{"id":150,"date":"2004-12-08T17:16:16","date_gmt":"2004-12-08T17:16:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blah\/?p=150"},"modified":"2004-12-08T17:16:16","modified_gmt":"2004-12-08T17:16:16","slug":"the_eight_steps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/2004\/12\/the_eight_steps\/","title":{"rendered":"The Eight Steps"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Fiercely redoubling my efforts to be trivial. Ithangyou.)<\/p>\n

So last night I heated up a frozen sausage lasagna for dinner*. It was perfectly deelish, but I couldn’t help but be struck by the instructions on the back of the cardboard container thingy. See, the instructions had eight steps<\/em>. To be sure, the final instruction amounted to, ‘divide up the lasagna with cutlery of your choice, place in mouth, chew, swallow and digest’ (‘What?! You mean I don’t<\/em> pour it into my shoes and squelch around all day? What kind of cockamamie set-up is this?’), but that’s neither here nor there. There were eight steps, and the manufacturers clearly believed that this level of complexity of both preparation, and description<\/em> of preparation, was entirely necessary. F’rinstance, I didn’t merely have to wrap the container in foil; I had to wrap it in foil shaped like a tent<\/em>. This was part cooking, part origami.<\/p>\n

I’m really a child of Marks & Spencer<\/a>, so this took me aback a bit. Until I’m convinced otherwise from personal experience, I’ll consider the good people of M&S to be the world leaders in food preparation for the reasonably affluent but pathologically lazy middle classes. No way would they consider an eight-step preparation algorithm for frozen lasagna to be acceptable. Three would be fine. Four, tops. Any bright young thing who came to them with an eight-step frozen dish would be given, ahem, the cold shoulder.<\/p>\n

Douglas Adams once wrote a character who’d been sent mad – the particular nature of his madness being having come to the conclusion that the whole of the rest of the world was mad – by having bought some toothpicks which had instructions<\/em> on them. This might not be too much of an exaggeration for satirical effect. The eighth step in the frozen lasagna algorithm was, verbatim: ‘cut, and serve’. Perhaps this is just me, but I kinda assume that when I’ve cooked food I won’t simply pour it down the garbage disposal, and that in order to put the food into my mouth, to facilitate ingestion into my body, I might need to divide it somehow into smaller pieces. My mouth just isn’t that big, yanno?<\/p>\n

The eightness of the algorithm is probably also a consequence of the relative rarity of basically good quality pre-prepared food in the US that’s intended to be heated\/cooked at home – the niche in Britain that M&S pretty much invented, then widened and perfected. If you’re a lazy eater in the US, there’s almost certainly a good basic diner not too far away that’ll fill you up for a few dollars. Not so in Britain, where eating out is still a relative luxury for most people. So the lazy-food market has been honed and polished by M&S (and others) until it gleams. Complex meals off the shelf. Whole dinner parties in cardboard and plastic, the preparation streamlined almost to the point of ’50s futuristic kitchen utopianism. And a good deal of pride in the culinary prestidigitation which pulls a basically home-cooked meal from little boxes, after waving over them the magic-word instructions which amount to: ‘Heat and eat, already. You know how this works. Go on, shoo.’<\/p>\n

*Memo to the world: It’s not lasagna if it don’t got no meat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Fiercely redoubling my efforts to be trivial. Ithangyou.) So last night I heated up a frozen sausage lasagna for dinner*. It was perfectly deelish, but I couldn’t help but be struck by the instructions on the back of the cardboard container thingy. See, the instructions had eight steps. To be sure, the final instruction amounted … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}