Green Bean Casserole:Friend or Foe?

Green bean casserole.  Source of major disagreement. Side A: this is one of the great  inventions of the American kitchen. Side B: this recipe represents American cuisine at  its worst.

Why bring up green bean casserole? Well, Thanksgiving's coming up, and green bean casserole is a popular Thanksgiving side dish. Also, Dorcas Reilly, the woman who oversaw its development at the Campbell Soup Company has just died.

“The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a star.” This, at least, was how the

gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin saw it.  Examples reinforce the claim: the discovery of a new star has little impact on life; but, pizza, hamburgers, mac ‘n cheese, hot fudge sundae--now those make a big difference.

What’s the controversy over green bean casserole?  One the positive side, the recipe offers great possibilities for tinkering and customizing.  It need not remain “pour factory-produced cans into a casserole.” Fresh beans can be used, ditto with  mushrooms, and onions. The sauce can be a “bechamel” (French names are always a plus for epicures).

On the negative side, and it is a big one, the recipe encourages “assembling” over “cooking,.”  The word “cooking” now means a lot more (and a lot less) than it used to. Michael Pollan made the point most clearly in  Cooked,

a point well summarized in an interview.

The upshot: a lot of activities we call  “cooking” are really “assembling.”

If humans, as the anthropologist Richard Wrangham has asserted, are the “cooking

animals,” then our humanity, to an important degree, depends on keeping up the artistry of cooking. This needn’t mean fancy, complicated dishes. One of my own favorite recipes is for Carbonade Flamande whose ingredients are beef, onions, flour, salt, pepper, thyme and beer.  

If what defines us is the physical activity of cooking, the more we move away from it, the further we remove ourselves from our humanity.   The move from cooking is part of a wider trend: the desire to secure results without old-fashioned effort. If I’m sitting at a piano bench, with a sheet of music in front of me, I can only play the music if I have undertaken lots of preliminary toil and training.  The satisfaction of successful playing comes from the combination of effort-and-result. The preliminary efforts of time, practice and concentration are also important in revealing and shaping character. In our “short-cut, it’s only the results that matter” world, character development suffers, as does the satisfaction of achievement that results from struggle. “Combine the contents of three cans” may get us a quick result, but at an important price: chipping away at what makes for the fullness or wholeness (“holiness” in religious terms) of a life.    

Cooking does not just impact the aesthetic possibilities associated with life (cultivating talent, working in a way that leads to  satisfactory culminations). It is also related to another important constituent of full humanity: liberty. Someone who can cook is actually free, i.e. really able to engage in the activity of preparing meals.   “Assemblers,” and, even more, “microwavers” have

subjugated themselves, made themselves subservient. It might not be the kind of dependency that goes by the name “addiction.” Still, the constant requirement for products from a factory means positioning oneself at the indentured extreme of the  independency-dependency continuum.

So, green bean casserole. Should it be loved or loathed? Once again a continuum has to be considered. At one end: fresh green beans, real mushrooms, cream, onions, lovingly (even if not with epicurean finesse) handled by someone who does real cooking.   At the other end: mere assemblage: empty the contents of three cans into a casserole. The latter, not surprisingly, in diminishing our capacities marks us ever more as indentured.

Why? (1) The emancipatory effects, i.e. the liberation of capacities tied to effort, are marginalized, if not abandoned outright.  (2) Once this shift has occurred, freedom is diminished. The use of factory products becomes more a necessity than a free choice. Creating a dependency that is almost like an addiction represents  a real limit on freedom. Assemblers are simply less free than cooks. This increase in dependency and decrease in freedom is, of course, what the good folks at Campbell’s sought in the first place.

Sex Bots Don't Eat or Drink

Robots are everywhere. Mitral valve repair?  Best option is with a robot.  Ditto for a hip replacement.

Such robots are easily recognizable as robots, machines dedicated to specific tasks. No one confuses them with actual humans   A newer generation of robots, though, looks a lot like us and, as with Blade Runner’s “replicants,” seeks to  “replicate” humans.  

 

Outside of fiction, the results are weak.  “Asimo," who played soccer with president Obama is quite marvelous in posture and movement, but not even close to replicating a flesh and blood human.  Nor is “Pepper” with whom a CNN host had a “date.”

Still, the dream lives on. One lucrative industry has emerged by producing “sex bots.” Combining synthetic materials and AI, manufacturers produce a “humanoid” companion.  The willingness to spend money on such factory-produced entities raises an immediate question since the propensity is quite gendered. Mostly, it’s males purchasing female bots.  Apparently there are males out there who simply can’t deal with real females. One of the most violent manifestations emerges within a movement called Incel.  Other men who refuse to look a themselves and ask “what should I change to get along better with women” would apparently rather purchase a predictable, controllable sex robot.

There is also the wider issue of whether humans and “intelligent”machines will one day be indistinguishable. Aristotle long ago said that humans had “logos” which could be translated as “thought” or, more concretely, “language.” Humans, for him, were those animals who talk, who have conversations. Such conversations, it should be noted, are not just matters of signalling or engaging in some communication. Most organisms, even trees, do this.

The conversational animals sit around and chat about the weather, engage in gossip, ask about health, family, mutual acquaintances. They seek tips on healthy living, make excuses, ask forgiveness, give thanks, make promises, share stories.  

Recently, some anthropologists have added another unique marker for humans: cooking.   Humans don’t just “feed” on whatever is available. They prepare their meals. Not only that, it is often around food that the chitchat associated with the conversational animal take place.

This combination, free-flowing conversations and cooking/eating, will never be matched by factory products. When humans were thought of as essentially ratiocinators, it made sense to wonder about a time in which humans and machines would be indistinguishable.   One result was the “Turing test,” a sort of game in which someone would have to determine whether interactions via two other terminals were with a human or a well-programmed computer.

The game was rigged from the beginning. First, humans were identified as essentially computing machines themselves.  Philosophers deride this as narrow ¨essentialism” identifying our “essence” with a single trait, ignoring the concrete, complex combination which makes us who we are. Second, there is fudging with the word “indistinguishable.”   “Indistinguishable” should mean "not in any way able to be distinguished." With the Turing test it means only “there could be one trait which is the same.”

The only real setting for deciding distinguishable from indistinguishable would be what I call the “first date test.”  To begin with, first dates often involve food or drink. In films like Blade Runner, with artistic imagination unfettered, the replicants eat, drink and engage in everyday chitchat. But that’s fiction.  If Pris, Roy or Rachael really came from a factory, they would not, on a first date, eat or drink anything. Also, despite the poetic license of fictional works, the factory-produced entities trying give the illusion of humanity would not do very well in carrying out a free-flowing conversation.

Human to human conversations move fluidly from family memories, high school boyfriends/girlfriends, gossip, aspirations, books, music, politics, all of this while sharing drink and/or food. If a factory-prod date partner actually drank and ate, carried out a smoothly flowing conversation ranging from childhood memories, to gossip, to books, to family habits, to favorite foods, then the replicant would indeed be indistinguishable from a human companion.  

Let’s face it, the chances are zero of that illusion being undetectable today. Samantha, the sex robot, fools no one. And, more importantly, if concrete complexity rather than narrow essentialism is emphasized, it’s unlikely that the illusion will ever work. (Even if it makes for good fiction).

The conversational and cooking animal is unique.  Who would want a first date with anyone, or anything, else?

Avoid Laziness: Dispute Tastes

A poet addressing an audience of 14,000?  It happened. The speaker: T.S. Eliot. The year: 1956. The place: a Minnesota athletic stadium.  How things have changed!  Today, beyond athletic events and rock concerts, stadiums are permeated by what has become most pervasive: advertising.   Best slogan for the last 60 years: from poetry to advertising.

Poetry is thick with allusions, references, ambiguity, the blend of sound and sense.  Its aim: revelation. The poet has something to tell.  Advertising relies on stripped down language.  It’s aim: manipulation.  The advertiser has something to sell.

Food studies people pay attention to advertising and its impact on health.  Now we have a philosophy book whose reflections begin by noting how ads are everywhere (see urinals, airplane tray tables, gasoline pumps). Not only that, the book uses the example of a cook both prominently and positively. Matthew Crawford is the author. The World Beyond Your Head is the title.  

Crawford’s concern is with “attention,” especially how our attention has been colonized by those with something to sell. He realizes, it’s a philosophy book after all, that this state of affairs was prepared by a general understanding of who we are, a particular “philosophical anthropology.”  This anthropology describes humans as minds (the “head” of his book’s title).  Things and events become neutral items providing data for the mind. We call these data “objects,” items in the “world beyond your head.” One outcome of this picture is expressed in ordinary language as “it’s all subjective,” or the food-related  “there is no disputing about taste,” i.e. the individual mind is the source of value.  Examined psychologically, such assertions reflect  laziness and self-interest. They combine an unwillingness to scrutinize value judgments and the self-satisfaction of the status quo. To say “there is no disputing about taste” is, in effect, to say, let’s not bother thinking about this, let’s leave things as they are.  Examined philosophically, as Crawford does, such assertions are part and parcel of a picture which, forgetting hands and stomach, artificially characterizes the human situation as  “head” and “world outside your head.”   

In the realm of food it is a commonplace to recognize that as the stomach-hand connection is interrupted, the more “de-skilled” we become. One example: the less we are able to cook.  In turn, this de-skilling renders us vulnerable to those who would gladly (a) provide the service and (b) shape our judgments.  Attention can be colonized because the de-skilling is  accompanied by  a loss of what alone can provide a defense: standards and measures for discrimination.

Crawford’s concerns are similar. The realm of “it’s all subjective,” thrives in the absence of justifiable, generally accepted criteria.  Why?  Without agreement on standards, we are empty, blank slates, ready for colonization. The colonization provides substitutes. On one hand, as qualitative criteria disappear, quantitative benchmarks, often “narrow economic considerations” become the default.  On the other hand, we are told to reach within and find our true selves, i.e. accept uncriticizable subjective feelings.   “The fact that these preferences are the object of billion-dollar, scientifically informed efforts of manipulation doesn’t square with the picture of the choosing self assumed in the idea of a “free market.”

In all of this, an overarching norm takes center stage: conformity. Why do the hard work of selecting quality-driven exemplars to emulate?  An obvious and easy (laziness again) standard is now available: opinion polls.  “We cannot look to custom or established authority, so we look around to see what everyone else thinks.  The demand to be an individual makes us feel anxious, and the remedy for this, ironically enough, is conformity. We become more deferential to public opinion.”

The best way to liberate attention from its colonizers is to multiply engaged activities, like cooking.    We then attend to our surroundings in ways that, (1) encourage us to recognize factors of significance built-in to surrounding conditions, factors open to reasonable discussion and debate.  Their  significance may be related to ongoing

projects  (what the “it’s all subjective” fans emphasize),  but  the what  and  why of significance are not of our making.   (2) Within any craft tradition there are masters and experts. We learn to appreciate, admire, and strive to emulate role models. It is genuine living models who serve as touchstones not some statistical mean.

Ours is a world dominated by those who have something to sell.  Conformity is crucial for them.  Confusing “norm” and “average” helps their cause.  Having a de-skilled populace is a great boon. Cooking and other hands-on activities allow openings for our liberation.  Crawford seeks to blend hands and mind. To his credit, he wants to make room for those who have something to tell.

The Hands of Time

The Culinary Institute of America has a wall full of hand prints.   Not just random prints but those of well-known chefs. That the CIA would memorialize chefs via their hands makes eminent sense.  Everything about the cooking process involves hands: planting, harvesting, cutting, peeling, handling skillets, cleaning up.   Before she got famous with Chez Panisse, Alice Waters worked at a Montessori school. “Montessori went straight to my heart, because it’s all about encountering the world through the senses. That how kids learn best. The hands are the instrument of the mind--that was how Maria Montessori put it.”

Sadly, when it comes to philosophers, the mind-hand couple linked by Montessori tends to be disconnected.  The general trajectory has been decidedly one-directional: moving away from the concrete realm of lived experience (hands) and toward the a more abstract, more simplified, more artificial one (mind).

Take time.  We still use expressions like “springtime,” “lunch time,” “having a rough time” or maybe the “time of one’s life.”  Such expressions remind us of an older, more concrete,  take on time:  a span defined by ongoing activities, permeated by a qualitative dimension.  

We might call this “baseball time.”  

The question “how long a time does a game last?” cannot be answered by referring to a fixed clock counting down the instants.  The “time” of a game, depends on the activities taking place on the field.  Similarly, on the more traditional take,  “noon” is not marked by a clock but by the sun’s position in the sky.  There is no separate, quantitative, “time” running independently of ongoing (qualitative) activities, the two are interwoven.

Our world is filled with phrases like “killing time,” “wasting time,”  “time is money.” To get there required a philosophical shift indicating a more artificial take on time. Instead of thinking time in terms of events, i.e. the day/night cycle, think of it on the model of a detached, homogeneous line composed of separate dots.  The dots, instants, keep disappearing and the line is quite separate from ongoing activities. Think, not of baseball, but of sports regulated by a clock. Springtime, summertime, wintertime, as qualitative markers, fade away. Instead, we highlight a  time-line that ignores the specifics of ongoing activities.  The newer take on time both creates and celebrates the world of 24/7.  In such a world there would, ideally, be no pauses, no suspensions of busy-ness, no limitations on the dominance of commerce in life. Instead of baseball time we now have Las Vegas time.  

Let’s say it’s the 4th of July, Independence Day. So what?  The casinos, working 24/7, don’t differentiate between this day or any other.  Sunshine is fading, night is arriving.  So what?  Why sleep?  The gaming rooms are open 24/7.   The natural cycle of day/night, along with the cultural cycle of historical/political, religious celebrations become annoyances, frustrations, interruptions in the nonstop frenzy of Las Vegas time.

The 24/7 world of all commerce all the time, transforms many traditional activities associated with hands into  wastes of time.  The handprints at the Culinary Institute remind us of an area which has taken a special hit, cooking.  As mentioned in a previous blog, a Silicon Valley engineer has even invented a food substitute, the ready-made drink Soylent, that can be utilized in  lieu of meals.   Eating food that is the product of loving hands, the preparation and clean-up of which often involves the helping hands of others, becomes more and more an exception rather than the rule. 

  

The personal world of the hands has not disappeared. But, as philosophy goes so goes daily life, and much philosophy has taken us into the world of abstractions.  24/7, along with the outsourcing accompanying it, transforms key instances of natural and cultural time into annoyances and limitations.  How to resist? Well, humans are, after all, the only animals that cook.  They are also the only animals that engage in relaxed conversations. Perhaps using hands to produce meals, cooperating with the helping hands of others in preparation and cleaning up, all the while engaging in conversation, is one way to establish a beachhead.