Responses to “The Lost Art of Following Instructions”

What’s the first thing everyone always does when they get a new toy? Throw away the directions, right? How many times have you gotten a new widget, taken one look at the bulky user’s manual printed in five different languages in minute detail with elaborate illustrations and then immediately pick the device up and begin pressing all the buttons and learn by doing, the old-fashioned heuristic way. Now, like a fuddy-duddy university professor you could spend a few minutes or hours dissecting all that is right or wrong or ambiguous in such instruction manuals or you can just get on with it in the time-honored way of learning by doing that kids have been using for generations. That is after all, how many of these recipes came about in the first place, as people experimented and then put the results - at least the successful ones - down on paper for the benefit of others, should they so choose to avail themselves. Which is fine and often a very helpful guide to novices in attempting something new; but not an inviolable edict that must be rigidly adhered to at the cost of active experimentation. The real irony with regard to cooking is not that its a lost art in most homes because of lack of cookbooks or understanding of terminology but for changes in society which have given rise to prepackaged convenience foods and eating-on-the-run. Gen Y is more likely to be holding down two jobs and gulping down junk food. This is something agribusiness and a highly concentrated food production industry has encouraged and greatly profited from as there is a much higher margin in this wasteful, energy-intensive form of food distribution than in bulk products requiring labor-intensive home preparation. This is in fact the model that corporate food chains are exporting to ‘third-worlders’, too, with the blessing of the IMF and WTO. Extropolate these social and economic trends to other realms and there’s plenty for oldsters and youngsters to worry about other than pedantic hand-wringing over stodgy instuctions for conformity.