Tag Archive for 'food'

How to Eat

Published
by
Brendon J. Wilson
on July 8, 2003
in Uncategorized
. 12 Comments

I was talking with Joseph Yang the other day about what I eat - he noted that I don’t eat a lot, though I do intake a fair amount of junk food. It got me thinking about one of the major life skills that we’re never really taught: how to eat properly.

Sure, our parents are supposed to teach us “how to eat right”, but that’s easier said than done. When you’re a kid, it’s hard not to eat right (of course, your experience may vary with your parentage). You’re not actually involved in the process of deciding a menu, shopping for the food, and preparing it. You just eat. Even the gross stuff is still easy to eat when it’s already prepared for you.

Once you’re out on your own, it’s an entirely different story. What did I eat in university? Hmm. Wow, I’m totally blanking. I know I ate perogies. And meat, there was some meat (possibly hamburgers?) in there somewhere. And pasta, the old standBy. I seem to recall bacon, but the only real image I’m getting is of a puddle of grease in a pan, and that could have been left by the hamburgers. Thinking back on it now, it’s amazing I lived this long once I left home. As students, we all heard horror stories of foreign graduate students dying from malnutrition because all they ate was Ramen noodles, in an attempt to save money. Were we doing any better than the guy with the chopsticks, face down in his bowl in a dorm room somewhere?

Probably not.

The sum total of my culinary training is as follows: boil water, insert (eggs) or (pasta) or (soup mix), wait ten minutes, eat. Even “home economics” in junior high didn’t prepare me. Pita pizza pockets? Why bother learning how to make those yourself, when science and the microwave provided the same feast, ready to nuke? I wasn’t even out of junior high and already my cooking skills were obsolete.

Half the time, we’re just too tired to plan, tired to shop, tired to cook. What would really improve the situation would be a tool that allowed people to plan their meals, providing recipes and generating grocery lists and meal plans with a few clicks of a button. Or better yet, a site that you can tell what you have in your larder, and it will tell you how to make something with the ingredients you already have at hand.

Then again, I guess there are limits to what such a system could do: I doubt it could help you make a meal entirely out of condiments.

Is Life Too Easy?

Published
by
Brendon J. Wilson
on February 24, 2003
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Something has been bothering me for the past several months, namely the thought that perhaps life is too easy these days. I don’t just mean that on a personal level, as in “my life has been too easy”, but also on a wider level. It begs the question: is Darwinism dead?

Humans exist for one purpose: to breed. As much as we might be interested in higher purposes, such as artistic or scientific pursuits, the fact remains that these are superfluous activities. Your only priorities as a human being can be broken down into three simple steps:

  1. Stay alive.
  2. Breed.
  3. Repeat (if possible).

Sad, but true. As a kid, I was always under the misguided impression that grown-ups were subject to significant obstacles to achieve Step 1. You had to get a job. Getting a job was hard. You had to buy food and shelter. Food and shelter cost a lot. Et cetera. But now I find that none of those are anywhere near as hard as I once thought. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like jobs fall into my lap or I’m a millionaire, but I’ve achieved success insofar as I’ve completed Step 1 for a sufficiently long enough period of time as to allow me to proceed onto Step 2 and consider my life’s work complete.

(Allow me to digress for a moment and state for the record this is not a subtle attempt to reveal my success in achieving Step 2. I have no intention of unleashing my demon spawn on the world until a much later date when the appropriate invasion plan has been formulated.)

So that’s it?!? I’m almost done?

Come to think of it, I’ve really been a bit of an overachiever. If I were really on top of my game, I would have moved onto Step 2 shortly after high school and taken the rest of eternity off for completing my assignment early. This is the path that many take and are they really any worse off? Sure, they may not live a luxurious lifestyle due to their lack of education or opportunity, but they’ve still succeeded in what counts from an evolutionary point of view. In today’s world, it’s pretty hard not to succeed on this evolutionary basis, at least at Steps 1 and 2.

The ease with which evolutionary success can be achieved makes me wonder if the fittest are really the ones that are surviving in today’s society. Is the human race dragging along genetic flotsam and jetsam that should have long ago been culled from the gene pool? But if it should have been culled, why wasn’t it? It almost seems as if the success of the human race to easily overcome evolutionary hurdles like predation and disease is enough to suggest that there is no higher purpose than Steps 1 and 2. Oh, and Step 3, time permitting.