on research conducted at UCLA between 2001 and 2005. In the resulting book, Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century (2012), the authors note that when families in the study cooked weekday dinners from fresh, rather than pre-packaged, ingredients, it took only 10 to 12 minutes longer, on average, than preparing a convenience-food meal. Nonetheless, most of the parents in the study cite time scarcity as the reason they rely on frozen pizza, boxed macaroni-and-cheese, microwave dinners and takeout for two-thirds of their family’s weeknight meals.

Interesting, right?  As I read that, I was thinking about my latest restaurant experience.  Time to drive to the restaurant and then the time driving back.  The waiting time. The time it takes for the food to arrive.  It is not as if eating out takes way less time than cooking at home with all the modern convenient gadgets.

"Why, then, is eating convenience food viewed as a timesaving strategy?"

According to the researchers, the answer has to do with a reduction of mental effort. ‘Perhaps the most important and clear-cut effect of packaged foods is that they reduce the complexity of meal planning,’ they write. ‘The family chef can invest less time thinking about the week’s meals.’

How strange, right?  It comes back to that one thing that I have always argued is what education is fundamentally all about: Thinking.  In this case, the family food preparer can't be bothered with investing the time need to think about what to cook and to, therefore, plan out the sequence of actions.

More than anything else, "food is the primary means by which we embody and enact our shifting, species-shaping relationship with natural world." We now have more than anecdotal evidence that kids do not know where the food comes from.  My favorite on this is a news report a few years ago on how a bunch of elementary school kids were "traumatized" when their teacher explained how Elsie becomes the hamburger that they like.

Oh well ... I suppose the only advantage with not cooking is this: There won't be dishes to clean.  I now head to the kitchen to wash those pots and pans.  Poor me!

Life in the fast lane

Back when I was in graduate school, my apartment mate--who was pursuing a doctorate in marketing--always argued in favor of efficiency and speed.  He was a good debater too, which made my thinking life both interesting and difficult.  But, he never managed to convince me about the primacy of efficiency and speed over everything else in life.

Whether it is on the road or in the kitchen, I am not a speed guy.  Life in the slow lane suits me just fine.  Which is all the more why the opener in this essay appealed to me, a lot:

More than 40 years ago, as a young woman in Melbourne, Australia, I had a pen friend in Papua New Guinea. She lived in a coastal village, an hour’s slow boat trip from the city of Lae. I went to visit her. The abundant tropical fruit, vegetables such as taro and sweet potato, and fish fresh from the sea made up for the mosquitoes that plagued me. No one was in a rush to do anything.
We spent an entire day making coconut milk. I suggested a different way to squeeze the coconut flesh that would allow us to make the milk faster. The young New Guineans looked quizzical. Making coconut milk always took a whole day. There was no hurry, they said. Today I see my interest in saving time and increasing productivity as a peculiar and interesting cultural eccentricity.

Now, I admit that I could not adjust to the pole pole pace in Tanzania, where everything seemed to unfold in the slowest speed.  It is not that I love, love a slow life, but seem to have my own pace that is faster than the speed in traditional cultures but slower than, heck, every other person in the US. 

What exactly are we trying to do with this obsession with speed?  As much as we are obsessed with speed, we are also the same people who complain about not having enough time to do everything within the 24 hours of the day.  We are one interesting species!

Are digital technologies at all complicit in our sense of time pressure?

Emails coming in all the time at work.  Text messages from friends and family. Facebook. Twitter. So much so that there are people who actually prefer Soylent over slow-cooked regular food!  Why the subservience to speed and the digital gods?

Human beings build the present and imagine the future with tools designed for certain purposes, and there are more reasons than ever to think about what kind of society we want those tools to advance.

Damn right!  

Articulating what kind of society we want will require us to understand what it means to be human, what it means to belong to humanity, and what it means for us to belong in this cosmos.  But, apparently we do not have the time for all those questions!

It is not that I want to return to a slow life that existed before all these modern technological tools.  But, I can't help wonder why we do not see these as mere tools--a set of tools that we could put to use for a much bigger, richer, understanding of life and its meaning.