It’s something I’m sure the internet can’t possibly relate to: brilliant and amazing, life changing innovations that by any metric should make life better in every way made into their worst selves as a means to maximize profits.
Like canned goods are amazing. In the same way advanced grain stores are the difference between starvation and survival in bad years, canning is the difference between a rough year of crap food and malnutrition. And in some contexts canned food introduces a level of convenience that’s worth the cost to nutrition and flavor. Canned beans are awesome. My wife and I consider “cream of x” soups to be Midwestern roux and see them as useful tools in our kitchen.
Then there’s the microwave and refrigerator that had genuinely huge benefits to everyday life and convenience.
But also everything you said is true. It permeated and destroyed our culture and communities. And our culture needed drastic changes, some of which they got. But it’s just like how women did need to enter the workforce for our safety and equality, but it should’ve been in such a way that each parent splits the professional and domestic labor rather than wages plummeting and now both parents need to work full time.
Just as I dream of a socialism in which the trains aren’t billboards but are instead a public good, I too dream of a world in which my casseroles can be made with cream of mushroom soup, not because Campbell’s taught my family to cook with their ingredients but because it’s a recipe where that’s the ingredient that works best. And because I’m very Midwestern, and casseroles are how we show love.
It’s something I’m sure the internet can’t possibly relate to: brilliant and amazing, life changing innovations that by any metric should make life better in every way made into their worst selves as a means to maximize profits.
Like canned goods are amazing. In the same way advanced grain stores are the difference between starvation and survival in bad years, canning is the difference between a rough year of crap food and malnutrition. And in some contexts canned food introduces a level of convenience that’s worth the cost to nutrition and flavor. Canned beans are awesome. My wife and I consider “cream of x” soups to be Midwestern roux and see them as useful tools in our kitchen.
Then there’s the microwave and refrigerator that had genuinely huge benefits to everyday life and convenience.
But also everything you said is true. It permeated and destroyed our culture and communities. And our culture needed drastic changes, some of which they got. But it’s just like how women did need to enter the workforce for our safety and equality, but it should’ve been in such a way that each parent splits the professional and domestic labor rather than wages plummeting and now both parents need to work full time.
Just as I dream of a socialism in which the trains aren’t billboards but are instead a public good, I too dream of a world in which my casseroles can be made with cream of mushroom soup, not because Campbell’s taught my family to cook with their ingredients but because it’s a recipe where that’s the ingredient that works best. And because I’m very Midwestern, and casseroles are how we show love.