As a continuation of our discussion of art, bread, cheese, mass production, etc... I will present part of a further comment from The Masked Chicken and respond to it. Why? Because my response will begin to get too lengthy for the combox, and also because this stuff is what this blog is all about and, feeling as strongly as I do, I don't think it's possible to have too many posts on the subject.
The Masked Chicken comments, in part;
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 doubt that we really do disagree at the bottom of things, but putting these foggy concepts into words is a dicey and imprecise business, especially the way I go about it. I use language the way Jackson Pollock used paint.
I think it is clear that bread will always be a commodity in a way that art is not, because when it comes to it, people eat bread not generally in order to have a culinary experience, but because they are hungry. The expressive and cultural aspects of bread are incidental (except in France, maybe). People buy and eat bread mainly because it is a practical, versatile and reliable staple food, and other considerations are secondary, unlike art or music, which carries no quantifiable, practical benefit... no survival value.
So in that sense, I think you're correct.
Brewing one's own beer at one time did carry practical benefits. It was more nutritious than modern mass-market brews ("liquid bread") and because of the alcohol content it was safe to drink when water often was not. Even children drank beer.
In our time, however, there is no real practical or economic benefit in making one's own beer (or bread). These things can always be bought somewhere more cheaply than they can be made at home, and if you consider the time and trouble, the motivations for making these things by hand must come from other considerations... poetic, expressive or even spiritual. That is why, in modern Western culture, I look at baking bread and brewing beer as being similar to making art. Both endeavors are, in a material sense, wholly unnecessary.
However, I don't think it is merely a subjective matter to observe that home-baked bread is "better" than the spongy white sandwich fluff we buy at the store, any more than it is only a matter of opinion that a Mozart symphony is "better" than a commercial jingle. Quantifying that judgment may be impossible, but it is more than simply a matter of taste.
In theory, of course, a bread recipe could be mass produced with more or less exactly the same result as the first time it was baked in your mom's kitchen. In practice, though, things almost never happen this way. Once a product makes it to the assembly line, there begins a process of adaptation - driven by profit concerns, competition and marketing - that invariably pulls quality in a downward direction. It takes active and positive resistance even to maintain a steady position against that constant downward pressure.
I worked in product design for a long time, and what happens is that, in the beginning, the manufacturing process seems to be constructed around the product. Over time, however, the product becomes more and more built to accommodate the process. When big numbers are involved, cutting this or that corner can result in hefty increases in profits. Whereas factory methods are supposed to make it easier to manufacture things, it becomes more a matter of making the things easier to manufacture.
It's a rare business owner who will say, "Yes, I know we could make more money if we tweaked this recipe, used cheaper ingredients and quickened the process, but I'd prefer to continue making a decent, modest profit and keep the quality just as it is.". If one generation manages to hold the line, the next will likely move it gladly enough.
Then there are marketing factors. Making and selling a lot of one thing is always more profitable than making smaller amounts of different things, so there is always the pressure to make one product as broadly appealing as possible and sell the hell out of it. In many cases, this means making a product as inoffensive as possible. Because people have such widely varying tastes, though, the easiest way to make sure they aren't offended at the flavor of your product is to make it with as little flavor as you can get away with... case(s) in point: white bread and light beer. These may not make anyone swoon in ecstasy, but if you bring them to a picnic, at least no one could very well be offended or make a face.
Serve a robust, multi-grain sourdough bread, or a creamy stout beer and you run the risk of a certain number of people just hating it. It will happen. Little Billy will gag on the sandwich you give him (burying his face in her skirts "Mommy, I want chicken nuggets"), and Uncle Ted will grimace and maybe swear at the brew and say acidly, "I don't know what the @!%&+# this is... can I have a beer now?".
I don't know if it is the actual flavors and textures themselves that offend, or if it is simply the rude and un-looked-for shock of particularity to which modern man is unaccustomed. The tang of articulated character becomes like a kind of assault.
So, whereas bread and beer will always - in theory - be more amenable to mass production, in fact the result is nearly always that the process removes from these things even the incidental expressive and cultural characteristics they once carried. The aim may be to mass produce a certain loaf of bread - say, Mom's Homemade Bread - but in the end, the loaf of mass produced bread is not the one we had in mind in the beginning. We have not succeeded in mass producing the loaf of Mom's Bread, as we supposed. We have in fact invented a new thing... the Production Loaf, if you will, which is like Mom's bread almost only by analogy.
Incidentally, Chicken, it does not surprise me at all that you have distributist leanings. I remarked at first that it was with great trepidation that I disagreed with you in print, because I have, through my interaction with you over at Jimmy Akin's blog, come to have the highest regard for your opinions. At bottom, as I say, I doubt we would really disagree about much.
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;
...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.