By Tom
Waters
September
16 , 2004
Is it really difficult to slice cheese into geometrically pleasing chunks? Is it time consuming? I don't think so. And yet there must be a big market out there if the average consumer is willing to pay an extra buck fifty to get their cheese sliced in advance. |
Now I'm not an American-basher by any means. Unlike Johnny Depp or any
other notable celebrity who's moved out of the country and passed judgment on
the bulk of us, I don't pick Western culture to shreds, but we're starting
to
get really, really lazy. I realized this last week while I was in the frozen
food section of a super store doing my grocery shopping and pondering the
existence of precut cheese cubes. The fact that they were there bothered me
greatly. There must be a market for precut cheese cubes. Is it really
difficult
to slice cheese into geometrically pleasing chunks? Is it time consuming? I
don't think so. And yet there must be a big market out there if the average
consumer is willing to pay an extra buck fifty to get their cheese sliced in
advance. It was a bit maddening, really. We're getting lackadaisical here
when
we can't cube our own cheese at home. We're slacking. If this continues,
the opposable digits we use to slice our own cheese will be replaced with a
machine six or seven hundred years from now and our genetic process will weed
said
digits out of our DNA chain.
I love cheese, I really do. That's why it troubled me to see it
prepackaged in the laziest fashion possible. I've even eaten pre-cubed cheese
at
other people's houses. You may think that I'm running out of interesting
things
to write about, but bear with me. Microwave ovens have replaced regular ovens
in a day to day cooking regimen. I'm almost completely and symbiotically
dependent on my microwave. It was a sign of progress. Recently, I've gotten
accustomed to my George Forman grill. Why heat up a hamburger on a pan when
you'd just have to wash the pan and put it in the dishwasher? Now you can
flash
fry the thing, dump the grease bin, and move on with your life!
Some inventions are time savers and others just go to far, like peanut
butter and jelly in one jar. That's disgusting. Is it overly tedious to grab
two jars out of a cupboard and mix it's contents? Are people the world over
collectively groaning because they can't bear to grab a jar of peanut butter
and
a jar of jelly during one meal preparation? What's become of us?
Maybe I never noticed it until I made steps to become self-reliant.
Following this wheel of logic, we arrive at dishwasher cubes. I have little
pumice sized stones that I drop into the reservoir for my washer. I used to use
the powder stuff, but why bother now? It makes me weep to think about how much
time it took to open the box, tilt the box of detergent towards the washer,
and have to decide how much powder to put in. Now for a couple dollars more, I
have a cube that I open up and drop in the washer. This is patently
ridiculous.
Margarita mixes, bagged salads, and three step boxed casseroles. Making
a drink is so time consuming, so why not just spend the extra five dollars and
pour the whole thing out of one bottle? Who wants to go through the trouble
of buying lettuce, carrots, and radishes when you can get it all in one bag
with five hundred percent of your daily preservatives thrown in at no extra
cost? Tired of going through the motions with your sheperd's pie? We'll do
it
for you! Dump the mix into a pan, add water and pre-cubed beef and you've got
your very own beef stew! And it's microwave friendly! I think we're all
sick of taking a can of soup out of the pantry, having to walk over to the can
opener, open the damned thing, pour it into a bowl, and heat it. Now you just
put a soup pod into the microwave, heat, eat, and throw it out! In another
year, we'll have soup pods that self destruct after they're empty! It'll
save
you the long trip to the garbage can.
I don't think it's all food either. Clip-on ties. Stain-guarded pants.
The fashion disaster of skorts. If you don't know how to tie a tie, ask
someone to stick your head in a dishwasher and have them set it on "imbecile" for
you. Tying a tie is not rocket science. Washing stains out of your khakis
might be difficult, but is it that difficult? And skorts. At the risk of
sounding like Jerry Seinfeild, it's not a skirt, it's not shorts! Don't
wear them,
ever. I'm glad that fanny packs aren't enjoying a heyday anywhere other
than in Canada, so I'm hoping that skorts are over with as well.
It's bad enough that people are too lazy to read book-sized books on a
regular basis. We'd rather power-scan fifteen different running banners on a
cable channel with a cute anchor woman feeding us factoids in a happy,
non-threatening manner. We'd rather hop onto www.info.com and catch up on
world events
in 2.5 minutes and sign off. Or read a blurb-filled magazine with happy
looking pull quotes and pretty pictures. Enough is enough! How much lazier can
we get?! This is out of control!
Western culture is turning into a Kubrick science fiction film. Maybe I
like going through the routines and less time-saving motions of doing things
for myself, but it's good exercise. If we keep this shit up, people will be
going terminally senile in their mid-30s because their minds are too goddamned
idle. My grandfather used to wash his dishes by hand, if you can imagine such
a thing. It was the one time out of the day that he had to think and turn the
day's events over in his head. There's a Buddhist term for finding
spiritual harmony in everyday functions and activities. I'm no Buddhist, but
I like
the concept. There are a million useless chores and tasks we go through
everyday, but by injecting a little bit of joy into them, we elevate them to
something more than mechanical boredom. Siddhana. That's it. You're not
going to
get that from Auto-opening your Pre-Sliced Monterey Jack Cubes and
Insta-Melting them into your Turbo Soup and spilling them onto your stain
guarded pants.
For chrissakes.
this sign off powered by EssayWorks 7.1,
Tom "Generic Nickname" Waters
