Michael Pollan likes to talk about food. In fact, he’s written six books on the subject. Some of his highly reviewed books include Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and Food Rules. Amazingly, Netflix caught on to Pollan’s popularity and turned his latest book — Cooked — into a series.
Cooked is about the transformation from raw to cooked foods. This simple difference is what Pollan thinks distinguishes man from the rest of the animal kingdom. He’s got a point: we love our cooked food. The flavors ignite. Further, when we cook food we chew less and do more than eat all day.
In the first episode of the Netflix series, Pollan explains how hunting, farming, and scavenging have all been outsourced. We’ve simplified the process of eating on every level. Corporate giants have vertically integrated food prep and delivery with surprising efficiency. From frozen meals to prepackaged sandwiches, everything has been prepared for us. For example, the turkey has been raised, fed, slaughtered, plucked, deboned, frozen, thawed, sliced, seasoned, and placed. We don’t see the life and death — we’ve outsourced everything.
The reasons for the decline in food production and cooking are multifaceted. It seems work and productivity have motivated us to pursue this path. Imagine the busy lawyer or medical doctor having a catered lunch because they are “too busy” to prepare and eat. We accept this in society — hell, we encourage it. We accept there’s a certain class of people who cannot “afford” to spend the time making food. And we accept that people should specialize until they merely focus on their vocational tasks.
As the episode unfolded, my appreciation of food outsourcing shifted more globally. I thought about what else gets outsourced. Our society has taken almost everything off of our plates so that we can focus more time on other activities. We continue to specialize well beyond food.
The decline of manufacturing in America can largely be seen as an effort to reduce costs, time, and environmental burden on the countries that now produce. We’ve outsourced the “negatives” and taken the cost savings. Comically, we criticize China for using so many coal-fired power plants and then click buy on our new computer, coffee maker, smartphone, etc. — all made in China.
We’ve outsourced reading longer books and research to journalists and even computer algorithms. Now, people read books for us and distill what we need to know — what’s most important. Consequently, this means we get a synthesized perspective of a book. It’s like playing the telephone game through articles, but most of the time we read that review to understand the book.
Even budgeting and financial management are thrown to others. We use Mint.com or other financial software to manage and update us about spending. There’s no need to balance a checkbook anymore — I’m not sure if I’d even know how. We trust financial advisers and/or digital facsimiles to manage everything for us. We’ve got better, more important things to focus on!
More and more, we watch sports and reality TV shows instead of playing outside and engaging in our own relationships. The drama of a royal, elite families and others’ lives encapsulates our attention, as those nearest us seem to wane. Many watch the throw, shot, or pass, but I’m not sure how many are making that throw, shot, or pass themselves anymore.
Even in academic circles, professors and graduate students are using other people to do their statistical analysis. Academics can even outsource their statistical analysis to India for further review and completion. Afterwards, with a nice, clean result in hand, researchers can write up the interpretations — or pay another person to do that part.
And as I type these words, they’re being stored in a cloud server for safekeeping, backup, and preparation for publication on my website. Both the cloud and website servers are miles and miles away from me. I’ll never see the computers, nor would I need to. I’ve outsourced these storage needs — someone else is handling them for me.
Again, I settle on this simple conclusion: we’ve embraced the streamlining of our lives for the purpose of efficiency. But what is this efficiency for? Is it so that we can focus on work more? Is it so that we can make more money? Is it so we can relax more?
Absent of answers, I wonder where we’ll be in a few decades. When asked questions about our personality and identities and hobbies, will we reply that we enjoy watching and reading others’ accounts of life? Will we effectively outsource our identities to the TV shows, movies, and reviews of reviews?
I was just having a conversation with a fellow blogger the other day about tracking net worth. I’ve used Mint and Personal Capital and those have worked well, but then I tried entering my account info manually into a spreadsheet and figuring out my net worth that way. For some reason, it is much more fulfilling this way and seems to make my brain more ‘active” when it comes to thinking about my finances.
Very thought provoking post Sam.
One of the ‘deepest’ articles I read in a long time. We are letting others ‘take on’ our lives, but it should be done to spend more time with our family or really improve professionally. Unfortunately in many cases we’re just wasting time instead of taking advantage of this advantage.
I thought a lot about that as I read “the Four Hour Workweek.” He talks about outsourcing everything (including apology letters to your spouse!) and I thought “what’s the point of life if it’s outsourced?” It seems like the answer is to get more money and be more selfish. If we outsource enough, someone else will do the “work” while we reap the rewards. Someone else will hopefully hold our marriage together while we “live it up” the way we want. Seems like we’ve made it too easy for people to be despicable.
I saw last week where Whole Foods attempted to sell single oranges that had already been peeled in a plastic container. I would like to meet the person whose productivity is so important and crucial that they can’t be bothered to peel their own orange. Years from now our progeny will be baffled when confronted with the natural state of this particular citrus fruit as they won’t know how to get past the rind. Yikes!
I can’t speak for that particular store, but more frequently stores are reducing food waste by prepping ugly fruit and veggies that would otherwise be unsold and go in the landfill.
Those oranges may have had something cosmetically wrong with them, and to reduce waste, were sold peeled.
Grocery stores are often unable to donate unsold produce because of restrictive food safety laws and an inability of food banks to process donations before they go bad. Documentary called “Just Eat It” talks about this in detail.
Great example of not knowing the whole picture and assuming what fits your particular viewpoint in the moment.
Did you attempt to verify the information I presented before criticizing it? Really? Who doesn’t know the whole picture?
http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2016/03/04/whole-foods-sparks-internet-debate-over-peeled-oranges-in-plastic-containers/
I find this amusing – mainly because of how true it is.
I used to work a job where lunch was catered almost daily, exactly for the reasons you mentioned.
What was amusing about this was that I ate the catered food, based on what I wanted in the moment rather than what was good for me.
I ate excessive portions of unhealthy catered food.
And then I got fatter!
We outsource for the sake of convenience, but it actually ends up costing more and making us less healthy.
I thought one of the more interesting lines from Pollan’s show was about how we’ve outsourced lots of things, but we don’t watch them on TV like we do cooking. There’s no “Laundry Network” or live oil changes channel. Maybe Twitch lifestyle streamers are approaching that.
I read about a man who outsourced his actual job! He found someone to do it online for him and paid them about half his salary.