Of Chalk and Cheese

Highly esteemed reader The Masked Chicken has a quibble with this post and I find myself (with great trepidation) forced to disagree.

He writes;

Dear Tim J.,

You wrote:

The point, if there is one, is that there is really no single reason (and no logical reason at all) for anyone to brew their own beer, or to bake their own bread, or to raise their own vegetables or livestock. It can all be done more efficently in the factory, or the factory farm.

There is also no logical reason to paint pictures or write poetry or make music.

The first point does not imply the second. Bread and beer are material objects; poetry, music and painting are modes of expression. No one has yet figured out how to mass produce a singular thing, which is what expression is - it is singular to an individual.

Bread and beer are not singular to individuals. One man may grow vegetables as well as the next man and so, they may be mass produced, but no two men can express the same thing in the same way.

First, I would have to disagree somewhat with the statement "No one has yet figured out how to mass produce a singular thing". It may be true that there is no way to exactly reproduce a singular work of art in every detail, but there are certainly modes of mass production that come close enough for the tastes of the masses. Part of the competition faced by working fine artists includes mass produced "original" paintings from places like China, and mass produced art reproductions (like those of Thomas Kinkade). Both of these are analogous (I would submit) to the mass production of something like American cheese... yes, it may technically be cheese, but the realities of mass production and mass marketing drain it of character.

But more than that, I would have to take exception to the assertion that "Bread and beer are not singular to individuals". Clearly if this were so, I would have no incentive at all to brew my own beer, nor would anyone. Part of my purpose in brewing my own beer is to (eventually) make it a mode of individual expression. The same is true of bread. There is an old recipe that my Dad worked up that I remember very fondly from my youth. I want to resurrect his recipe and will no doubt end up making it a little differently than he did. It is this glorious concept of The Old Family Recipe that has been largely lost in modern life.

The whole craft beer movement is founded on the idea that one beer is not like another, and should not be like another. I beg you to read this short essay on cheese by G.K. Chesterton to get an idea of what I have feebly been trying to express, but I will reproduce a bit here;

But cheese has another quality, which is also the very soul of song. Once in endeavouring to lecture in several places at once, I made an eccentric journey across England, a journey of so irregular and even illogical shape that it necessitated my having lunch on four successive days in four roadside inns in four different counties. In each inn they had nothing but bread and cheese; nor can I imagine why a man should want more than bread and cheese, if he can get enough of it. In each inn the cheese was good; and in each inn it was different. There was a noble Wensleydale cheese in Yorkshire, a Cheshire cheese in Cheshire, and so on. Now, it is just here that true poetic civilization differs from that paltry and mechanical civilization that holds us all in bondage...

...By a wise doom of heaven men were commanded to eat cheese, but not the same cheese. Being really universal it varies from valley to valley... I fancy the Grand Lama does not eat cheese (he is not worthy), but if he does it is probably a local cheese, having some real relation to his life and outlook. Safety matches, tinned foods, patent medicines are sent all over the world; but they are not produced all over the world. Therefore there is in them a mere dead identity, never that soft play of variation which exists in things produced everywhere out of the soil, in the milk of the kine, or the fruits of the orchard. You can get a whisky and soda at every outpost of the Empire: that is why so many Empire builders go mad. But you are not tasting or touching any environment, as in the cider of Devonshire or the grapes of the Rhine. You are not approaching Nature in one of her myriad tints of mood, as in the holy act of eating cheese.

From a strictly material perspective, certainly beer and cheese and bread (and art) may be mass produced, but it is an awful shame that they are, for this robs them of the possibility of becoming more than just commodities by becoming also particular expressions of an individual, a region and a culture. If Budweiser is at all a cultural expression, it is the expression of a civilization that has elected to have no culture. A beer that tastes as much like nothing as beer can.

Indeed, we have over the last century or so increasingly become consumers of centralized, mass produced and manufactured culture as well as food and goods. The local character of goods that had once been produced at the level of the family, the town or the region has been diminished and swamped in a glut of generic, homogenized culture.

The craft beer movement has been one indication of a reaction against this state of things, with micro-breweries popping up by the hundreds or thousands. I just hope to see the spirit behind the craft beer movement continue to expand into other areas... food, art, clothing, household goods, etc... I would love to see our resources and technology used less for the mass production of "end-user" goods (cookies and coffee mugs), and used more to make smaller, local production easier and better.

I hope, at some point, that more people will see the real virtue in (for instance) owning a half dozen hand-thrown coffee cups rather than two dozen cheaper, mass produced (and pretty much disposable) cups from a mass market retailer.

There are, of course, some things that are much better mass produced - chalk and gasoline and light bulbs - so I am not making some blanket condemnation of mass production or manufacturing per se. I'm just saying that there are some things, perhaps many things, that are much better not mass produced.

Comments

[Devin Rose]

I would assert that there is benefit in growing and eating food that is not mass-produced, and not just cheese or beer but also beef and chicken and pork and vegetables. The new agrarian movement, or sustainable farming movement, or local foods movement, is all about non-mass-produced foods.

I made a post on this topic a few days ago: http://www.devinrose.heroicvirtuecreations.com/blog/2009/05/02/unconventional-farming/

[Jeremy]

Hear Hear! Bread and Beer that are mass produced have to have their flavors stabalized so that the end product will always taste the same.

When making these goodies at home you don't add any special chemicals to stabalize the flavor - hence day old bread tastes different then hour old bread, and 6 month beer tastes different (better) than 3 month beer.

[jim janknegt]

Amen brother.. preach on!

[Johannah Erickson]

"I hope, at some point, that more people will see the real virtue in (for instance) owning a half dozen hand-thrown coffee cups rather than two dozen cheaper, mass produced (and pretty much disposable) cups from a mass market retailer."

-- just as long as those hand-thrown coffee cups are the kind you can drink from without throwing out your arm (not like the ceramic cups I made that feel like you're lifting a dumb-bell.)

[Tim J.]

Ha!

I am aware of only two surviving pieces of hand-thrown ceramics from my college days, and they could both serve well as boat anchors, or maybe a counterweight for a trebuchet.

If I have any natural gift for throwing on a wheel, it is buried so deep that I was unable to uncover it in an entire year of ceramics classes.

I am now happy to leave it to more skilled artisans. One can't do everything.

I don't suppose I'll ever be a rock star now, either...

[Del]

Meh... we already have too many rock stars.

"A beer that tastes as much like nothing as beer can."

With your kind permission, I am going to use this line often from now on.

[The Masked Chicken]

Dear Tim,

It might shock you to know that I have been a closet distributionist for the last twenty-five years, so I don't disagree with your sentiments. in fact, Io constantly bemoan to my students how the do-it-yourself industry is essentially tanking in the U. S. because people want mass produced things.

That being said and realizing that cheese, wine, and bread are all the products of artisan workmanship, music and art gain their value, in part, because of their scarcity in a way that bread does not.

There is a personalized art to making bread, but once the recipe is completed, bread is expected to be made in more than one loaf. A painting is not. There are knock-offs, to be sure, but they are not the same as the original and cannot survive a test for originality. We have art forgery, but no bread forgery. Art is displayed in a museum; bread is not.

Art is, supposedly, a unique expression, not only of the indivdual, but of things that are common to man. The process of making things is unique to man and som personalized bread-baking falls into that, but the bread expresses a preference of the individual moreso than music, which has to go beyond itself, ideally.

Thus, bread, by its very nature, can survive being mass-produced in a way that art cannot.

I'm still probably not clear enough. Feel free to criticize so I can clarify, further. We do not substantially disagree. I just think that the art of bread-baking, while an art, is not an art-form and has less stringent conditions for cultural adaptation than the visual or performing arts. I do agree that there is something called culinary art, but then again, the product of the art is eaten and it satisfies the stomach more than the mind, although both music and cheese may satisfy the soul.

The Chicken